Some 20 years ago, I had the privilege of working with architecture students at the University of Toronto to develop a website called Architectural Science Forum. The site was hosted by Canadian Architect magazine, and funded by a generous donation from the late Jim Cassell, then the Senior VP of Arriscraft in Cambridge, Ontario. It consisted of modules on sustainability principles, enclosure, design strategies, design tools, durability and detailing—topics for which scant resources were available at the time. An abridged article on each topic appeared in the magazine, then edited by Marco Polo.
Architectural Science Forum was based on a simple model of sustainability dynamics. Within each ecological setting, humans evolve cultures as a means of enabling survival. These cultures produce technologies such as language, tools, agriculture, and buildings that improve the odds of survival and quality of life, so long as their impacts are confined within a sustainable ecological footprint.
When technologies become dysfunctional and adversely impact the ecology—such as with the over-combustion of fossil fuels for energy—then an appropriate cultural response and re-crafting of the technologies are needed to restore a sustainable balance. The same may be said about architecture as it seeks to adapt its culture and technologies to emerging existential challenges. Humankind is currently in a restorative loop as we reach the limits of growth. This explains why evidence-based architectural science has become essential in guiding sustainable development: we must be reasonably certain we are making things better, rather than worse.
A major focus of the Forum was the building enclosure. In the early 2000s, thermal insulation levels were commonly increased to promote energy conservation, but as a result, many buildings were experiencing performance problems related to the inadequate management of heat, air and moisture flows. Building enclosure performance problems continue to constitute most claims against practicing architects to this day, but there is now a readily accessible arsenal of modern building science principles and strategies in the design of durable, high-performance enclosures. Similarly, it is fair to say that virtually all the issues and challenges identified back with the turn-of-the-millennium Architectural Science Forum have now been engaged by schools and the profession to some degree.
But new challenges of great urgency abound. Studio culture continues to emphasize individual expression over the collective collaboration of an integrated design process (IDP). The integrated design process is capable of producing far more sustainable architecture than the linear assembly line model, where the building design is sequentially passed on from one discipline to the next, thus stitching together piecemeal Frankensteins that are kept alive with enormous carbon inputs. We witness the products of this outmoded model of professional practice in the large stock of dysfunctional buildings constructed since the end of World War II, which now represent a burden of deep retrofits and decarbonization efforts to be carried on the stressed-out shoulders and empty wallets of the post-pandemic generation of Canadians.
The decades-long fixation on energy efficiency is only now starting to wane as an appreciation of the critical impact of embodied carbon in buildings on global warming gains ascendancy. It is now recognized that time is running out for climate change mitigation as we approach a critical tipping point in mean global temperature rise. If we fail to meet our greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, then climate change beyond the tipping point will unleash extreme weather events that will drive a widespread need for climate change adaptation. Buildings account for some 40% of global carbon emissions and Canada’s demand for buildings is growing. How can we achieve sustainable development while living within our allowable ecological footprint?
Here then, some 20 years later for the second time around, is a short list of some of the emerging issues and challenges facing the next generation of Canadian architects and architecture educators. Unlike two decades ago, the issues and challenges are not primarily technological—they are cultural.
Climate Change Mitigation Versus Adaptation – Finding the Balance
There is currently a natural tension arising between the need to engage climate change mitigation versus adapting to the demands of a changing climate and extreme weather events. Clearly, we need to reduce our current carbon footprint drastically in the short term to avoid global warming tipping points, and the associated severe climate events we are starting to witness today. But neglecting the need for resiliency carries an enormous carbon footprint as damages are cleaned up, requiring the repair and replacement of buildings and infrastructure. For the built environment, in particular buildings, the question is: do we focus on reducing the carbon footprint of new and existing buildings, or do we look at enhancing their resilience? Can we somehow do both?
While building codes are slow to change, the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events induced by climate change are beginning to adversely impact human health and safety. If codes and standards do not evolve, the insurance industry will impose premiums that reflect the damages and losses to buildings resulting from climate change; in some cases, assets may not be insured at all because the risks are too high. Either way, architectural design will have to address the need for enhanced resilience. But can this higher level of performance be achieved within a sustainable carbon footprint? When answering this question, it is important to appreciate that resilience is not the new sustainability, and while the two concepts are related, they should not be confused. Resilience is like a shock absorber that allows for a safe, smooth ride, while sustainability is the road taken—one that hopefully does not lead to a precipice or dead end.
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Life Cycle Design of Buildings
One way of finding the balance between mitigation and adaptation is to adopt a life cycle approach to the design of buildings. Over the past two years, a growing interest in embodied carbon, non-extractive architecture, and the need for a more circular building industry, has brought forward the importance of life cycle assessment (LCA). Several recent articles in Canadian Architect by Kelly Doran and Anthony Pak underlined the importance of material choices, durability and adaptability for reducing the ecological footprint of buildings.
If the objective in Canada is to achieve a net-zero carbon building stock, this can only be accomplished by taking in the whole life cycle of buildings, from cradle to cradle, within a circular building economy. But no form of life cycle assessment is mandated in our green standards, step codes, or design competitions.
The concept of a life cycle approach has a cultural component. There is a major disconnect between the reality of the ecological footprint exerted by buildings and the importance placed on their visual appearance, with elegance of form, geometry and composition divorced from performance attributes that render a building sustainable. The predominant focus in design schools on the building as a singular object obscures the fact that buildings are in fact processes—ones that unfold slowly over timeframes that exceed the average life spans of humans. The types of case studies and design exercises needed to impart this overview of architecture as a set of cultural resources, as opposed to art objects or speculative investments, are largely absent.
Strategies and guidelines to inform the early stages of design are also critical to sustainable architecture that delivers high performance, at the lowest life cycle costs, and with the fewest environmental impacts. A large number of green and clean technologies are being innovated, but there is not a corresponding advancement of the lean design basis for truly sustainable architecture. More must be done to revive the elegance of vernacular and passive systems that dominated architecture long before cheap and plentiful fossil fuels swept aside form and fabric with brute-force electro-mechanical conditioning.
Today’s innovation additionally requires the application of evidence-based building science. How do we forecast how sustainable a given project will prove to be over its life cycle? This kind of question can only begin to be addressed by evaluating built and occupied projects. Measuring energy performance, embodied and operational carbon, indoor environmental quality, and occupant comfort and satisfaction can provide critical feedback to improve design and project delivery. This feedback is particularly important for healthcare facilities, where the wellbeing of both the patients and the healthcare providers impacts health outcomes. The quality of buildings ranging from housing and schools to offices and hospitals cannot be significantly improved without measuring and reporting actual outcomes over the life cycle of buildings. Evidence gathering, analysis and synthesis are the backbone of the health sciences, but remain largely ignored in the architecture academy and profession. People inhabit actual buildings situated in communities—not architecture theories nested in urbanist ideologies. Architecture must enter into the 21st century by measuring outcomes that inform evidence-based design.
Mass Customization of Architecture Education
There is much concern about architecture education being out of touch with current realities. And there is even greater concern that our schools are not future-proofing students for careers that will peak several decades after graduation. Meantime, students remain glued to their computer screens instead of engaging in fieldwork that has them experience architecture directly, and more importantly, gather feedback from building inhabitants. Cities are living laboratories that no manner of research funding could ever afford to reproduce, yet there is almost no time devoted in the current architecture curriculum to surveying the built environment. As the title of Phyllis Lambert’s latest book so aptly reminds us, “Observation is a constant that underlies all approaches.”
The reality is that, given the large number of balls students now have to juggle in order to explore just the most basic aspects of contemporary building design, it is only possible to cover what may be termed “shell and core” professional education. The university provides a framework that the graduates must augment, in conjunction with their employers, when they pursue internships. To some extent, this was always the case, but the degree of superficiality in curriculum has dramatically increased over the past several decades, because there is simply insufficient time to engage most of the subject matter in depth.
Can schools of architecture continue offering a one-size-fits-all professional degree program that is primarily aimed at producing ‘design’ architects? Streaming is a reality after graduation, and many students would benefit from choosing a stream while still in school. Why is the retrofit, rehabilitation and repurposing of existing buildings not given the same emphasis as the design of new buildings? If roughly half the current practice involves existing buildings, then perhaps some courses and studios could be devoted to deep retrofits and repurposing. In the absence of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) and building performance evaluation (BPE), how can we expect to determine if the buildings we produce to protect us from extinction are effective, and as importantly, contribute to enhancing the good life? Measuring the various dimensions of building performance deserves to be studied and students must learn to engage in meaningful field work.
The risk in architecture’s common future is that it falls victim to untested ideologies. It is widely viewed that architecture must once and for all abandon the elitist Fountainhead mentality and courageously embrace an evidence-based, integrated design process that does not fear evaluating itself according to criteria that are meaningful to the people that inhabit the buildings and the communities where they live, work and play.
It is widely understood that most of the professional development for architects occurs after graduation during their internships. Looking at buildings for guidance, perhaps architecture education should focus on a sound intellectual armature of good bones to provide an adaptive structure for ongoing internship, practice and lifelong learning. Fads and style trends are for the fashion industry, where clothing only needs to last one season—not for buildings that must endure a changing climate, culture and economy for many generations to come.
Exorcising Architecture’s Existential Déja Voodoo
Will artificial intelligence displace architects? It is more likely that a failure by the architecture discipline to adapt to the realities of our times will devalue and diminish both the academy and the profession.
Expo 67 and its theme of Man and His World represented a watershed moment for Canada as a nation, but especially for its architecture community. Montreal architect Moshe Safdie’s revolutionary Habitat 67—along with over 60 pavilions designed by some of the world’s leading architects—exposed some 50 million visitors at Expo 67 to a new awareness about the role of the built environment in mankind’s future. Many people view this as the big event of the 20th century that brought Canada out of its colonial closet. The Canadian architecture community was among the groups most highly affected.
The post-Expo 67 existential angst over architecture education has returned today, because of numerous disconnects between societal expectations, the heightened demands of professional practice in the absence of compensating offsets to fee schedules and liabilities, and the anachronistic accreditation requirements that handcuff the architecture academy to deliver relevant programs of professional education.
In 1969, a new model of architectural education was being introduced by Peter Prangnell at the University of Toronto. An overview by Canadian Architect editor Robert Gretton stated, “There is widespread unease that unless architectural education shifts to meet the new demands, other people will assume the task of solving the critical issues facing man and city,” (CA, Feb 1969). One again fears there is a genuine risk that architecture stands to lose its leadership role in the shaping of our buildings and communities, unless it embraces the need for more applied, multidisciplinary research. Even though the same concerns arose in the 1960s, for over half a century, architecture schools and the profession have failed to demonstrate research leadership within their own discipline.
“We’re witnessing new challenges and problems in the built environment,” said Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena in an interview with The Globe and Mail in 2016. “The questions are new, and the starting points are very far from architecture. These are,” he continued, “the forces at play in cities, from migration to insecurity to pollution to inequality. These are problems that do not belong to the architectural realm. They are issues that interest society at large. For architects the challenge is: how do we use our specific expertise and translate these issues into form?”
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will be of little assistance to the cause of sustainable architecture if those that command it lack the deep knowledge and understanding of what matters. Garbage in, garbage out—computation is not a God, but a tool, and the resulting work is only as good as the heart and mind of the tool user.
Deploying energy models, simulating daylight, and conducting life cycle assessments will not save architecture from extinction—not any more than having architects perform their own structural analysis, since there are specialty consultants who possess greater expertise and can do this sort of work much better and more cost effectively. While architects need to understand the fundamental concepts and limitations underlying all allied design disciplines, much like orchestra conductors, there is no need for them to be virtuosos on every instrument. Instead, they must be well-versed in the synthesis and integration of multi-disciplinary inputs to the design of buildings.
Appreciation of the ‘big picture’ and the ability to bring lateral thinking, synthesis and integration to design problems is the unique purview of architects, and focusing on these attributes while remaining societally relevant is key to sustaining architecture’s status. This implies a massive shift in how professional practices are structured and operated to respond to shifting societal priorities.
Stewardship, Not Authorship
Much like music, the fine arts and literature, architecture was traditionally concerned with authorship that bestowed credit and intellectual property to architects. The recent shift in thinking that was spurred on by the environmental movement and the more recent life cycle assessment of buildings has made obvious the need for stewardship of our built environment.
In the conventional mode of architecture practice in Canada, architects conceive one building project after another, and subsequently abandon their offspring after they are born. There is still little interest in adopting a cradle-to-cradle approach to architecture practice that embraces the principles of a circular building economy. That’s a missed opportunity, because architects remain most informed and best suited to the role of stewardship over their buildings. Engaging in a full life cycle service approach to their building projects would not only stabilize revenue streams, but also provide a feedback loop on how to improve designs to enhance sustainability.
Historically, building codes and standards focused on minimum requirements for health and safety. Now we recognize that many aspects of building environments and the environmental impacts of buildings adversely impact not just human health and safety, but wellbeing and resilience. The architecture profession and its allied disciplines must adopt an ethical posture and engage in public education. In ways similar to how the medical profession educated the public about the risks of tobacco smoking, lack of exercise and poor diet, architects must take the lead and vigorously promote the literacy of the average citizen about the social, ecological and economic impacts of buildings, so that appropriate requirements in codes and standards protect the interests of future generations, rather than those of profiteering opportunists.
Competency in Sustainable Design
Urban development is largely made possible by architects who offer architecture and urban design services to private developers and public agencies. Judging by the vast majority of contemporary built works, it appears their basis of design is lingering in the 20th century instead of observing the 3Ls: long life, loose fit, and low impact. Over the past several years, a number of academic and professional surveys have reported the need to enhance climate change and sustainable design competency in the education of architects.
Here in Canada, Terri Peters from the Department of Architectural Science at TMU has conducted a survey examining issues related to sustainability. Peters’ initial findings indicated the majority of students at the Canadian schools of architecture did not feel they were gaining relevant competencies in sustainability and climate change mitigation/adaptation: “According to the responses, students do not feel confident in their knowledge of sustainable design and climate change issues,” Peters told me. “Overwhelmingly, students say they want more expertise in these issues, and they say they aren’t getting it.” She adds that students are not confident about how to apply their knowledge to design. Increasing the amount of learning content without guidance on how to apply that knowledge leaves students anxious and frustrated.
At the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty, Bruce Mau’s office was retained to conduct a series of interviews, surveys and townhalls to help develop a five-year academic plan. One of the most significant learnings gleaned by Mau’s team was summarized in a call to “Integrate environmental sustainability everywhere.” Their report explains: “Students and faculty see climate change as ‘one of the most important challenges of our time’. Its importance was highlighted as a unifying thread so that each goal could help further the cause. Students and faculty critiqued the unsustainable practices of industry and academia, seeking real change in the operational and academic practices of the faculty.”
An Australasia-wide survey, as reported in Architecture AU, similarly concluded: “The mounting impacts of global warming, as well as the imperatives of decarbonization and disaster mitigation, will have dramatic effects on the design, construction and maintenance of the built environment. Architecture education must adapt to prepare graduates—as well as to reskill professionals—for rapidly changing conditions of practice.”
One of the elephants in the room is a lack of suitably qualified faculty that have training and experience in applying sustainability principles in building design. In all fairness, sustainable architecture is relatively recent and rare, and so much like advances in medicine where practitioners must take supplementary training in new clinical techniques, the same holds true for 21st-century architectural practice. It is difficult to imagine how someone who has never designed a sustainable building could lead a studio in architecture school without some upgrading of their knowledge and skills. This was not an issue when the rate of change in building technology was slow, and studios were delivered largely by senior practitioners with considerable experience and expertise. Today, reskilling for existing faculty, alongside lifelong learning for architecture professionals, is not only necessary—it represents an enormous opportunity for architecture schools to reconnect with the profession, while augmenting revenue streams.
The Future Is Now
20 years from now, it will be obvious whether or not architecture has successfully engaged our common future. In many ways, Canada’s unique geographic, climatic, economic and demographic conditions are at the root of our strength—but only if we are willing to jettison outdated traditions and engage the emerging realities. Across Canada, we have many opportunities and natural blessings to lose if we are unable to transcend the current preoccupation with buildings as objectified commodities. We must learn from our Indigenous Peoples to recognize our buildings as cultural resources to be shared between all peoples and future generations, no differently than our land, water and air. The massive shift in consciousness needed to break away from the artist-patron model of architecture practice can only come about if academics and practitioners work together. We must forge a hybrid, multi-disciplinary view of architecture. Those involved in architecture must also educate the public, in order to promote literacy and citizen participation in shaping our built environment. Equity, diversity and inclusion must be baked into the architecture profession’s public engagement and built environment stewardship agenda.
Architecture should become less self-referential and open itself to other perspectives, other disciplines, and other stakeholders besides its paying clients. Public health and wellbeing are so heavily influenced by architecture and the built environment that it is no longer ethical to ignore conducting post-occupancy evaluations, especially in the case of social buildings such as housing, schools, offices and healthcare facilities. The artist-patron model may continue to make sense for art, which if it causes displeasure can be stored away out of sight and mind. But is it an ethical model of professional practice in architecture, where buildings shape climate and their communities for many generations? To whom does the architect owe the highest standard of care? The planet and the people should certainly take precedence over the client, since as innocent bystanders, they will suffer any collateral repercussions of an economic transaction in which they had no part. And what of the succeeding generations who inherit a built environment in which they had no say? How does architecture education and professional practice reconcile intergenerational equity?
Accepting the new realities is certainly swallowing a jagged, bitter pill. But only by doing so can we move forward with the long overdue process of truth and reconciliation in architecture and its allied disciplines. The technology gods of the 20th century, like our buildings and infrastructure, have clay feet and represent a linear economy that is costing us the earth. Only sustainable processes can yield sustainable outcomes, and this holds true for the future of architecture education and professional practice. For the sake of our ecology, it’s no longer about our technology: it’s all about our culture.
As a new hire at U of T back in 1999, leading the collaborative research at the turn of the millennium that developed Architectural Science Forum felt somewhat strange. It feels stranger yet, some 20 years later, to be again revealing the big issues and challenges facing the next generation of architects and educators, given that I am not an architect. But after more than 30 years as an educator of architects, a consultant to architects, and a researcher of building science in support of sustainable architecture, I have had numerous opportunities to speak with colleagues, students and the public about pathways to sustainability.
I want to thank the numerous colleagues, students and citizens who shared their thoughts with me and took the time to enlighten me about my misconceptions.
It is also important to acknowledge that almost none of what I discussed in this article is original. Thanks to everyone who contributed their observations, ideas and aspirations. Our collaborative spirit should give us cause for great optimism—so long as we have the courage to adapt and evolve.
Ted Kesik is a professor of building science at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.