Pre-Carbon Copy

I can’t look at exuberant structure without thinking of the amount of steel that went into its various contortions so I’m not unaware of embodied carbon. I learned from Log magazine’s issue #47: Overcoming Carbon Form how there’s much more to it than that.

Carbon form includes roads and all buildings such as shopping malls and apartment buildings and detached houses designed to be accessed by vehicles. Shopping malls are central to an entire economy of carbon filling them with goods. Everyday I drive to work [from Dubai, of all places], I pass a LEED Silver shopping mall. No building rating system I know of offers points for whether a building is necessary. The question of whether a building’s use of resources is justified in planetary terms is never asked. Carbon form includes airports.

Starchitects evolved to validate the carbon economy sometimes called the neoliberal economy and are a symbiotic part of it whether they design its airports or not. Architects less stellar are also implicated because carbon form includes all buildings that can’t exist or function without the significant input of energy from fossil fuels. If a building depends on steel, concrete, air conditioning, artificial illumination, mechanical ventilation and elevators, then it’s carbon form.

A revisionist history of architecture could begin by tracking what happened circa 1965 with Postmodernism and then work back to post-WWI with The International Style and then back to the 1920s and Modernism and post-WWI before finally tracking down the origins of carbon form with the development of the combustion engine and the Industrial Revolution. However, to propose solving our current problems by “raising awareness” through history lessons isn’t going to achieve anything fast. We may as well wait for the Mars shuttle. There’s also the danger that any talk not focussed on actioning definite proposals will simply be assimilated back into the carbon economy as academic churn or media churn, much like what happened with sustainability. The true function of Mars-talk is to suppress enthusiasm for low-tech solutions.

Meanwhile, the carbon economy and the information economy are co-dependent and solutions promoted most are those that sustain the status-quo. The premise is that more technology is the solution to the problems caused by technology. But what if it’s not? How did people ever build and live in pre-industrial societies where beams and window frames were the only hard carbon and construction depended on a workforce skilled in simple techniques?

Contemporary domestic construction still does wth its teams of contractors tightly project managed to move in sequence between multiple sites in an inversion of the factory conveyor belt as the product is stationary and it’s the workers that travel. This is easier than making buildings in a factory and transporting them to where they’re needed. Most building components however, are mass produced and transported to sites for assembly.

So then, what to do? Rather than ponder what post-carbon form will be like, I thought I’d see if some pre-carbon form could be brought back into service. I’d always admired the Yemeni town of Shibham, a town about 1,700 years old. Many of its buildings date from the 17th century and parts have been rebuilt several times since. This is fair enough considering they’re made from mud-brick.

The town is economical with land, space and building resources because its compactness and enclosing wall made it easier to defend. Buildings are mostly one per family and have simple plans such as this one typical of the Yemeni vernacular. [c.f. The Buildings of YEMEN]

There’s much to be learned from a vernacular featuring the simple use of non-carbon resources.

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The thick walls and efficient staircase reminded me of a recent project [c.f. The Factory] but a building doesn’t need to be a superslender for it to have a critical structure. I set myself the task of re-designing the Yemeni house as a low-carbon alternative for Western lifestyles, aware that this is probably a contradiction. High-tech solutions usually involve sustaining the status quo come what may, but this simply isn’t possible with low-tech ones. Something’s going to have to give. [c.f. Architecture Reductions, Final Reductions!] This time I’m coming at the same problem from a different angle.

One thing we know about the Western lifestyle is that it’s generally not conducted in single buildings for extended multi-generational families as was the Yemeni norm that gave rise to this architecture. With the one staircase serving both as sole access and internal corridor, it would be like a large family living on a hotel typical floor with the doors ajar. Everyone would always know where everyone else was. Still, being able to reallocate rooms to accommodate changes in the composition and or activities of the household did not involve any architectural trauma. This was one of the inspirations behind The Universal Apartment series of proposals. So here’s my first proposal for a mud-brick apartment building for no-carbon times.

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But what’s been lost in this anti-carbon architecture? What bits of the status-quo weren’t able to be retained?

And for what has all this been done? What’s been gained?

All spaces are naturally lit and ventilated but this building is not off-grid. Energy is still required for appliances, hot water, cooking and lighting. Disregarding the soil vent pipes, the building’s sole ornament is two extra windows on the uppermost level.

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