Leveraging the Arup Regenerative Design Report
CS-03 Unconcealing the path toward the Future of Architecture.
This article took longer than the rest so far. I was inspired by the Arup Regenerative Design Report, adjusting it took a while.
The inertial properties of the world's life are accelerating in an evolution from the steady-ish state that we have known for some 1000s of years. We know that Nature's events tend to accelerate on a curve, beginning with silent tiny movement. We are still on the flatter part of this curve.
Chris Hatch recently published an article on the degrees of misunderstanding of our current situation. See Climate Solutions and other Delusions. He reminds us that even if today was the last day of atmospheric CO2 production, CO2 is cumulative and the CO2 in the world now will stay there for some time, having its effect over lifetimes. But it is not stopping, production is accelerating.
This effect is signified through CO2, but certainly not limited to CO2. It is broadly environmental. Addressing our beliefs and attachments that underlie our climate 'signifiers', to no longer do what we have been to destabilize the Earthly environment will not help to stop it. The challenge is now to create another approach.
Studies such as the ARUP Regenerative Design Report 2024 (RDR) are useful. But they become damaging in the same way as greenwashing because they imply that we can solve environmental issues while continuing with existing fundamentals by applying them differently. We may feel need to do something now, which is great. But if it is aligned with and justified by keeping up business as is, it is conflicted and inertial.
We are all aware of the harms that we are doing to the biosphere, to the climate, and to humanity. Is it justifiable for the sake of maintaining commerce and markets? Many of us say it is, since we need to be responsible to our families and community. That view is a minority opinion. At least half of humanity that does not benefit from that commerce or those that do remain under colonialist structures to do so.
Utilizing a basis of change based on what we can do now, today, we are not likely to leave behind the destructive factors of human being as they are. People are averse to changing what they are making money doing and accepting that our technological approach has fundamentally flawed at its root. Pressing forward with urgency while featuring do–ability is good for business, so managers sign off on it. While it does create commercial churn and the appearance of progress, what we are doing has got us into trouble, and like the pill you take to deal with the side effects of the pill you took to take care of the side effect of the pill ... this is not going to solve problems. ARUP can do better than this.
Given that the biosphere is going to change, it seems that we should learn what fundamentals we need to change because we will have to change insofar as the climate and the biosphere are changing.
But I'm playing around here a bit. The reality is that the biosphere is already post-extinction event. We pretend it is underway, or beginning. But that train has left the station. It is not about to happen. It has happened. The catastrophe to the biosphere's character and physical being is advanced. Atmospheric CO2 is a good metric to handle unified communication on the change as the biosphere rebalances. But the Earth's temperature change and the CO2 increase are lagging. It is not the real problem and the destruction is advanced.
The real issue, and the real fun for those who accept the change and responsibility, is to allow ourselves to free ourselves from the beliefs and attachments that have brought us to these dangerous crossroads. Questions such as how to represent that the life of nature that has no 'systems' challenge the false terms of a colonizing force. These are very interesting questions for architecture's future. Architecture also suffers under those same terms.
I suggest that those of us who can make change viable have now got a world that will accommodate and that change with its power.
Architecture is the role of human conscious life as an agent in service to the world that provides for us being here, meaning its purposefulness needs to be answered with taking on our role. It is fundamental and our technology is already proven in so many ways to be far off balance. The change coming to architecture is as big a change as the Enlightenment and the First Machine Age. It is not based on tendencies of this century or last. The orientation was already far off harmony with Nature before the current Machine Ages and the Anthropocene. This began long before we had the power to move earth and energy mechanically as we do. It revealed itself as we scaled up the power and the numbers.
Science has established that buildings are responsible for 30-40% of emissions in the world. This graph taken from Chris Hatch's column and originally from BloombergNEF research shows a different valuation of the same data. Rather than bring all the CO2 outputs into coherence in terms of construction and use of buildings, which erases their provenance, and absolves of wider influences, the mountain shows the proportions of atmospheric CO2 influenced by production and activities. It implies avenues that architecture influences, not only buildings. This reinforces the demand that architecture be more about the biosphere and the wider implications of our influence than merely CO2.
The step by step effort to decrease production and increase sequestration of CO2 in terms of building science and technology is certainly valuable. The AIA is now expanding its approach beyond zero carbon and zero energy toward life cycle knowledge systems for materials and processes. This is the new net zero. That is good. But it is not the heart of the matter just as building construction is the means and not the heart of architectural value.
What I express below, as I comment on the ARUP RDR, is that we can address our outlook to the biosphere and all of Nature as fundamental, at least among architects. After all, there would be no oxygen in the earth's atmosphere nor the balance of CO2 and nitrogen etc., were it not for plants and creatures. The biosphere created the climate, and it is changing the climate now. We are creatures ourselves and the environment of humans would all be architecture if we would aspire humanity.
Changing fundamentals of practice will chop some of the main pillars of ARUP's and most architects’ business model, the construction industry, the banker's profits, commerce ... everything. But such change is not against economic transition scenarios. We would be hypocrites to act as if we keep our principles the same when we are still aware of how profoundly the changes in the 19th and 20th centuries changed everything, and we know that we can. We remain proud of how much we gained then. Now transition demands more courage and unity than we are showing now. Of course, we had World Wars back then … and the lack of responsive and responsible change is causing so much destruction now. ARUP exists because it contributed to foundational change that in the wave of First Machine Ages Modernism. ARUP is big enough and strong enough to change out its pillars and to change the partners it works with. ARUP will be able to carry, support and benefit from radical geniuses like Sir Peter Rice and Sir Ove Arup himself.
To express the needs of adhering to the level at which this paradigmatic change can be empowered, I have taken ARUP's RDR as a threshold to go closer to what we will need to do. The intent is to show how far we need to go before any thing will change, and to point to what needs to change. I engaged the three summary panels. They inspired me to see if I take them further. This is a quick critique and ideas, not backed up by a team's time. It can be expanded down through its details. I plan on evolving this under this with other articles in this CS group of OPA substacks.     Â
This is the first of three summary panels from the report. The original is on the left, my modified version is in the middle and a commentary on the right. The red spots are words that defy the intent of the report. The heading for this diagram from the RDR is "Regenerative design lets nature shape human-built forms by integrating them with, and leveraging, ecosystem functions and processes. It enables humans to live in harmony with natural cycles; thus ensuring resilience through planetary health."
The heading for this diagram from the RDR is "Regenerative design ensures human-made systems participate positively in the wider natural system. It guides us to understand interconnections between systems and helps us identify design interventions to build synergies; thus leading to greater systemic health."
The heading for this diagram from the RDR is "Regenerative design guides us to nurture a just space for humanity by prioritising the biosphere that supports us all. It maximises harmony and justice through equitable nature, climate and social targets; thus ensuring human health and wellbeing."
This is a branch made low by AURP's RDR, low hanging fruit, the words like keys to ideating the form of the transformation that we are facing.
We are at a similar stage in process as we were in the late 1800s, when questioning toward what we call Modernism, or International Style, or the First Machine Ages, like Reyner Banham wrote of. Ruskin had written his prescient Seven Lamps of Architecture, a diatribe of the coming doom, about which he was largely correct. Louis Sullivan was already moving ahead fast in the USA and FLW beginning his run. They were asking different questions in the UK. In mainland Europe there were some architects getting high profile projects that exemplified the pre–modern movement. Some architects were responding with clarity and conviction that existing modes of planning, design and production were going to be superseded. Ove Arup was one of the early participants. Most were not.
There was a lot of contradiction to modernity that is now largely forgotten. There are few architects who see the current rumbling of things we took for granted shifting and crumbling as an opportunity, and there is very little will for essential change in values of design, planning and production and in the architectural profession. It is a profound and beneficial opportunity to inflect the grounds of architectural practice and engineering, as well as the entire Technosphere.
The change appears much harder as we exit this phase of architecture due to the downward trend of available resources. Back then, two centuries ago, based on the vast potential of new technology and the kind of acceleration that scientific thinking provided, along with unabashed colonialism and empire building, there was an surge of material growth and power. We are suffering reductions now as efforts to reign in climate and biospheric harm cut into certain kinds of growth, and we are unable to continue paths that have turned out to be toxic. As we fall behind the needed changes to the extant regimes, the kind of materiality and power we have will be less.
The 'surpluses' that the RDR refers to are the sign of constructs that leverage our capacity as conscious beings of stewardship in the world against ourselves, exploiting each other directly or through the life of our planet, relying on the myth of garbage. That the ARUP RDR includes these 'surpluses' as part of the future is a key to understanding the need for the deeper correction than this is offering that the needed change would serve.
We are being messaged by Earth's life form. Wealth building and prosperity values will change for better approaches to life quality and wellbeing. But a lot of human suffering will be ongoing for some time as we learn the outstanding lessons of the continuing injustice of colonizing life, including people and Nature, and reaping 'surpluses' as our technology 'captures' them, in the zero-sum game into which our techo-ecomony locks us.
The ARUP Regenerative Design Report is a threshold object. As it is, it sells us and ARUP itself short. It is like building a weak horizon, allegorically as one of Christo's curtains,[1] concealing a bright dawn already over the real horizon.
[1] The installation of Running Fence, modified/coloured. Photo: Private Collection/Wolfgang Votz/ Copyright 1975 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.