Chapter 2 of 22
Polycrises
Increasingly over the last years of practice, issues around responding to climate change, responding to the climate emergency, have become an increasingly important part of our practice. So the idea about not only how our buildings perform, but also the materials that they're made from, how much energy goes into those materials, how straightforward it is to recycle or even better to reuse those materials or components that go into our buildings. And also thinking about the provenance of those construction materials, where they come from, how they've been grown or quarried or mined or forged, who's done it, what kind of working conditions are they working in, really trying to think more broadly about a responsibility to both society and planet for the buildings that we build and the process of building. And so the architecture that we seek to create as a practice thinks before the fact as well as after the fact, if you like. So we're thinking about where those materials come from, what the effects and the cause of those materials might be, also how the buildings that we build sit within our cities, how they work for the people that live and work and get better and are educated in those buildings. So an increasingly important part of the focus of our practice is dealing with the polycrisis of the here and the now.