so this is the Darwin Center it is a 60
meters long and 300 millimeters thick
giant concrete egg in West London and I
remember this building because as a
student I saw the architects C. F. Møller
present this project and they said this
is a very sustainable building and I
thought, that's an interesting thing to say
what do you mean it's very sustainable
building it's it seems like a giant
concrete egg? And the guy, he was quite
annoyed, and he was like no no Phin. Well
he didn't know my name but he's like no no no boy. What you don't understand is this
building's gonna last for 200 years so
yes it has a lot of carbon but you take
that carboin when you divide it over 200
years that gives you your per year
carbon emissions and that's what you
should be focusing on. Of course, he's
dead wrong and we know this now because
the situation is just far more urgent
than he kind of assumed it was. We don't
have 200 years. The last IPCC report
highlights these tipping points, right
these ecological snowball
effects, if you hit the tipping point
everything gets much harder to solve and
the first of those is like 11 years away.
So the implications of this are sort of
really big for architecture because
we've got very used to making this kind
of calculation – the spread it out over a
long period of time calculation. But it's
possible that a lot of our kind of most
seductive material strategies when we
invoke hard-wearingness and longevity
are always associated with materials
that involve a high blast of carbon on
day one and maybe we have to completely
rethink that paradigm. Maybe we have to
even abandon it entirely. Maybe we have
to embrace materials that are actually not
very hard-wearing at all. That wear out
quickly and require a lot of maintenance,
but don't come with that massive blast
of carbon. What would that kind of
architecture be like? What would an
architecture of constant maintenance be
like? Well this is a useful case study
it's it's thatch.
This is Burgenland but thatch is pretty
much as global
people and plants are. Here in
Switzerland in America in Bali in India
in Germany in the UK and so on. Thatch is
an amazing material. It grows very fast.
Its carbon emissions or almost nothing.
It actually sequesters a bit of carbon. It
has these incredible sculptural
qualities. We don't use it very much
because it has very high maintenance
requirements. A roof like this would need
to be replaced every 10 to 15 years, but
what would it mean if we were able to
turn that weakness on its head and start
specifying thatch not despite
it needing a lot of maintenance but
because it needs a lot of maintenance?
Well this is another interesting case
study, this is Mali's great
mosque in Djenne. It was first built around
the 13th century and rebuilt in 1907 and
it's covered with these protruding
bundles of sticks called torun and they
are kind of decorative but
they're not just decorative, they're
actually the scaffolding that allows the
facade of the mosque to be replastered
with mud render every year after heavy
rains. I think this duality of the
torun something this is both a piece of
architectural expression but also an
indicator of a culture of repair, you can
find that elsewhere in design history in
Japan of course boro technique where
you repair the same garment again and
again and again and hand it down through
generations or kintsugi where a piece of
smashed ceramics is stuck back together
with lacquer dusted with precious metals.
I think that thatch and the mosque and
kintsugi and boro all exciting
metaphors in a way for an architecture
that doesn't sort of shy away from
damage and repair that it embraces it
that treats it as part of the history of
the object. The building is never
complete. The bowl is never complete.
Everything is in a constant state of
becoming. What would it mean to apply
that paradigm to contemporary
architecture in urban context? Well
actually I'm not sure it is that hard to
imagine when you think of the lengths
that the high-tech guys went to to
achieve their architecture. These are
window cleaning cranes but they're also
architectural form. Here at HSBC
here again at Lloyds here and number one
Blackfriars where the whole roof lifts off to
reveal this cleaning device. So this is
cleaning as architecture and I think
Goldfinger does something a little bit
similar at Trellick tower, here the
boiler room is elevated to this
extraordinary architectural status —
literally higher than anything else in
the building. So if window cleaning and the humdrum
domestic labour of heating up some
water can become rich seems for
architectural expression maybe
maintenance could as well. And what would
it mean for us as architects to
fall in love with maintenance, and to
abandon infatuation with hard-wearing materials entirely.
