Architecture and Construction

Architecture is our most intimate, most immediate artform. An art that, done well, balances functionality with beauty: what we need to live with what we need to thrive. It has the power to engender harmony, community and happiness. To enhance our lives. 

Neglected or misused it has equal power to negatively impact them. And, of course, architecture, misappropriated, has immense power to negatively impact our environment. 

Ultimately, it’s down to us. A species with so much potential, so much knowledge, so much capacity for creation and development, we could be making far better design and construction choices for our homes: and, in turn, for our health, happiness and the health of our planet. 

So what went “wrong”? 

Humanity has always worked with natural materials for our domestic spaces. But last century saw a sea change in how we looked at consumption and production: a shift to fast, cheap mass production, from which our architecture was not immune.

We started to ignore the impact that design has on our emotions and wellbeing, and confined the art of architecture to our most emblematic buildings. Our homes – the places we relax in, cook in, in which we raise (and make) our children – became all about “efficiency”: fitting in as many houses as possible in the smallest amount of earth. Tower blocks built so tall they literally defied nature. New towns piled high with ugly homes fuelled by functionality rather than wellbeing. 

And the cherry on the teetering, towering mass-produced cake? In order to defy nature in this way, we had to build our homes with toxic materials – layering them up with varnishes, cladding, fibreglass and laminates: all harmful for us, our children, and our earth. And the more we build, the more we damage the planet, the more extreme the elements become, and the more toxic we have to make our homes to withstand them.

Our 20th-century obsession with concrete too, has seen us desecrate our mountainsides and riverbeds – causing swampland, depletion and damaging our oceans. At the same time, we’re running out of metals to mine. We live in a finite planet, and we seem to be going out of our way to use it all up – all the while teaching our children that it’s OK to build and live in this manner; to go against what we inherently know is right. 

Worse still, our fixation with durability means they’ll be stuck with our waste for centuries to come. We harvest materials, make them toxic, amass colossal carbon footprints shipping them all over the world, then we don’t know how to dispose of them when we get bored because we’ve made them almost impossible to get rid of. The best solution we’ve come up with so far? Throw our rubbish into space. Brilliant. 

Intergalactic littering aside, what can we do?

The good news is, there’s no one right way; there are LOADS of right ways to build better, more beautiful, more sustainable, inspiring and enjoyable houses. 

Think local

We propose a return to recognising the importance of the local, traditional vernacular of architecture. Why? Because centuries of research, reasoning, understanding and experience has gone into local architecture – these are buildings created, adapted and perfected specifically for that environment and climate – of course it makes logical sense to respect and use that as our starting point. 

Moreover, local architectural styles usually use local materials; what can be found and grown on or near site. This is testament to nature’s intelligence that it tends to offer us the building materials we need for the environment we’re in – and a wonderful way to thank nature is by reducing our carbon footprint by sourcing locally as much as possible, rather than shipping in building materials from the other side of the world. It’s the least we can do.    

And traditional 

While we’re doing this, we can go on using the brilliant natural materials that are our heritage – the baked tiles, bamboo and bahareque – and the natural techniques that have been tried, tested and proven to withstand the test of time for thousands of years. Think medieval cathedrals, even elements of Roman and Greek architecture. These are beautiful, powerful, much more sustainable and exceptionally long-lasting. 

…then make it our own

But sure, not every old house or architectural style serves us now – our needs have changed, our climate has changed, our tastes and our technology have changed. We use local, traditional styles as our starting point, our inspiration, then maybe we add the home office that modern remote workers need, or the big family kitchens that have become the heart of contemporary homes. We make our own version of the story. 

And, of course, the resources and their availability have changed too – in many regions we have exploited precious local hard woods to the point of extinction, for example. So we adapt, considering what we have now and what will best enable our ecosystem to regenerate. Take bamboo: strong, malleable and incredibly fast growing – a perfect resource to mimic traditional wooden styles. Hempcrete, too, is a smart modern fix. Our evolutionary gift is to combine the wisdom of the past with advancements in science, engineering and design. Our artform is now a balancing act of longevity vs. waste, what we need vs. what we have. 

Reclaim, refurbish, reuse 

A brilliant way we can use traditional architecture and reduce waste while working with new ideas and technologies is by literally recycling – taking the beautiful woods of crumbling colonial houses, for example, and using them in our new designs, rather than creating or culling more materials and more waste. Or the reverse: taking the “crumbling” houses and adding newer materials to refurbish and give them a new lease of life. It’s the simplest way to reduce waste and use less – and it results it exceptional, inspiring design. 

Think natural

Not just natural materials – literally nature. Biomimicry is one of the most intelligent arms of architecture; looking at the structures in nature to find engineering and building solutions. Take an egg, for example: not only structurally strong, but incredibly efficient in terms of how much energy it takes to produce. In architectural terms, that egg becomes a cupola: resource-light, beautiful and super-strong – safe as houses, as the saying goes.  

Nature has helped solve design problems in everything from the Japanese bullet train to wind turbines, and in our homes it can help with everything from ventilation systems, mimicking the way air passes through plants without knocking them down or how termites build their nests, to shock absorption and integrating our accommodation into jungle or forest environments. 

Close circles 

Do you know what else nature does beautifully? Close circles. An ecosystem untouched by man finds a way to use and feed everything without depletion or waste. We can learn from this. Actually, we have to if we want to leave anything for our kids. 

Take water. Water in, water out. We need to think about our sources, how we can capture it and purify it for drinking. How we can save water, down to our very tap heads. How we can create pressure without an energy-guzzling pump (say hi to gravity). How we can treat and reuse our grey water. We need to create systems that integrate our homes, gardens and communities so everything’s working together. 

Then there are our cooling and heating systems, which can be made so much simpler and so much more efficient by returning to those traditional materials for some good old passive heating: adobe, for example, absorbs heat, keeping houses cool in the day and releasing heat at night for warmth. Genius.  

And with modern renewable energy sources like geothermal energy at our disposal, the technology we have at our fingertips goes way further than simply solar.  

Think about yourself and your environment 

Yes, you can think of both simultaneously; building in harmony with nature doesn’t compromise either of them. In fact, it has the ability to maximise both. 

Speaking of solar, for example, humans love light. In fact, neuroarchitecturally speaking, getting the right light is the easiest way to lift our moods and enhance our health. And it’s the first, easiest way to work with our environment in architecture; simply designing our houses so they enjoy the right aspect to capture sunlight, aligning the day’s course with our natural circadian rhythms. 

And while we’re positioning our houses, we can design them to let nature in: to see the sea, frame a beautiful tree, allow us to stargaze from bed. We can make nature a design feature; brining it in, all we need is a well-placed window and our quality of life improves.  

This is, ultimately, why mass production doesn’t work, even in one community: every house needs to be individually thought out, because every incline, tree, outlook is different; the views, the orientation, the shade, sun, water flow differs on every square metre of land, so we need to build our communities mindfully accordingly.

Love thy neighbour

Speaking of community, designing at a community level is one of the most effective ways to create more sustainably: just by the simple nature that if you share, you use less: a shared laundry room or yoga shala, say, shared energy use, resources, maintenance. Thinking about architecture at a community level is a deeply impactful way to make a change for the planet. And for us, these collaborative living spaces can integrate generations and groups so we work with symbiotic relationships to keep everyone happy and healthy. Win, win. 

You can learn more about our thoughts on community and collaborative living structures but, essentially, in our view it’s about designing mindfully for what we need for human and planetary thriving: incorporating all this smart design – traditional, contemporary and natural – into beautiful places we not only want to share, but that literally enable us to do so, unleashing the true artform of architecture.