And the future? Buildings and cities of the future must conserve energy and materials so we can live in harmony with the planet

Architectural Review, The, March, 2005

Despite the brilliance of Stirling's Stuttgart and Gehry's Bilbao, the thoughtful power of Snohetta's library, the penetrating reticence of Zumthor and Leiviska, monuments cannot make up a city. We cannot live in a state of constant climax, nor can a humanly satisfying life be set amid a background in which formal and spatial events struggle against each other in a kind of three-dimensional, multi-branded brawl. There will have to be some sort of matrix from which the monumental emerges. It will not do to say (with some of the proponents of high PoMo) that in a democratic society we each deserve to build a monument, that everyone's 15 minutes of fame should be translated into three-dimensional built stuff. Such a way of making cities would result in universal road-to-the-airport syndrome, where ducks and decorated sheds succeed each other ad nauseam--at best caviar mixed with marrons glaces, at worst (ie normally) tacky, shabby and completely banal.

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To suggest that there should be a hierarchy of importance in the environment is not a call to return to the pyramidal societies of the past but a plea for the public realm. Cities all over the world are growing at a colossal rate. In poorer countries, combined technological and agrarian revolutions are drawing people to cities with forces as powerful as those that caused the explosion of tiny towns in the north of England during the first industrial revolution 250 years ago. In richer countries, there has been a colossal expansion of the suburbs caused by increasing populations, changed family structures and burgeoning affluence.

Shanty towns and suburbs are both cating land at a rate unprecedented since civilization (the culture of cities) began thousands of years ago. Such land is almost by definition highly fertile, for before the development of mechanized transport, cities had to be located as near to their sources of food as possible. Now, with transport costs in many countries being held artificially low by government intervention, food sources can be much more dispersed and, by using artificial fertilizers, they can be on land which was previously unproductive (while of course increasing pollution). But all this has costs: ecological ones that are masked by conventional accounting. As the history of places like Easter Island shows, a civilization can collapse if it cannot understand ecological imperatives because they are masked by conventional rituals. The islanders chopped down every tree they had to support a religion that demanded more and more huge carved monoliths. Lack of trees led to erosion; the agricultural base collapsed; the islanders had to resort to civil war and cannibalism. Their civilization ended.

We are (I hope) a good distance away from cannibalism at the moment. But we are beginning to move on a downward path. Most of us (except Texan fanatics) have realized that we are living in a world with limited resources, and Easter Island is an analogue that, as Jared Diamond points out, we should never forget. A tiny piece of land isolated in the vast Pacific has extremely important lessons for a little planet drifting round a small star on the edge of a galaxy. (1) Gaia, James Lovelock's name for the complicated, interrelated self-organizing systems of relationship between the organic and inorganic aspects of the earth, is totally indifferent to individual species. We, as a species, happen to have been successful since we discovered the benefits of civilization. We have been particularly and spectacularly successful in the last couple of centuries, when the natural world has been dominated as never before by us and our machines, and we have exploded in numbers like a bloom of algae in an over-nitrogenated lake.

Modern, mechanical civilization is becoming unsustainable, as phenomena as different as global warming and the AIDS epidemic dramatically demonstrate. Gaia will survive, but it is utterly unconcerned with humanity. Unless we can live in harmony with the planet, we shall perish as the algae do when their bloom becomes too great; their pond becomes sterile, waiting to become repopulated by windblown seeds and the life-forms that attach themselves to the legs of wading birds.

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But it would be better for us to continue to be successful and learn to live more sensibly. So we need to change our relationship to the planet. Instead of trying to dominate it, we should study and respect it, and try to work with it. Here, architects, planners and landscape designers are immensely important, for buildings consume more energy and materials in their construction and running than any other human activity, save perhaps transport and manufacture. Eroded as our professional architectural status is by commerce and bureaucracy, we can still make a huge difference to the relationship of humankind to the planet.

Yet ecologically aware architecture is only part of the answer. As I never tire of pointing out, the Nazi party was the only successful green political movement ever to achieve power. There are some very strange authoritarian creatures in the rich undergrowth of the green movements: think of Wright's Broadacre City. Wright was very far from being a fascist, but his ideal rural community bears uncanny similarity to the very authoritarian society portrayed by Thomas More in Utopia. Each male citizen of Wright's city was to be given an acre of land at birth that, on coming of age, he would be expected to cultivate to feed himself and his family. Wright did not reveal what would happen to a chap who didn't want to live as a tiny smallholder, but presumably punishments would have been unpleasant, socially, if not physically.