Who's responsible?

Architectural Review, The, July, 1997 by Peter Davey

4 von Weizsacker et al, p178.

5 von Weizsacker and his colleagues suggest that 'the commercial interest in long-lived structures could be spurred if ... structures were leased instead of being sold. With leasing, the construction firm would have a vital commercial interest in durability and low maintenance costs' (p80). In Britain, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has been set up to do just this but there is little indication so far that it will lead to better environments, or even buildings that are more efficient in terms of resource use, because construction firms still tend to choose the safest and dumbest designs which are cheapest in capital cost, hence rather defeating the point of the whole process.

6 The privatisation of many utilities in developed Western economies has reinforced this trend and made it more difficult to reverse.

7 Probably just well, for computers which could learn to make value judgements about unlike variables might really become a threat to the human race as many science fantasts have proposed.

8 Because buildings very rarely travel across national borders it should be possible, even in an age of free trade, for national governments to impose taxes to encourage appropriate resource use. An analogy might be building controls: in Europe, it would plainly be imbecilic to have the same building regulations from Sweden to Sicily.

9 von Weizsacker et al, p78. The authors cite work by Christa Liedtke of the Wuppertal Institute on the material and energy consumption of manufacturing electricity pylons in concrete and steel. The conclusions cannot of course be translated direct to building, because they leave out the implications of providing fire-proofing of structural steel. See for instance p37.

10 Ibid p128.

11 Morris, William, Useful Work versus Useless Toil, 1885. Collected in Centenary edition, op cit p609.