Project Updates

by Dirk Hebel, Workshop Mentor & Professor of Sustainable Construction, Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany & Member of the Academic Committee, Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction

According to the surveys released by the European Union (EU) in 2020, the construction industry is responsible for 40% of global CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, 50% of primary energy consumption, 50% of primary raw materials used and 36% of produced solid waste. Mainstream building practices are unsustainable.

As Workshop Mentor Dirk Hebel pointed out, “mainstream building practices are unsustainable. The construction sector uses an extensive amount of material resources and is responsible for the use of material compounds that are harmful to both humans and the environment. It is not enough to talk about more efficient steps to take within the existing systems, but time for a real paradigm shift.”

Dirk Hebel began the inaugural seminar with a brief account of his personal journey into the creation of the Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie (KIT). Dealing with innovations in the construction sector to the promotion of circular metabolisms, detoxification and durability, Hebel’s seminar introduced some of KIT’s most successful research in the search of new materials that promote fundamentally sustainable building practices.

Carme Pinós opened her seminar by expressing her conception of the city, the ‘articulated city’, which envisions architecture as the space of relationships and the city itself as the space in which human beings create a sense of community. Presenting various projects of her past work, Pinós referenced her transformation of Plaza de la Gardunya (2006), whose inspirations draw on her familiarity with the city of Barcelona, and, in particular, the rigid geometry of the plaza, especially towards the centre of the space.

To begin her seminar, Anna Heringer stated that, while architecture can be used as a tool to improve lives, unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Because the act of building consumes many resources and involves significant budgets that, in turn, impact society, she claimed that architects have an enormous responsibility to not only construct buildings, but to foster communities that occur in harmony with nature.

“Architecture must arouse, inspire and feed the human spirit. The need is for professional concern with the environment and an improved quality of human life for all people.” Alongside a series of other inspiring quotes, Brinda Somaya began her seminar under the premise that, beyond building, architects must act as guardians of both the built and the natural environment.

In the material world we live in today, it is becoming widely known and accepted that what we use to build our cities have a far-reaching impact. With this in mind, how can designers, architects and engineers find scalable solutions that adequately respond to the material problems we face? Questions such as this were posed by Stuart Smith, director of Arup Berlin, to the audience of his seminar at the Norman Foster Foundation.

Presenting his renowned work at Better Shelter, a nonprofit company that builds shelters for displacement settlements created in response to warzone conflict and natural crises, Johan Karlsson offered an intensely provocative reconsideration of the relationship between architecture and the humanitarian system. In opposition to the precedent set by traditional shelter architecture, where temporality and impersonality often prevail, Karlsson asked, “Can we build shelters that are able to not only stand against the next hurricane, but to feel like home?”

In fulfillment of its motto to ‘live well by design’, the mission of Urban Splash, which Tom Bloxham describes as ‘a market-leading urban regeneration developer’ to which he is both founder and chairman, is to build beautiful, modern homes in green neighbourhoods that are full of character. Going through the history of Urban Splash and its work, which includes the creation of over 4,000 new homes, Bloxham took the seminar’s attendees through an overlook of the design firm’s most notable regenerative projects, including the transformation of historic structures such as Concert Square in Liverpool and Lister Mills in Bradford.

Speaking on her experiences as the former minister of urban renewal and informal settlements in Cairo, Egypt, where materials discarded by the rich constitute the informal waste-management industry of the urban poor, Laila Iskandar’s seminar referenced one of Egypt’s six principle recycling neighborhoods, Manchiyet Nasser, and the waste management system carried out there by its inhabitants.