What Architecture must Be
Architecture has been responding to the requests for experiences and prestige by clients to allow the clients to be valued by their peers.
Architecture should be constantly reviewing the context of its age and then review its true nature as a Functional Art.
Our planet is entering a new age. The age of depletion. An age when environment resources and energy are depleting due to human consumerist policy. The depletion age of the ‘Anthropocene’. The new human Cenozoic era. The age when humans have been altering the planets ecology, resources and climate by their actions.
The solution to the human accelerated climate change is to reduce those areas of human activity that contribute the most to depletion effects.
Construction is the largest human depletion system on the planet.
In Britain it accounts for approx. 65% of UK energy use per year and approx. 62% of the total UK greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
Architecture and Construction should therefore only be carried out when absolutely necessary.
Therefore Architecture must contribute passively.
It must examine the context of this age and then review its true nature as a Functional Art.
It must respond by altering its focus.
It must reduce its built output, to reduce UK and global depletion effects.
Architecture should do nothing more than establish response to future problems and then publish these findings for the builders to form and the public to use when they can be proved to be needed.
Architecture would then regain its true name and nature as the works of the master builders.
‘De Architectura.’
References:
‘Anthropocene’ - Revkin, Andrew C. (May 11, 2011). "Confronting the ‘Anthropocene’".
Crutzen, P. J., and E. F. Stoermer "The 'Anthropocene'". Global Change Newsletter 41: 17–18
CAIT 2.0, WRI’s The History of Carbon Dioxide Emissions World Resources Institute
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population and associated sources
OECD
MtCo2 = million tonnes of carbon dioxide (1,000,000,000 kg of carbon dioxide)
Reuters
WWW.Gov.UK DECC
BPF 2013
Ian K Whittaker
My websites:
https://sites.google.com/site/architecturearticles
Email: iankwhittaker@gmail.com
04/10/2014
14/10/2020
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