On April 4 – 6, the international conference FABRICATE 2024 will be held at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. Since its inception in 2011, FABRICATE has established itself as a global forum for new radical possibilities for architecture and welcomed thousands of participants from practice, industry, and research.
In this second article, we meet architect Indy Johar who is the director of WikiHouse Foundation and CEO and founder of Dark Matters Lab working with institutions around the world, from UNDP, the European Commission on Net Zero Cities, the European Environmental Agency, and various national agencies and cities. The text is an excerpt from the upcoming FABRICATE 2024 book and is based on an interview conversation led by Co-chair Phil Ayres between Indy Johar and Professor Philippe Block, Head of the Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA), ETH Zürich. The book will be published on the opening night of the FABRICATE 2024 conference.
FABRICATE is a conference focused on the methods, technologies, and materials of making architecture. This year, our call has sought to extend the discussion to include new perspectives on how fabrication changes in a resource-aware world. This brings forth both ethical-ecological and design-driven questions asking what the future value systems and practices of making architecture can be. The conference themes will expand on questions of how to work with reclaimed materials, what bio-based thinking can drive in architecture, and how resource-aware practices can be formed.
Related Article
Reclaim: Circularity and Reuse at Fabricate 2024
Phil Ayres: Indy, could you articulate the kinds of shifts that are necessary in the ways that we design, and offer some insight on how architectural fabrication might be leveraged to be a part of this rethinking?
Indy Johar: I'm not sure we understand the scale of what we're facing. If Europe wants to stay within 1.5˚C targets, and you look at the available carbon in the system, you can't afford to build 1.5 million homes a year – the figure is closer to 144,000 homes. A typical UK building has 800kg per meter squared of embodied carbon. The best low-carbon house has 150kg of embodied carbon per square meter, but we need to get to 6.3kg. I think the innovation space that we're being sold is nonreal, and exactly as Philippe (Editor’s Note: Block) was mentioning, a move to timber doesn't solve anything if you rely on global timber supply chains.
To move to timber, you're going to have to move towards the bio-regional timber base. There is a structural land use transition that's required in many countries to move to a bio-based economy, and that has a 30-year window minimum and will add to the food pressures that we've got. Then, we have to be able to sequester that carbon for 200 years. But, most modern buildings have a lifespan of less than 25 years because they're programme-driven buildings. We need those buildings to survive, but we don't have the material registry frameworks for that materiality to survive for 200 years. We don't have the end-of-life material management liabilities on those frameworks. We don't have the legal governance of those materials. Our asset codes for buildings, in terms of how they're financed by pension funds, are entirely financed on use – they're not financed on the material reuse of those buildings.
So, what we have are structural issues that are locking us into a problematic space. This is how I would define where we are, and being radical here, we should not be building in Europe. We have 33% of our buildings lying empty. I think the innovation space is to radically increase the utilization of our built environments and we're going to have to radically reduce the materiality around development. We have to massively reduce the engineering and talk about smart buildings with smart failure management, which isn't based on huge levels of redundancy in our material fabric.
PA: I'd like to shift the conversation towards the role of technology – specifically digital fabrication and automation – in the necessary transitions that have been outlined. There are value propositions that can be made about the use of these technologies, but it can also be argued that they are a product and ultimately dependent on many of the extractive, linear, and capital-concentrating systems that we need to reconsider. Can these positions be reconciled?
IJ: I think nuance is everything here. If you're looking at retrofit, it's very difficult to do in terms of re-skinning buildings given the diversity of building stock. If you look at the production of solar panels, or battery production, or whether you look at ice or heat pumps, yes, you could automate some of their production radically, and that would have quite a lot of value. That's probably the most efficient automation cycle investment that we could do now, whereas doing deep retrofit automation is probably not an efficient allocation right now just in terms of the complexity that's required on the ground. So, the question is, where does automation work effectively?
There’s a philosophical question that you’re asking in the back end of that, which is the nature of our technologies and the nature of rent-seeking and power asymmetries buried in those technologies. Most of our technological frameworks are built on theories of extraction, and they’re all about the accumulation of asset value rather than the development value of human beings. So, there's a macroeconomic question that I think we are going to have to address. What do life-affirming technologies look like? How do we radically start to shift our material economic base towards them? What are the funding mechanisms to be able to support them? We also need to be acutely aware of the embodied carbon and the embodied energy costs of many of these technologies, as we have lost the headroom for many of the carbon investments needed to make those transitions. We are in borrowed space, operating in these extraordinarily tight limits in ways that I don’t think we’re being quite real about.
PA: This segues into questions about new partnerships and collaborative frameworks that need to be developed. Could you offer your thoughts, and outline some of the prospects they hold for reshaping the world of fabrication?
IJ: Firstly, we need to recognize that the scale of the transition we face exists at the intersection of these problems and if we only focus on one of them, what we end up with is that we mis-optimise the system. So, we need to recognize that we do have carbon constraints; we do need new material economies; we do need to radically shift human comfort expectations; we do need to improve built environment quality from a human health perspective – and at the intersection of that is a new built environment economy.
It's only when we have a reasoned debate at the intersection of these problem spaces that we get to the right solution spaces, but what we're currently getting is siloed responses. You've got regulation doing one thing, not recognizing technical limits, and on the other side, technical limits not recognizing some of the climate change numbers that we're facing. So, I think you have to look at the problem through an intersectional lens. We are going to have to multi-solve and move away from segmented responses. I think it is really important to recognize that it is not an options conversation – it's an intersectional conversation.
FABRICATE 2024: Creating Resourceful Futures asks how rethinking architectural methods, technology, and construction can create a new societal position for the built environment, appointing a particular focus on questions of resource consciousness and bio-based design and fabrication strategies. This will be explored through four themes: RECLAIM: Circularity and Reuse; LOCALISE: Sourcing and Performance; INTEGRATE Systems and Context; and RATIONALISE: Elements and Assemblies. The conference is Co-chaired by the Head of the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture Professor Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen and Chair for Biohybrid Architecture Professor Phil Ayres. ArchDaily is collaborating with FABRICATE 2024 to share articles about the four-session themes and their respective keynotes: Zhu Pei, Anna Dyson, Indy Johar, and Anders Lendager to prepare for the opening of the conference.
