Common Interests: Duncan Baker-Brown on calling for embodied carbon benchmarking and making carbon measurement tools accessible
Common Interests is a series shining a light on changemakers in the sector.
This month we spoke with Duncan Baker-Brown : founder of BakerBrown studio,?architect, academic, environmental activist and a candidate running for President at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) . The second edition of his book, 'The Re-Use Atlas: a designer's guide towards a circular economy', will be available from RIBA Publishing this September.?
In a recent interview you called for legislation that supports retrofit and low carbon design. What's the one thing that central government can put in place to shift the needle??
What I'm looking to do is to convince government to legislate for benchmarking embodied carbon. It sounds a bit dull, but as soon as you say you you're benchmarking the amount of 'stuff' that goes into creating a building, you enter a world where you're going to have to use less of that 'stuff'. And what we're realising is it's the mass consumption of materials that's destroying the planet. Once the onus is on us to benchmark embodied carbon, then we're trying everything to reuse before we demolish.?
What can industry do to make retrofit and circular principles much more mainstream and commonplace??
Beyond legislating for it and creating a subsidised environment encouraging this way of doing, it's advocating. The community of designers and technical consultants need to be better informed; I think that's where the RIBA can lobby on the community's behalf, to show what good practice looks like, to shine a light on what a lot of people in its membership are already doing, as well as people beyond the membership across Europe and the rest of the world.?
And that's why we spent three years putting together the second edition of the Re-Use Atlas, because there's so much stuff being done and it's not talked about, and we need to understand, very quickly, exactly what 'good' looks like.
Carbon literacy is something that a lot of architectural practices are grappling with - especially if they don't have in-house expertise. Is this something you'll be championing as well?
As a small practitioner myself, I know it's very difficult to have more things to pay for, and that one of the things that's difficult to pay for is affordable Whole Life Carbon life cycle analysis software. I'm going to be lobbying for an affordable version of that, because we want to be able to very quickly look at design options from a Whole Life Carbon point of view, to make early design decisions.?
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I want to make sure that the RIBA, with its community of 50,000 people, deploys 'buying power' for its smaller members, so we can calculate early on and make the important initial decisions around embodied carbon.?
Is there an exemplar project that stands out in your mind as an interesting, and viable, retrofit or reuse project?
There's an architect called Joe Taillieu, from Belgium, and he's got this lovely project called Paddenbroek Farm (see Dezeen feature here). It’s a small farmyard that's been converted into an education centre for children. The landscape is farmed around there in a traditional way, and so it's really rich with biodiversity and welcomes a lot of groups. The original farmyard buildings have been wrapped in glazing - what on first sight looks like a giant greenhouse, but because of the way it's designed, it doesn't overheat; it creates this environmental buffer zone. So in the winter, if it's cold, you are within this envelope, but there's no need for heating. It protects the original buildings; it's the idea of reading a building as a serial phase.?
We can't afford to wrap all our built environment with insulation. So we need to develop and apply a clever understanding of what goes on in our buildings: where we need to be sedentary and have insulation, and where you're moving and don't need it. The net result is a really playful and good bit of architecture which makes the most of the properties of the existing building whilst introducing spaces for new programming. New stuff goes on?because of?the retrofit. It's creates a bigger building, a cheaper-to-run building, and a building that is making more money for its clients because it can now be used all year round.?
What are you most hopeful about within the built environment today??
I'm hopeful that we can begin to be transformative from the point of view of our our response to the climate emergency. I think it's a huge work opportunity for architects.?
And I'm hoping that the other thing that could happen during my RIBA presidency is that there is a broadening of options to study architecture. At the moment — I teach in both undergraduate and postgraduate — I've got students on full time courses who are also doing part-time jobs to support themselves. Whereas we could, for example, have a flourishing apprenticeship scheme to make education more accessible.?
#CommonInterests is an interview series organised by property developer Common Projects, where we talk to leading thinkers in the built environment who share our goals of shaping a world where people and planet matter.