How I plan to become a more sustainable architect

I had dinner with a friend recently and we were talking about marching through the streets back in 07-08 for climate action*. I said how at the time it felt like a culturally significant moment with Rudd’s election and a shift in the tone of the country, but looking back it felt like a lost a generation and nothing much had changed. My friend, who works in the sustainability space, quickly put me in my place. Sure, we’ve got a long way to go he said, but we’ve actually started to make some significant changes and these are impacting the built environment. This was a bit of a wake up call for me, as I’d let time and complacency get the better of me and felt really out of the loop.

As an architect I’m well placed to make a modest, but hopefully meaningful impact on getting to Net Zero and after that conversation I made a bit of a personal vow that night to take steps to take more action as a practitioner.

See my issue is that any architect worth their salt knows and uses general passive design principles when designing houses. However, I’ve been guilty over my career to rely too heavily on rules of thumb as opposed to measurable strategies that allow for direct comparison of different approaches and therefore better inform my clients on their options and choices.

We work a lot with clients that have sustainability goals in their project, and while we never diminish them, for the most part they generally relatively rudimentary – they’ll have some questions about double glazed windows, are keen to add in rain water tanks and want solar panels installed. We advocate and support these ambitions, and always design with solar passive principles in mind, but recently I’ve become frustrated at my own reluctance to better advocate for bigger sustainability goals within projects.  

I advocate for better design outcomes and bigger design ambitions in other realms of a design. For example, one of the first topics that clients bring up is the arrangement of the kitchen design. I always remind clients that although it is important, there are more important decisions to be made early in the design process and that we should focus on the things that will have a bigger impact on their project than the arrangement of their kitchen (eg connection to outdoors, reinforcing how you’d like to live with your family, access to natural light, better balance of privacy and connection etc). However, I rarely push back on clients when their sustainability goals are so narrow – it's my job to help them see what is possible and guide them to make more informed decisions on the sustainability of their design and I’ve failed that.

I think what is missing from my toolbox is a clear knowledge of the measurable sustainability impacts of one design alternative against another, and a step in our design process that communicates this to clients.

So, I’ve made a commitment to myself to begin to introduce this into our process. Over the next few articles I’ll share what we’re researching here at Guide Architects that will allow us to better advocate and explain good, sustainable design to our clients so that they can make more informed decisions about their renovations.

*By the way, I’m not claiming to be a renegade activist - I’m ashamed to say I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve marched for climate justice