Topic: ArchitectureUK Architecture is Greenwashing on a Global Scale

We’re starting to see buildings being created with a better ecological record in the UK, and their designers have been quick to claim the credit. But UK built environment firms take a very different approach to building at home than overseas, argues Krish Nathaniel. There is a ‘west and the rest’ approach emerging, with firms using the soft power of ‘green’ at home to mask their ecologically and socially damaging practices overseas. Edited by Martha Dillon.

By Krish Nathaniel

Over the past year I've been returning to my 'alma mater’, teaching on the Masters Architecture course at Central Saint Martins, London. Being back in Kings Cross (or NC1, to go by its recently minted postcode), I've been faced with the wall of construction that is the new Google campus. Longer than the Shard is tall, the building – dubbed the landscraper – snakes along a thin site wedged between railway lines and the grandly named King's Boulevard. This new headquarters for the tech giant is the brainchild of Heatherwick Studio, whose Coal Drops Yard shopping complex sits opposite the site and who are best known for London's new Routemaster and the 2012 Olympic torch.

Watching lift cores rise and new windows being craned into position, I’ve been reflecting on the project’s (and the practice’s) environmental impact. The landscraper is undoubtedly more sustainable than the glut of reinforced concrete towers which have been driving the capital’s decades long construction boom. Though built from a carbon-intensive steel frame, the structure uses less raw material and is massively more structurally efficient than reinforced concrete – in short, doing much more with less. Timber decks have replaced concrete floor slabs, further reducing the scheme’s embodied carbon, the building’s glass facade is triple-glazed and rooftop solar panels will produce almost 20MWh of power a year. The project is aiming to meet BREEAM ‘Excellent', the main green building standard in the UK. In fact, the only truly head-scratching own goal seems to be the large concrete basin on the building’s roof, which will soon house 40,000 tons of soil for a (private) rooftop ‘forest’.

It’s worth looking at some of the Studio’s other ‘live’ projects for a better understanding of their true approach to sustainability

While not the gold standard, the landscraper is certainly ambitious in terms of its sustainable structure and energy efficiency. Along with its neighbour at Coal Drops Yard, which reuses former railway goods sheds, the project will position the Heatherwick Studio as a leader in sustainable design in the public eye. But, it’s worth looking at some of the Studio’s other ‘live’ projects for a better understanding of their true approach to sustainability.

Each tree would have to live for at least 155 years to reabsorb the carbon created by the column it sits on alone

Another tree-topped, but radically different, Heatherwick scheme is 1000 Trees: a shopping complex in Shanghai's M50 Art District, the first phase of which opened in early 2022. Designed to appear as a verdant hillside along the banks of the Suzhou Creek, the undulating, nine-storey building is crowned with 120 trees, each sat atop its own tulip-shaped concrete column. Unlike at Kings Cross, 1000 Trees is an orgy of concrete, with the huge planter-columns visually and environmentally drowning out any attempt at greening. According to architect and academic Philip Oldfield, manufacturing one of these planter generates 1.5 tonnes (CO2e) of greenhouse gas, meaning each tree would have to live for at least 155 years to reabsorb the carbon created by the column it sits on alone.

The human impact of the project has also been questioned. Former resident and architectural designer Flora Jing Lin Ng notes that the site was previously home to a collection of 1930s industrial buildings and an emerging green space which, by the early 2010s, had begun to self-seed, redressing a local ecosystem imbalance. Surrounding the site, similar buildings had begun to be occupied by artists and creators in a pattern seen in other post-industrial cities, the organic genesis of what is now ‘officially’ called the M50 Art District. But a proposal to revive the existing warehouses to support local artists and morph the green space into a public park was spiked by Chinese developer Tian An, in favour of Heatherwick’s 1000 Trees. In place of an accessible landscape for local people is one that’s tantalisingly out of reach, atop tulip-shaped columns, to visitors and creates more atmospheric harm than it reduces.

The decision to deliver projects with such radically different environmental impacts is ultimately a design choice

As clients, Google and Tian An have the final say on the use of the Kings Cross and M50 sites, but the decision to deliver projects with such radically different environmental impacts is ultimately a design choice. Timber and recycled steel are available in China just as in the UK – so are other regenerative and recycled materials – making the choice to use hulking concrete planters even more perplexing.

This duplicity in pursuing harmful and carbon-intensive practices abroad while promoting sustainability at home lays bare Heatherwick Studio's cynicism in addressing the climate crisis. By addressing sustainability at Kings Cross, the practice’s environmental harm in Shanghai is disguised and obfuscated. They are operating on two footings, one in the West, where climate crisis is increasingly widely discussed in planning and policy; while designing with less rigour and using climatically damaging design and construction processes in other parts of the world. This serves as little more than sustainable design ‘offsetting’, with the studio increasing sustainability measures in one context to mask and counter the lack of such care in another.

But this approach isn’t unique to Heatherwick Studio: it can be seen at many of Britain’s largest design firms.

For the UK’s largest practice, Foster + Partners, a legacy of delivering more sustainable projects in Europe, such as London’s Bloomberg office complex or the retrofit of Berlin’s Reichstag is eroded by dubiously ‘sustainable’ or ethical mega-projects. In the UAE, the Foster-designed Masdar City, billed as the ‘world's first carbon neutral city’, yet reachable only by car, was appraised by Cornell academics as 'inherently unsustainable because it involves constructing a brand-new city in an unquestionably resource intensive place, the desert.’

More tragically, the development of Saudi Arabia’s much-publicised and much-criticised NEOM mega-city, proposed for a region facing a climatic change with ‘significant risks on human survivability’ has led to death sentences for protestors from the local Huwaitat tribe at the hands of the state. In a call to conscience for global firms like Zaha Hadid Architects and US-based Morphosis commissioned for the project, London-based urbanist Adam Greenfield comments 'what should weigh most significantly in your calculus is whether the satisfaction of working on this project, and the compensation that attends that work, will ever compensate for your participation in an ecological and moral atrocity.’

What ‘sustainable’ mega-projects have in common (aside from their architect’s ego) is a preference for technocratic solutions, industrialised construction methods and a razed land approach that is inherently unsustainable. What they are not are the more humane, citizen-led developments which retain existing buildings, reuse materials and draw on localised low-carbon construction methods shaped by the views and participation of local people.

The UK’s global architecture practices pursue sustainability in one part of the world, only to undo those gains by administering harm in another, exploiting relaxed environmental laws and construction standards in a repeat of a colonial past

To an extent, this split-personality approach of green design in the UK and more harmful design abroad relies on exploiting different levels of global climate literacy and regulations, but it also has a colonial undertone. Much like the current offshoring of waste and recycling, the global South and East are saddled with more environmentally damaging architecture, while Europe and North America can largely avoid it. The UK’s global architecture practices pursue sustainability in one part of the world, only to undo those gains by administering harm in another, exploiting relaxed environmental laws and construction standards in a repeat of a colonial past.

As well as its direct harm, this blinkered approach fails to recognise the climate emergency as a crisis of interconnectedness. Emissions are not bound by national borders and the design decisions made by the pouring of columns in Shanghai or the laying of runways in Riyadh will be felt in the streets and parks of Paris, Melbourne and Sao Paulo.

When the Google HQ finally opens, you’re sure to hear me mutter ‘it’s nice but…’ as I walk past. Beyond the niceties of its construction, I can’t help feeling that a sustainable façade is cloaking a much wider hypocrisy.

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