it’s our turn #1
At the interface between architecture and responsibility
My name is Kathrin Albrecht and I am a sustainability manager with a focus on the building sector. In this new monthly column, I would like to make it clear that architecture can and must take on responsibility in a sustainable way. “it’s our turn” tells the stories of people I meet at the interface between architecture and responsibility who (used to) work in Hanover or are a child of the state capital. The prologue to this series of stories is provided by Prof. Dr. Werner Sobek, the German pioneer of responsible and resource-saving building construction.
Before we get into Sobek’s story, however, I would like to explain why such a column belongs in a city magazine and not in an architectural journal: because architecture concerns us all! We spend around 90% of our lives indoors – at least in Northern Europe and North America. We have become an ‘indoor generation’. Our rooms are nest and shell, home port and place of learning, meeting or feeding place, source of inspiration, farewell room or convalescent room. While rooms can sometimes even serve us as ‘another therapist’ (more on this in a later episode), others can make us sick. Due to the trend towards energy-efficient, airtight building envelopes, coupled with widespread ignorance of adequate natural ventilation, indoor air quality has deteriorated in many places. In some cases, it is many times more harmful to health than the air outside, because not only cooking, cleaning and showering, burning candles and drying laundry, even sleeping and breathing pollute the indoor air, but also because pollutants from toxic materials such as plastic toys, cleaning agents and some building materials also contribute to the pollution. A sad testimony is the constantly rising number of illnesses from asthma or allergies.
The space built around us also has an impact on the environment and climate: 40% of annual CO2 emissions (Werner Sobek even speaks of more than 50%) are due to the building industry, more than 50% of waste is generated by demolition and construction activities, and the majority of mineral raw materials – the volume of two full shopping bags per person per day – flow into this industry.
“Climate change and global resource depletion are gigantic challenges that we have to overcome in a short time. The building industry is a major cause of both problems, but can also contribute to their solution,” reads the website of Werner Sobek’s office. Repeatedly, as recently at the Heidelberg Castle Days, the engineer calls for a paradigm shift: “The future of architecture lies in building for more people with less material and without emissions,” he says.
In the meantime, it is almost four years ago that the Association of German Architects (BDA) demanded in its position paper ‘The House of the Earth’, among other things: “We have to think and act politically, we have to interfere, develop our own initiative and rehearse civil disobedience. We have to show that the daily environmental madness, such as the unchecked consumption of land, the priority of new buildings or the fetish of mobility, is not without age. Otherwise, we no longer need to think about a future. It’s our turn.”
I still vaguely remember how Germany’s major newspapers joked that the architectural profession was robbing itself of its own raison d’être by questioning building. Today, the discussion is accompanied more sympathetically by the press and conducted in an even more differentiated manner in the building industry: The ‘Klimafestival für die Bauwende’ in Düsseldorf and the ‘Tag der Umbaukultur’ in Berlin bear witness to the fact that the change of perspective has penetrated deep into the building industry.
And Sobek also dismissed the reactions of the press at the time as “intellectually inadmissible statements” in our conversation. “Architects who don’t want to question their own profession have already given up being architects. Architecture is the anticipa-tion of the future. They have to think today and draw tomorrow and build the day after tomorrow what will – hopefully – be valid the day after tomorrow. And if someone refuses to think this ‘after tomorrow’, then for me he is not an architect.”
Sobek has not only specialised with his company in the development of concepts to minimise energy and material consumption, but is also a founding member and former president of the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB). I am interested in what motivates him to act far beyond what is required and also to want to convince others of his point of view.
“In 1992, when I was freshly appointed to the University of Hanover, I set up a series of lectures called ‘Recycling-Fair Architecture’. This caused complete incomprehension among my colleagues, because they said that it was of course very important to be sustainable. But the best form of sustainability is to build in such a way that the buildings never have to be rebuilt or dismantled. To which I replied, ‘Look out of the window, what is old here and how old? Because the fact is that things have to be changed – even demolished – because of changing requirements for use. For me, however, even then a house I was planning had to be able to disappear from the earth with decency. That means it must be completely reducible to technical and biological cycles. That was the beginning. 1992.”
Shortly afterwards, Sobek developed the Active House as a counter-position to the passive house hype of the time and, before the turn of the millennium, introduced the Triple Zero Principle, which states that a building should not use any energy derived from combustion processes, should not produce any emissions and should not produce any waste.
In addition to his idea of the three zeros, Werner Sobek endows his buildings and products with another magic power. His magic is called – which may be surprising at first glance for a numbers man like Sobek – ‘breathtaking beauty’.
He quotes Robert Bosch here, who once said: “Everything I make has to be good.” A pro-duct needs compatibility, i.e. a compatibility with the nature that surrounds us – and it should and can be breathtakingly beautiful at the same time. “If people do not consider a product beautiful, then they do not have a positive relationship with it and will not care for it. If people don’t care for things, then they won’t grow very old. I.e. this emotional attachment of people to what we do is much more important to me than the engineering brilliance that we may stand for in the outside world. The engineering brilliance is the keyboard of the musical instrument on which we play a melody, and that melody is called architecture. It is the production attempt of human home, in its entirety, with everything that belongs to it.”
Sobek’s attitude strongly coincides with the idea of the Bauhaus School, founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919 and closed by the National Socialists in Berlin in 1933, which is still considered Germany’s most successful cultural export. At that time, the distinction between art, craft and technology was abolished in favour of the idea of ‘building(s) the future’, as Gropius confidently titled his Bauhaus in Dessau. At the same time, the school was opened to all nationalities. This parallel between the Bauhaus and Werner Sobek AG, namely the interdisciplinary work in international teams, ensures among other things that the company, in contrast to the vast majority of players in the building industry, has no problems finding and above all retaining suitable employees.
“The fact that we employ architects, product designers, civil engineers, aircraft engineers and even a religious scholar means that we have a very wide intellectual range,” says Sobek. “The path you want to take is reflected on, discussed and commented on from many perspectives. This in turn leads to an expansion of awareness and many-maybe a change of path, in a positive sense.”
For me as an architectural communicator, another aspect of the ‘breathtakingly beautiful’ design is almost more essential: even if things are bad for our climate and thus also for the future of humanity, we will not succeed in winning society over to our cause with a renunciation aesthetic.
Sobek quotes the Austrian psychologist and psychotherapist Paul Watzlawick: “People cannot stand a future that promises them a lack of opportunities and meaninglessness. That is, if I tell people, ‘In the future, everything will only get worse and worse, and when Corona is over, there will be global warming and wars over energy, building materials and food. There will be migrations without end’, then scientifically speaking that is 100 per cent correct. But if you confront people with such a brutal announcement, you will find that most of them withdraw into their own environment. That is, they reduce the number of synapses to the outside world to a minimum and to what is necessary for their own explanation of the world.
I also observe that many people find the connections between architecture and climate change or their own actions and their impact on our environment too complex. Mostly, the interdependencies are not understood. Or people believe that their contribution makes no difference, no matter how big it is, so they simply carry on as before. So, and here I absolutely agree with Sobek, on the one hand we building artists have to show our fellow human beings that it can be done differently: a sustainable building can (and even should) be breathtakingly beautiful, so that everyone wants to live in it. “I have built houses where people go and stroke the façade because the tactile quality is absolutely enormous. And that’s what I mean by that, by this ‘breathtakingly beautiful’.”
At the same time, it is our job to raise awareness and educate. Besides the persuasive power of built examples, I believe in the superpower of images and stories. For Sobek, 2.6 is the most important number. 2.6. Yield? Per thousand? The number of earths we actually need?! Not quite.
2.6 is the net growth of humanity per second. Sobek explains why this number should be an elementary one for all building creators as follows: “In order to provide a built home for this 2.6 net human growth per second, and that is, after all, our task as architects, engineers, as builders, we have to scrape about 60 billion tonnes of raw materials out of the earth’s crust every year, process them into building materials, convert them into semi-finished products, i.e. pre-material, and then use them on the building site to construct a building or an infrastructure project.”
60 billion tonnes – another figure. Sobek has a suitable image ready here, too. That is equivalent to a wall along the equator, 40,000 kilometres long, 30 centimetres thick and about 1.5 to 1.8 kilometres high, every year.
And the master builder also has a story to tell on the subject of urban greening: The healthiest tree of all times binds a maximum of 100 grams of CO2 per day in its strongest growth phase, quasi in the puberty of the tree. If we look at its average lifetime, 30 to 40 grams of CO2 per day are unfortunately more realistic. However, if we put these positively calculated 100 grams per day in relation to a normal SUV, the calculation quickly becomes negative. Because this one car emits 300 grams of CO2 per kilometre. This means that when a parent drives their child to kindergarten, it takes a city forest to compensate for this one trip! One is amazed at the actual dimension of the facts.
Kathrin Albrecht in Stadtkind 1/23
Drawing Aegidienkirche: Mila Albrecht, age 11
Photo: Esther Tusch