There is a detectable ’sustainability fatigue’ in the built environment research community. For a growing number of researchers, sustainability is yesterday’s project. Sustainable development, sustainable design, Brundtland; they are all mainstream now. The research focus has shifted to new topics—such as exergy—or returned to familiar friends, such as energy conservation, now wearing the new clothes of low and zero carbon design. Of course, “energy in buildings” never really went away. It has been a serious research topic since the 1970s, though it may have taken a backseat to social and economic concerns before resurfacing after spikes in oil and gas prices and the realisation that peak oil is not far away, or has already happened.

Reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions in the built environment is a critical issue, deserving concentrated research activity, but it is not the only one. Its renewed dominance poses potential problems for architecture and sustainable design. Here are three of them.

1. Much of the research on energy that is being promoted is on the supply side: new ways to generate energy more efficiently, new technologies and new kit. Though this is necessary, it overlooks the energy and material costs of producing more equipment, even if it is to result in less operating energy and fewer emissions. If we are to reduce overall energy consumption, then we need less, not more, stuff.
2. A primary focus on energy risks skewing the assessment criteria for design in the built environment, much as it did in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the result that many single-issue (energy/carbon) buildings will dominate the built environment to the detriment of the overall quality of design. Designs that respond mainly to one type of problems are rarely satisfactory.
3. Even among those who should know better, the design of low carbon buildings usually ignores the attitudes, desires and skills of their eventual occupants. A successful low carbon outcome casts the occupants as benign users who are perfectly aligned with the designers’ goals, and equipped with the technical understanding and skills needed to operate and maintain these incredibly sophisticated buildings and their systems. Further elaboration of this view of the occupants as users and the parallels with software design will be the topic of a future post. It is enough to say now that the occupants, users—people—are often seen as the problem in creating low carbon buildings, not part of the solution.

Two of the main lessons from the focus on sustainability are that environmental design on its own is unable to create environments people enjoy being in, because it neglects important qualities of human experience, and that for architecture to remain relevant it will have to respond to the challenges of complexity inherent in the sustainability agenda. Architects should be in prime position to lead, because of their capacity to work across specialisms, but they will have to step up to the plate.

Consistent, sustainable design is incredibly difficult and may be impossible, but we won’t know until we have fully explored what it might mean. It’s certainly too early to allow research in sustainable design to dwindle and to narrow the focus to single issues.

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