About the book
Every time someone uses concrete, steel, bricks, glass or aluminium to build a home, office, school or hospital, they set off a chain reaction in which fossil fuels are burned, metals and rocks are mined, pollution is released and waste is discarded. Every year, this adds up to:
one-tenth of the world’s carbon emissions (that’s four times the aviation industry’s footprint);
one-third of all waste (a figure surpassed only by food wastage);
one-half of all the raw materials we take from the earth (triple the quantity of fossil fuels extracted).
The construction industry’s contribution to the breakdown of our climate and nature through pollution, waste and extraction is almost without comparison. Yet, we need buildings - and in many places, we need more of them.
And so, Future Build explores one of the defining challenges of our time: how to meet human needs without overwhelming the planet. Drawing on real projects, emerging technologies, and practical design strategies, it sets out a hopeful antidote to all this damage, demonstrating that we already know how to construct in ways that heal nature, strengthen society, and leave a positive legacy for the young people to whom we leave our buildings.
This is not a call for sacrifice or retreat, but for better designs and better decisions.
Excerpts
“Nick’s face was burning. He knew he should back away, but his curiosity was too great, and he took another step closer to the source of the heat. The pain and noise grew as the floor vibrated with the slow relentless rotation of the two steel tubes suspended in front of him. Each tube was as wide as a house and the length of an aeroplane, and as they turned and shuddered, he could hear and feel the churn of the rocks and fire within them. It was a strange machine that he had chosen to visit, one that ate stone and spewed out cement.”
“A high-end window in a British house could conceivably contain French glass made from German sand, assembled in a Polish factory, fitted into Austrian aluminium frames (using Guinean aluminium ore) and attached to Swiss stainless-steel hinges (Brazilian iron ore), before being shipped back to the United Kingdom on a boat passing through Danish and Swedish waters.”
“If a building is in the way, we knock it down and start again. Despite all the momentum building across society to eliminate single-use plastics, throwaway coffee cups and fast fashion, we haven’t yet realised that we still have a ‘disposable building’ mentality.”
“We sculpt the skeletons of our buildings from steel and concrete and then wrap them in a skin of glass, aluminium and bricks. If you went on a construction materials safari, these would be the ‘big five’ you’d be looking for. It would only take you a minute to spot a herd of each.”
“Seven kilometres of timber discarded from film sets was collected and nailed together to make panels for the floors, storm-felled oak trees from the campus were milled into benches and counters, and joists from a demolished church were transformed into ramps and walls.”
“If lobbying the government to write such regulation wasn’t working, then – we decided – we would just write the damn thing ourselves.”
