Why Architecture’s past holds the key to sustainable future

Modern ‘sustainable’ innovations in architecture are failing to slow climate change,  but revisiting ancient knowledge and techniques found in traditional architecture could offer better solutions.

sustainable futureThis is the argument of architectural historians Professor Florian Urban and Barnabas Calder in their new book Form Follows Fuel: 14 Buildings from Antiquity to the Oil Age. The authors argue that energy availability has been the biggest influence in architecture throughout human history.

How architecture can help a sustainable future

Their extensive study is the first to calculate energy inputs for a range of historical buildings, demonstrating how different types of fuel, from human labour to fossil fuels, have fundamentally determined building designs across civilisations and eras.

“The history of architecture can be told as a history of energy,” the authors explain. “Today’s architecture is accordingly the outcome of four centuries of effort, innovation and ingenuity directed at maximising the proportion of architectural production and operation that could be powered by fossil fuel heat.”

This argument comes at a critical moment in architectural history, as the building sector currently accounts for 37% of all human climate-changing emissions. Despite decades of research and discussion, the environmental impact of buildings continues to rise.

Urban and Calder document how the shift to fossil fuels begins in the 17th century and transforms architecture more profoundly than any other development in human history. This transition reversed the previous dynamic, where labour was cheap and heat expensive, creating an architectural model which depended on energy-intensive materials and processes that reduced human input.

“If form follows fuel, ours is fundamentally an architecture of intense fossil fuel consumption,” the authors explain.

Even as society becomes more aware of emissions and carbon footprint, and more efforts are made to build sustainably, the authors prove that today’s architecture comes at a catastrophically high energy cost. They explain how globally influential minimalist designs often depend on massive energy consumption, for example, the Seagram Building in New York, widely praised for its simplicity, received an energy efficiency rating of just 3 out of 100 from the US Environmental Protection Agency, and cost more energy to build than the entire labour cost of quarrying, transporting and placing 5.5m tonnes of stone for the largest of the Egyptian pyramids.

“Mies’s famous dictum that ‘less is more,’ turns out to be missing a word: ‘less is more carbon,’” the authors explain. “Per square meter of floor space, it used four times as much energy as the average American office building in 2012.”

By contrast, pre-modern buildings like the Scottish blackhouse achieved remarkable thermal efficiency using only local materials and passive design strategies. Examples of buildings like these show how humans have always before been able to provide the interior space and thermal comfort needed for survival in a harsh climate, while being fully sustainable and recyclable.

The authors’ studies span 4,500 years of architectural history, from the Great Pyramid of Giza to Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

The authors offer practical solutions for contemporary architects by unpicking the specific energy costs of different building elements and materials. For instance, their research demonstrates how structural stone tenements used significantly less energy throughout their life cycle than similar brick buildings, providing quantifiable metrics to inform modern sustainable design decisions.

Professor Urban says: “With regard to energy consumption, the world has never had so many pharaohs. Not only special buildings like the Seagram, but even our most mundane buildings use more energy than the most extraordinary structures of the ancient world.”

As architects and policymakers search for solutions to the climate emergency, Form Follows Fuel challenges assumptions about sustainability always meaning technological advancement, and provides an alternative approach to low-carbon architecture.

“The historic conditions of life without fossil fuels often look like poverty to those living in today’s energy-rich societies,” the authors explain, “but whilst luxuries were sparse and ill-distributed, materials local, and technologies comparatively simple for most non-fossil-fuel buildings, they had one immense advantage at a global scale: they collectively used resources at a rate within the bounds of what the planetary ecosystem could sustain.”