What is sustainable architecture?
Summer Exhibition 2019
Monday 10 June 2019 6.30 - 8pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly
£15, £9
Summer Exhibition 2019
It's time that architecture critically interrogated its impact on climate change. Join architect Julia Barfield for her take on how to shift our focus towards greener, more environmentally conscious buildings.
Taking inspiration from projects with a strong sustainable agenda in the Architecture Room at this year’s Summer Exhibition, we interrogate notions of sustainability in architecture.
The discussion will take a closer look at what sustainable building really means and how architects could positively contribute to the conversation. Instead of looking at practitioners as individuals with limited agency, we will aim to see them as active participants in a dialogue that affects everyone's future.
We will confront difficult issues, including whether the environmental impact of “green” buildings is enough to make a change? Are strategies for adaptation and reuse more productive? And finally, is the best thing that architecture can do for the environment to simply stop building?
Julia Barfield is co-founder of Marks Barfield Architects, famous for projects such as the London Eye and British Airways i360 in Brighton. The practice is deeply committed to the ways in which buildings can affect our lives through good design and has a long history of producing innovative solutions to the UK’s energy crisis. From The Beacon, a proposal to bring wind turbines to the City of London, to the Severn tidal barrage, they continue to critically engage with issues surrounding sustainability.
Fiona Harvey is an award-winning environment journalist for the Guardian. Prior to this, she worked for the Financial Times for more than a decade. She has reported on every major environmental issue, from as far afield as the Arctic and the Amazon, and her wide range of interviewees include Ban Ki-moon, Tony Blair, Al Gore and Jeff Immelt