Climate change: these architects who have decided to stop building

In Europe, climate change is shaking up and changing architectural practices.

Olga is Lithuanian, Anna is Swedish and Thomas is French. Architects by training, they participated a few days ago in Paris at the “Climate Building Forum”, under the aegis of the UN. AFP met them during this first global gathering of construction professionals, financiers, ministers and diplomats, around the issue of climate.

“At the beginning of 2020, I decided that I would not build,” Olga, 34, told AFP. Today, converted into teaching and associations, its objective is to make construction professionals aware of the impact of their activity on the rise in global temperatures. She runs participatory workshops on “construction frescoes”, a variation of the famous “climate fresco”, including for big names in world architecture.

However, she worked in architectural agencies in Newcastle in Great Britain where she obtained her diploma, and in Edinburgh in Scotland. The young woman, very enterprising, worked on a velodrome in Canada, a student residence in Cardiff and “many hotels and luxury apartments in Edinburgh”.

“I became aware of the waste of materials,” she remembers. “When we remodeled a bank branch, we threw everything away.” “And I was not satisfied to see that many 200 square meter lofts remained empty”: “investments of rich people who were investing their money”.

“Slap”

Olga had heard about global warming, but without making the connection with her activity. It was “the slap in the face” she received while reading the book by a radical environmentalist which made her turn away and decide “not to do architecture anymore” until she had “found a way to do it well”.

According to her, "the urgency is not to build low carbon, but to renovate everything we can" to avoid emitting CO2 twice: by demolishing then rebuilding. She is particularly interested in “the intensification of the use of buildings”. A school can be used for something else in the evenings and weekends, which could “avoid building for nothing,” she says.

Anna Ervast Öberg also left architecture. To get started in real estate development. “That’s where the real power lies” in imposing new models, she believes.

The Cedarhouse project that she promotes is an all-wood housing program in Stockholm, above a highway. It avoids urban sprawl, reduces CO2 emissions compared to the very high emissions of concrete, and accommodates 240 families. In Sweden, 20% of new two-story buildings are made of wood, and four wood factories opened this year, she smiles.

Thomas Bourdon, one of the two partners of the Croixmariebourdon agency in Malakoff in the Paris suburbs, is a practicing architect.

Its buildings are at the heart of the climate and social issues of the moment: renovation, evolution, reversibility, biosourced materials, sobriety. He transforms offices into housing, builds wooden market halls, rehabilitates housing without pushing the occupants out. His sponsorship experience in Africa changed the life of his agency.

“Cheap, durable, maintenance-free, energy-free”

The agency built a library in Guiré-Yéro-Bocar in Casamance, Senegal. An elegant round building, naturally ventilated, surrounded by a bamboo trellis around walls made of local, compressed raw earth bricks, which protect the books. The project arose from the request of a Senegalese friend who wanted to provide his home village with a library to store 15.000 books collected in French high schools.

“It had to be cheap, durable, maintenance-free, energy-free, resistant to termites and runoff during the rainy season,” explains Yaya Mballo, at the origin of the project.

“The whole agency got involved, we held ideas workshops, we looked for local materials and know-how that were sometimes forgotten, we trained people on site, all remotely,” explains Thomas Bourdon.

A concrete footing stops termites. The sloping steel sheet roof is lined with a bamboo ceiling to block solar radiation. “We discovered real local know-how in metalworking and locksmithing,” says Mr. Bourdon.

The building has become the local attraction, the place where the baccalaureate juries meet and where end-of-year parties are held. “A lot of people have inquired, in Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia or Somalia,” says Mr. Bourdon. And after this experience, for our work in France, “we are increasingly looking for simple and local solutions”.