The Poetics of Performance

The challenges that humanity and by extension the built environment will face in the coming decades are well known but worth emphasizing. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are at their highest in some 800,000 years, fed by our insatiable reliance on fossil fuels for energy. The impact on our climate is widely documented, but effects are accelerating in frequency, with record heatwaves, extreme weather events and Arctic ice losses regular occurrences. We know buildings play a huge role in this, being responsible for 39 percent of all global energy-related CO₂ emissions – a figure far higher than industry or transportation. There exists, then, an undeniable need to rapidly reduce the impact our buildings are having on the environment, not just in terms of the energy we use to operate them, but the resources consumed and the pollution emitted from the materials we use to construct them in the first place and to renovate them over their lifetime.

“… buildings that are not considered beautiful tend to be demolished, and so beauty is the essence of our concern about a lower carbon future.”1
— Alec Tzannes

Yet at the same time, we also need to build much more and much better. Increasing global populations and urbanization are set to fuel the largest construction booms ever seen. To accommodate increasing populations,