A Human Thing, Indeed

ProDesign talks to Mark Kelly about Pub­lic #5, Woods Bagot's new tome on sustainability.

An image from Pub­lic #5, edited by Woods Bagot's sus­tain­ab­il­ity dir­ector Mark Kelly.

It is without doubt a pecu­liar conun­drum. As Mark Kelly, dir­ector of sus­tain­ab­il­ity at multi-national archi­tec­ture firm Woods Bagot states, “We are des­troy­ing the world devel­op­ing viable economies.”

So, what to do about that? As Kelly, who has recently fin­ished edit­ing the fifth book in Woods Bagot’s Pub­lic series (entitled A Human Thing, Pub­lic #5, Sus­tain­ab­il­ity, Volume 1) sug­gests, it’s a little bit late to head back to the horse and cart era.

The ethos of Pub­lic #5 revolves around how “bet­ter build­ings and cit­ies can sig­ni­fic­antly reduce our impact on the envir­on­ment”. It’s also about lead­er­ship: “Archi­tects have a great impact on how build­ings are designed – nobody wants to be inef­fi­cient," says Kelly.
Kelly grew up in Manchester in the 1960s, with its pol­luted rivers, fog, smog and pre­val­ent indus­tri­al­ism. He fluc­tu­ates between pess­im­ism and optim­ism on the envir­on­mental sub­ject.
“Ulti­mately, half of me says that things are get­ting worse; the other half says things are get­ting bet­ter, the air’s get­ting bet­ter, food is get­ting bet­ter, there’s less dis­ease … It’s not just about car­bon diox­ide and polar ice-caps, it’s about the essence of human soci­ety and eco­nomic sus­tain­ab­il­ity.”
As the book explains, human eco­nomic activ­ity is exceed­ing the planet's lim­its. As Kelly explains in his pre­face, "the idea has formed amongst aca­dem­ics and busi­ness vis­ion­ar­ies that the next Indus­trial Revolu­tion has arrived – where nat­ural cap­ital (i.e. nat­ural resources and eco­sys­tem ser­vices will drive future buis­ness oppor­tun­ity, sim­ul­tan­eously sat­is­fy­ing cus­tomer needs, increas­ing profits and revolving envir­on­mental issues."
Let's hope he's right.
Woods Bagot’s Pub­lic series meets a num­ber of cri­teria for the com­pany. “We came to the con­clu­sion that the only way to dif­fer­en­ti­ate ourselves from the pack was to under­pin our work with a research focus.” This dif­fer­en­ti­ator means that the firm's work con­tin­ues to improve. Inter­est­ingly, rather than sit­ting on its research as intel­lec­tual prop­erty, it pub­lishes its find­ings, no doubt improv­ing its status in the eyes of cli­ents and the public.

An image from Pub­lic #5's chapter on China. "It was estim­ated that by the 2008 Olypic Games there would be 3.3 mil­lion cars on the road, up from 2.97 mil­lion cars in early 2007."

Ask­ing Kelly if he found any of the research res­ults par­tic­u­larly sur­pris­ing, he is non-committal. What he does find inter­est­ing is stud­ies in the US and Europe that show the increased per­form­ance of school chil­dren in envir­on­ments with increased access to light and fresh air, and the fact that people spend more money in nat­ur­ally lit shop­ping envir­on­ments.Pub­lic #5 con­tains a wealth of inform­a­tion: case stud­ies on pro­jects the firm has con­sul­ted on (includ­ing the near-finished 80 Queen Street, Auck­land), regen­er­at­ive pro­jects through­out the UK, a chapter on envir­on­mental prin­ciples of Chinese build­ing (“har­mony with nature”), ver­tical farm­ing, calls to action and a series of inter­views with a num­ber of experts on vari­ous facets of sus­tain­ab­il­ity. It also dis­pels a num­ber of myths asso­ci­ated with sus­tain­able build­ing: 
as Kelly says, “It doesn’t cost any more to do it, so let’s get on and do it.”

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