Peter Murray reflects on our recent 'Circular London: Building a renewable city' report, an update on how the capital is doing in conforming to the London Plan 2021 - originally written for Architects' Journal.

A few days before Michael Gove’s rejection of Marks and Spencer’s plans to demolish their Oxford Street store, NLA published its report on Circular London - an update on how the capital is doing in conforming to the London Plan 2021, which calls for materials to be “retained in use at their highest value for as long as possible and then reused or recycled, leaving a minimum of residual waste."

While the Secretary of State's decision will have far-reaching consequences, one suspects a level of political grandstanding and anti-London sentiment because, the NLA recommends, there are more basic political actions he could take to limit the construction sector’s sizeable carbon footprint with perhaps greater effect.

The report highlights the lack of incentives for retrofit, encouraging reused materials or design for deconstruction. 

The first thing Gove could do is to reduce VAT for retrofit to the same level as for new buildings. This is something industry lobbyists have been pressing for for over thirty years and is supported by UKGBC, ACAN, and the AJ, but governments have ignored a lot of them. It would, at a stroke, increase the viability of retrofit and help not only the high-profile projects but the desperate plight we are in regarding the improvement in the efficiency of millions of homes.

Other recommendations from the NLA report that Gove could promote is an insistence on a pre-demolition audit in planning documents for existing buildings to identify what can be reused on site and elsewhere. He could change Building Regulations to ensure mandatory assessments and reporting of whole-life carbon and ask that publicly funded projects commit to using circular principles. 

As far as the Mayor is concerned, the report asks for a London-wide strategy for material storage and logistics with hubs for reuse of materials. Currently, a lot of the reuse involves identifying materials on one building that can be used directly on another. In the longer term, if we are to make use of materials on a wider scale, there will have to be mechanisms for identifying the available materials and for upgrading and exchanging them. 

Gove could do worse than read the section of the report features on Danish architect Anders Lendager's Resource Rows housing scheme in Ørestad (AJ 8/8/2019), described as the world's first circular economy building. It uses upcycled bricks and waste wood, recycled concrete beas, old windows, and rooftop community garden huts, which started life as crates used for transporting precast concrete elements for the Copenhagen Metro expansion. 

To deliver his circular projects, Lendager has set up several building materials companies re-making plastic, bricks, wood, and windows. Resource Rows cost no more to build than traditional construction and is one of the most popular rental projects in Ørestad. In fact, people rather like it: Lendager talks of a new aesthetic that celebrates upcycling and how the narratives of rescued materials connect with the occupiers. He believes architects should be master builders, not “color pickers."

While designers and contractors must consider how demolition materials can be reused or recycled and how components and products can be disassembled and reused at the end of their useful life, the circular economy does not mean the end of the new building. It means a rethink of the materials we build them with and how we design them so they can adapt to new uses.

The concept of long life and loose fit was first promoted by RIBA President Alex Gordon back in 1974. If you google architects who use flexibility and adaptability in their lexicon, you get BIG, Renzo Piano, Foster and Partners, Diller Scofio, AHMM, Make, and Lifschutz Davidson. However, it is still challenging to deliver unless developers, too, have bought into the concept.

More needs to be done on the repurposing of materials. Interestingly, M&S’s architect Fred Pilbrow had been working with Arup on the possibilities for reusing concrete – slicing concrete columns into panels to create elegant domed ceilings. Arup has been working on turning second-hand concrete into various products for some time. Kate Jackson, who leads Arup's circular economy team, says in the NLA report, 'We need to see our cities as manufacturing and re-manufacturing centers, taking elements mined from buildings and repurposing them for use elsewhere. If we are to move beyond hero projects, we are going to need exchange mechanisms.”

Unfortunately for Fred, the message did not get to Gove in time.

Read the full article on Architect's Journal.