NBWW Architects "It's time for architects to choose ethics over aesthetics" says Christine Murray • NBWW Architects

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“It’s time for architects to choose ethics over aesthetics” says Christine Murray

Architects can limit the environmental impact building has on our climate using their power as specifiers, they just need do it, says Christine Murray.

photo via Dezeen

Christine Murray

Architects are quick to bemoan their loss of status, sensing the growing lack of respect for the profession. The unveiling of £250m trinkets, such as Thomas Heatherwick’s stairs-to-nowhere The Vessel, do little to subvert the public perception of architects as court jesters to the rich, complicit in the crises of our time.Most architects are blase when it comes to climate change. I’ve often been told, “designing a building to last one-hundred years is the most sustainable thing you can do”. Not only is this untrue, it’s dangerous nonsense.At current rates of warming, most places will become uninhabitable due to floods, wildfires, drought and heatwaves – triggering mass migration. War and famine will follow as we move inland and scrabble over resources. This is not happening in the distant future. Read the news: from cyclone Idai to the Central American caravans, Southern Californian fires to the war in Syria, the process has already begun.

It will unpredictably, radically, grow worse. One quarter of Boston will be underwater at some point in the next 25 years. By 2100, southern Europe will be in permanent drought and the areas burned by wildfires in the US “could quadruple”, David Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth. By then, 1.5 million homes in the UK will face coastal flooding and 100,000 homes will fall into the sea. We’ve been given 12 years by the UN to dramatically lower carbon emissions to reduce the chances of the earth’s sixth extinction. Instead, CO2 is rising.

Read the full story HERE >>> Source: Dezeen “It’s time for architects to choose ethics over aesthetics” says Christine Murray