RIBA Climate Change Lecture Series

April 2009. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) have put together a series of lectures and I chose to learn something important on the 1st of April, rather than going into London to lay siege to the City. Interesting that there were only two landscape architecture students there. Jean-Paul Nunes, Head of Education projects at RIBA, introduced the lecture and gave us an an overview of student membership. Stephen Bates of Sergison Bates then discussed how we should be more aware of what we are consuming and think about sourcing things more efficiently. One of the panel, Craig Andrews commented that it is often difficult to convince the client to accept new ideas, as they are unfamiliar. An example being that residents in a social housing project wanted to see radiators, even if they had far more efficient underfloor heating. Max Fordham went on to show how the design process must consider all aspects of a problem. He noted that plants grow on the earths surface at 25,000 tonnes / second and man uses 600 tonnes of fossil fuel / second and it takes 1 second to produce 1 gram of fossil carbon. Max Fordham also went on to explain how natural light is best used in interiors and how you need to marry direct light and shade, to maintain the correct temperature. The next speaker was Michael Pawlyn who describes himself as an exploration architect. He worked on the Eden project and is a promoter of Biomimicry, citing termites as leading the world in sustainable architecture. The most awakening part of his talk was on the CSP concept which uses mirrors to heat a container of water, which produces steam to drive turbines and this results in electricity. twice as good as solar, but it needs to be in a desert. He states that 'we must move away from a carbon society to a solar society'. he has already designed and put into practice large sea water greenhouses which can be rolled out across deserts and create communities. Fordham has worked out that it would cost £300 trillion to produce an ecosystem like the earth.