Picture the scene. The cowboys have gathered on a wide open plain where they are vulnerable to attack from all sides. There was some initial discussion of wagon circling but that seemed like a lot of hard work, so now those wagons are just strewn about the place offering no protection. A large fire in the middle of their encampment belches smoke high into the air for all to see. And the men speak so loudly that they can be heard for miles around. They have just topic of conversation – How to repel an impending attack from native tribes.
At that very moment, those native tribes DO attack. The cowboy’s conversation continues while their wagons are set ablaze. It continues while the cowboys’ horses are let loose and while their women are abducted. And they are still talking when the arrows hit and the bodies of the cowboys begin to fall.
On Wednesday 4 October, The National Federation of Demolition Contractors, the Institute of Demolition Engineers and the Health and Safety Executive gathered in London to deliver what was billed as a “planning masterclass”.
On the very same day and just up the road, an architect was delivering a lecture. But this was not just any lecture; it was The Conrad Lecture. And this was not just any architect; it was the Pritzker Prize-winning architect David Chipperfield – The Sitting Bull of the architect world. And he called for the introduction of RetroFirst planning regulations on embodied carbon in a bid to halt “the country’s tide of demolition projects.”
Speaking to Architects Journal managing editor Will Hurst, Chipperfield said: “We’d love, as architects, someone to tell us the rules of this particular chess game. But there’s only one thing: don’t knock a building down. You start a few hundred metres in front of everybody else if you don’t. Whatever you do, if you’ve knocked the building down, you can’t catch up and I think this has to start becoming a rule.”
With the words of the NFDC, IDE and HSE still echoing through the corridors of The Montague, David Chipperfield continued: “We have to move on tackling embodied carbon and I would say you are smelling that already now in planning discussions in London. The move has to be not ‘what’s the reason for keeping the building’ but ‘give us a convincing reason why you can’t keep it’.”
So on the same day that the demolition industry was offering its advice on the planning process, a notable architect – the latest in a long and growing line – was proposing new rules that could effectively remove demolition from the planning discussion entirely.
The demolition industry find itself outnumbered and outgunned; and it is standing against a rising and forceful tide of environmental concern and public sentiment. Sadly, it seems that the sector will only accept the true gravity of the embodied carbon threat when its world comes crashing down.
This article was first published on Demolition Insider where – for now – subscription is still free of charge.
