At SWA we often find ourselves using the word ‘sustainable’. It seems that the word resonates differently for each of us, and some of our recent collaborations have given us pause to consider what we really mean. So we are re-considering our ideas and disrupting our biases about holistic sustainability, to find new ways of embedding a variety of approaches into our work.

We’re interested in how projects are fostered, often long before they reach us. It is clear that the means of catalysing a brief are not evenly distributed among society, a structural inequality that seems impossible to overthrow. So, we look for the cracks and blind spots in which we can pursue more diverse agendas outside ‘normal’ building practice.

An Ethical Process

Sumayya Vally argues that sustainability is best considered as ‘the ability to sustain’ – we agree. One important shift is for us to advocate for ‘sustainability’ as an ethos, not as a goal. This notion impacts the inclusive nature of our office and the practices we enact, the respect we give our clients and the effort we put in to ensure we respond appropriately. As Clare Bond noted in her shortlisted Habinteg Essay, diverse voices represent diverse needs. We use the process of designing with our clients and collaborators to embed meaning in a place and build tomorrow’s history. Part of this means incorporating the ability of a building to adapt to, sustain and

A Collaborative Process

As architects we usually find ourselves operating between procurer and occupier of a building; it can feel as if we have scant agency to question or challenge how sustainability is embedded into a project brief. So how do we open up new ways of commissioning buildings, before the brief is decided? One way is to become your own client, as we did for the recent retrofit of Stock Orchard Street. This single house retrofit made us re-consider the value of housing retrofits at scale.

Another route is to seek collaborators with specific sustainability goals; we play a strategic role on a number of Passivhaus retrofit projects (some within Conservation Areas), connecting with building occupiers to understand how to balance their need for

Sustainability Life Cycle

We have argued that to sustain all our futures we need to design for current and evolving needs over time. We could call this ‘spatial dexterity’ – the ability of a space to continually accommodate and negotiate between individual needs and collective preferences.

Spatial dexterity goes beyond cupboards with fold out ironing boards, LAN connections at kitchen counters or sliding walls. It means that the space should be designed generously, with sufficient thresholds and adaptability to empower residents to resolve the tension between changing spatial needs, for themselves. This is a cornerstone of a building’s ‘ability to sustain’, as neighbourhood demands vary (outside-in) and residents’ needs evolve through their own life cycle (inside-out).

Heinonen-Smith recognises that a home could support and adapt to each stage as well as cyclically moving between them. We propose this could go even further: movement could be across the dial, back and forth between stages repeatedly, or occupying multiple roles simultaneously.

We like this because it builds diversity into the brief for a home, shifting focus away from number of bedrooms (correlated with economic value) towards a consideration of the social and civic function of each dwelling in its context. After all, designing a home should be an exercise in empathy, not ‘viability’.

This focus on the building user’s agenda is helping us to define and quantify the sustainable potential of our housing projects. We are interested in the bigger questions about how to resolve the uneven distribution ‘home’ or ‘work’ loads, how to meet evolving needs for privacy

In parts 2 & 3, we explore ideas for engaging, motivating and cultivating knowledge across more representative groups of building users. We discuss examples of how to initiate demand for sustainable housing types, how to motivate disengaged occupiers and how to share project learning between communities.