Towards resilient building construction
Our needs for living solutions are in constant flux. Instead of accepting short-lived buildings as a solution, we should extensively prolong the lifespan of our built environment to make it more sustainable. There is no real sustainability without buildings’ capacity to adapt to unpredictable needs.
The built environment consumes half of the world’s raw materials and produces one third of our greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, sustainable and resilient building construction play a huge role in fighting the climate crisis and preventing the depletion of natural resources. At the same time, building construction has to respond to major societal changes: urbanisation, ageing population and changes in working life. All of these factors will affect the type of spaces we need in our lives.
Recent studies show that in Finland, the average age of buildings being demolished is even less than 50 years. We are among the most enthusiastic western European countries in terms of tearing down buildings, even though about 80% of our national wealth is tied to the built environment.
Rather than coming to the end of their technical service life, buildings are often demolished because they cannot meet changing needs.
Residential buildings account for most of our building stock. However, the objectives, construction methods and housing design solutions have not changed significantly in recent decades.
Construction consumes enormous amounts of energy and materials. Even the most energy-efficient building cannot be ecologically sustainable if it has to be demolished around the age of 50 years — regardless of whether some materials could be recycled. The longer life span for buildings we aim at, the more essential and critical a building’s capacity to adapt to different and often unpredictable needs becomes.
When a home is inflexible, it is people who have to adapt.
This often occurs at a time when a person is most vulnerable: during a divorce, when a spouse passes away or children leave home, during illness, when employment ends or a person becomes self-employed. The majority of those living alone are ageing widowed persons for whom moving to smaller and more easily managed home can mean radical changes: the deterioration of important relationships and need to leave a familiar environment.
These are the challenges that designers and builders of residential buildings need to address. It should be easy to combine smaller dwellings into bigger dwelling units or divide them into smaller dwellings units based on needs rather than being tied to a single, permanent mix of dwelling types and sizes or use within the building. This requires several entrance possibilities into each dwelling unit where spaces can be redistributed and easily adapted for different room spaces and use.
Instead of improving continually the efficiency of individual dwellings, sustainable solutions should focus on comprehensively examining the utilisation rate of buildings and their ability to adapt to changing needs at the building, regional and urban level. However, dwelling sizes have been decreasing — especially in the Helsinki metropolitan area — and new housing has become increasingly inflexible.
People want to cherish things they find meaningful and serve their needs.
That is why constructing a flexible and high-quality built environment is an effective way of radically extending the life span of our buildings. Amsterdam’s centuries-old merchant houses are a good example of this principle. Their spatial solutions have enabled constant variations in the size of dwellings and work and business spaces. The buildings have an open and vibrant relationship with the street, and the environment is perceived as beautiful and worth preserving.
Usually the aspects that we regulate develop. Understanding sustainable development mostly from a material-focused standpoint bypassing the spatial criteria creates new problems that can have very large impacts. Simply promoting flexible zoning and spatial planning will not guarantee the development of flexible building stock. In fact, without adequate and correct way of steering towards more adaptable buildings, the building stock could become even more uniform in nature. We need to promote the development of a flexible building stock, that starts from regulatory and legal level, which objectives are clearly stated in the Land use and building act. By doing so Finland could lead the way towards a comprehensive, sustainable and resilient construction of built environment that benefits both people and the environment as a whole.
Karin Krokfors
Karin Krokfors is Associate Professor of Urban Design Practices at Aalto University.
