‘What role can museums play in supporting not just industrial strategy but the fundamental economic and social shifts required by the green transition?’
In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art in New York built the first of a series of houses in its garden aimed at modernising housebuilding in the US. Designed by Marcel Breuer, this commuter house was meant to be modern, affordable and easy to build. As MoMA put it at the time, adequate housing was 'today's primary architectural problem'.
Leaving aside MoMA’s self-appointed role in defining ‘modern architecture’ and ‘good design’ – a canon it helped codify through a series of exhibitions in the 1940s and 50s – the institution saw itself in relation not just to a museum-going public but to industry. In post-war Europe and the US, this was not unusual, with exhibitions and trade fairs playing a critical role in modernising both industrial production and public taste in burgeoning consumer societies (think of the Britain Can Make It exhibition of 1946 or the Festival of Britain in 1951). But in recent decades design museums – while arguably more critical and nuanced in their relationship to the public than they were then – are less proactive, let’s say, in driving industrial innovation.
What role can museums play in supporting not just industrial strategy but the fundamental economic and social shifts required by the green transition? The default position tends to be one of ‘raising awareness’ or steering the visitor-consumer towards more environmentally ethical products and behaviours. There is also a need to help audiences find paths to collective action and, indeed, to process their emotional responses to climate change, including grief. These are critical roles cultural institutions can and should play. But a programme like Future Observatory has a unique opportunity to go beyond raising awareness and behaviour change at the individual level, by stimulating change in industry. Elsewhere I’ve called this ‘the museum as catalyst’, a model exemplified by the Stone Demonstrator, a full-scale prototype aimed at spurring the construction industry to adopt low-carbon materials.
If, in 1949, housing was the ‘primary architectural problem’, there is no question that in the 21st century architecture’s problem is much more fundamental: decarbonisation.
The most effective way to meet that challenge is to drastically reduce the amount we build. Construction projects account for 11 per cent of global carbon emissions. There is an unimpeachable case for reusing, converting or retrofitting the buildings we already have. To adopt the mantra of architects Lacaton & Vassal, “never demolish”. Some architects, notably Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, call for a moratorium on construction altogether, which would certainly be effective, though unlikely to be entertained by governments bent on economic growth. And regardless of what might be theoretically possible in Europe, most urban development this century will take place in the ‘Global South’, where reuse is not an adequate strategy.
In the world of realpolitik, the question is one of how to build with the lowest possible embodied carbon.
The UK government hopes to build 1.5 million homes this parliament. Even if that were possible, housebuilding would devour the entire national carbon budget and more. We urgently need low-carbon solutions, but change in the construction industry is notoriously slow.
This is where the Design Museum is in a potentially unique position. Through AHRC funding, Future Observatory was able to build a demonstrator project to make the case for a low-carbon model of construction. Given that opportunity, there are any number of concepts we could have demonstrated. Timber-framed buildings, for example, need to be much more prevalent, but these have been widely tested – in the UK, the obstacles are not technical but conservative regulations imposed after the Grenfell fire. We decided to demonstrate the potential of structural stone because of its low-carbon credentials and because there are no regulations hampering its adoption. Also, while the UK imports most of its structural timber, stone is relatively abundant.
What the Stone Demonstrator ‘demonstrates’ is the ultra-low-carbon potential of pretensioned stone frames. This particular frame – devised by engineers Webb Yates with input from Arup, and manufactured by the Stonemasonry Company – reduces carbon emissions by 75 per cent compared to reinforced concrete, and 90 per cent compared to steel. The stone bricks used on the façade emit nearly 98 per cent less carbon than their fired-clay equivalents (when you consider that the UK consumes more than two billion clay bricks a year, that’s quite a saving).
We could have just commissioned a report on structural stone, but reports tend to sit on servers and somehow lack the mass of stone blocks holding themselves up against gravity. Reports do not bring to life the technical skills of stonemasons and contractors. The physical thing is always more persuasive than the idea of the thing on a page.
The 1:1 prototype in architecture is incredibly rare. We are familiar with the ‘pavilion’ model – and there is certainly a place for summer follies and temporary exercises in style – but the Stone Demonstrator is not a pavilion. Rather, it’s a building-sized research tool. It exists to be studied and ultimately to persuade not just architects and engineers, but the forces that can drive – or block – change in the construction sector: developers, planners and insurers.
As I write, engineers at University College London are gathering seismic and loadbearing data from sensors placed on the Demonstrator. Roundtable discussions with architects, engineers and planning experts have been convened to study the Demonstrator and explore the adoption of stone frames. Regular student groups are making visits and, of course, it is open to the general public, with a series of museum-style interpretation panels explaining how it addresses low-carbon construction.
Demonstrators like this can have a catalytic effect. The question is, who is going to fund them? There is a strong case to be made for both the public and private sectors investing in more low-carbon demonstrators. But a design museum, as a site for stimulating the public imagination and presenting industrial innovation, can also play a role in driving change.
