Dear Grandchild,
It is Wednesday evening. Over the last week I have hit some important milestones. On Monday I submitted the first official draft of my letters from the future article for AD magazine. This is Chris Luebkeman’s issue, where my article is a letter from my 2050 self back to today, critiquing my work and giving me advice. That article is to me a compass and an ideal that I should strive to follow, and it was also the genesis of these letters to you. Writing that article made me realise that it was important that even as I did my work from day to day, that it would be important for me to understand the greater goals and the long-term implications of the decisions that I make.
I hope that this projection to the future will give me a stronger sense of mission and more confidence to strive for higher ideals. At least once a week, I must be doing something that makes the world a better place to live, for you and not just for me.
I was in Copenhagen last Wednesday and Thursday to give a public lecture at the Building Green Conference there. My talk was entitled “Sustainability as a Matter of Form,” and I talked about the need for sustainability to be subtle and fully integrated into the work that we do as designers, rather than applied on top as a layer of technology.
This is very important to me because I believe that so much of the architecture that we do should not feel immediately technical or futuristic. In the case of the Cambodia project that I have designed with Zaha Hadid and the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, the main character of the building should be one of healing and reconciliation. It is the play of shadow, light, and material that must come to the foreground, rather than the energy strategy or the water management approach. As I said to you last week, sometimes the rhetoric of sustainability must give way to the song of form. And so we embed the sustainability deep within the fibres of our buildings—always there yet only sometimes speaking loudly.
Copenhagen was an example of that approach. I had heard so much about the great cycling city, and expected the cycling element of the urban fabric to be extremely visible and very much in my face. And I was so surprised at the subtlety of that system, even though on inspection it permeated every corner of every space. How successful it was. I will take you there someday and we can ride the streets together.
Your grandfather. 5 November, 2014. London
