Days may be numbered for showcases such as Foster’s Gherkin, warns Cambridge expert.
Glazed buildings including the Gherkin could become “pariahs” by 2050 because of their inability to cope with climate change and dwindling resources such as power and water, it was claimed this week.
As BD celebrates its 40th anniversary, the head of architecture at Cambridge University said the next 40 years would see many of today’s architectural landmarks increasingly dismissed as energy-guzzling relics of a bygone age. Alan Short said global warming and other factors including the ageing population would result in a huge programme of retrofitting as well as radically different forms of architectural expression.
Many of Short’s predictions were echoed by Oxford University professor Steve Rayner, who this week announced details of a major research project into how cities can be adapted over the coming decades.
Short said: “There is a huge challenge for the construction industry and designers… the idea of making buildings out of glass is going to become a historical phenomenon. Buildings that use huge amounts of energy, and big glass office buildings, will be pariah buildings. People won’t want to rent them. Will the Gherkin still be standing? Well, no names, but I do think that is going to be a big issue.”
Rayner, the head of the Institute for Science, Innovation & Society at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, is leading research into how urban areas can meet the “intense pressures” of climate change and other factors. He agreed that current commercial buildings would become increasingly sidelined.
“People have been disastrously wrong before in predicting ways of working but the need to have large office buildings will change,” he said. “These kinds of buildings will become less desirable.”
Rohit Talwar, chief executive of forecasting consultancy Fast Future, which recently examined the future of professions including architecture for the government, agreed. “The big glass testaments to wealth and power in the eighties, nineties and noughties will come under pressure,” he said. “Icons will become so expensive that it hurts the bottom line. By 2050, energy demand will have grown by between 70% and 100%.”
However, architects defended the use of glazing in their buildings and said they will still continue to use more efficient forms of glass. Ken Shuttleworth, one of the designers of the Gherkin while at Foster & Partners and a previous critic of “glass box” architecture, said glass manufacture was evolving all the time. “Glass lets in far too much heat but [manufacturers] are reinventing what they can do with glass,” he said.
Foster’s declined to comment.
