The new issue of the IHBC’s members’ journal, Context, No. 180, moves beyond Churchill’s take on ‘architecture shaping us’ to argue that ‘we have [now] come to realise that what we build has a fundamental effect on the planet and its climate, and vice versa’.
… Dominating nature, through landscapes and buildings, became a habit…
The IHBC writes:
We are all doomed, but…
Buildings and nature met in the first cave that people adapted as shelter, and in the first hut that they made from whatever materials were growing around them. The local vernacular developed from what the natural world provided close at hand: timber in sufficient spans to make a roof; stone, mud or brick clay to make roofs and walls. Later, there were leisure and resources to make formal gardens and landscapes that demonstrated how nature could be tamed. ‘There’s nothing wild and uncultivated about us,’ was the message. Later, gardens and landscapes that looked less formal showed how the natural world could be shaped to a refined sense of beauty. Dominating nature, through landscapes and buildings, became a habit. In time, some people came to value what had been built and became less sure that it could be replaced by something better.
Focusing on taming nature perhaps blinded us to the effects that development can have on the natural environment even when we do not notice it. Only recently has promoting biodiversity become an aim of the planning system. More than that, we have come to realise that what we build has a fundamental effect on the planet and its climate, and vice versa. The changing weather has always been the favourite topic of conversation. We can cope with weather. A changing climate is something else: just as unpredictable as the weather, but with potentially catastrophic consequences. That means, as far as historic buildings are concerned, that conservation is becoming more difficult. As ever, we have to decide what we value most, and where we are willing to invest our scarce resources. We are finding that the changing climate’s heat, cold, wind, rain, sea levels and other extremes are making some of those decisions unusually painful.
‘We are all doomed,’ Imogen Wood writes in her article in this issue (page 12), ‘but in the short term, some places and assets are more doomed than others.’ Responding creatively to that predicament will involve, she rightly suggests, asking some difficult questions about how we balance what we value in heritage and nature.
Context’s themed articles include:
- Value transitions between heritage and nature, Imogen Wood
- Life and death at Highgate Cemetery, Ian Dungavell
- Shaping the Northern Forest, Sian Atkinson, Liam Plummer and Emily Sloan
- Everyone needs trees, Erika Diaz Petersen
- Saving traditional orchards, Anthea Jones
- Birkenhead Park shows the way, Marie Le Devehat and Urmila Jha-Thakur
- Don’t take British stone for granted Mark North
- Heritage management plans and historic landscapes, Ben Cowell
- Bats in churches, Diana Evans, David Knight, Sarah Robinson, Diana Spencer, Lisa Worledge and Kate Jones
Access the online archive and see the issue online
Reading Context helps IHBC members develop their skills across all of the IHBC’s Areas of Competence, and so is a critical baseline in addressing priorities in Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
See more IHBC background and guidance on IHBC CPD and on how you might use past, current and future issues of Context
See the formal guidance paper on IHBC CPD (scheduled for update)
See more on the IHBC Competences and Areas of Competence
