Twenty First Century Design: MASCo WALCOT

 

 

 

 

 A warm welcome for MASCo in Bath

Progress gathers pace as the new MASCo Walcot project rises from the former architectural business started thirty years ago by Rick and Jane Knapp. The generosity of spirit  and welcome conveyed by the local people, Walcot Street Traders and civic leaders has been quite overwhelming.

When the work is complete and the display areas and offices properly on stream we can begin to roll out the full extent of our proposals.

Changing the face of architecture, design and material resourcing

Before long we hope MASCo Walcot in Bath will come to represent the very best in Sustainable Architectural Design and Planning Consultancy, all fronted by the new architectural antiques and traditional building materials showrooms at 108 Walcot Street.

The project will bring together in Bath, for the first time, multi disciplinary skills to change the face of architecture, design and material resourcing.

Dynamic Conservation of Bath’s heritage

The very lifeblood of the City of Bath as a World Heritage site must be rooted in conservation and preservation, as a dynamic and progressive movement that enables the Georgian architecture and Roman origins to be maintained as a living environment for the people of Bath in the 21st century.

The essential need is to establish a way to preserve everything that is worthy and be sustainable at a time of global environmental change.

The development of thinking and policies that will enable this magnificent city to prosper within the context of the national framework presents challenges that cannot be ignored.

Integrating sustainability  

We do not exist in a vacuum. However, we have a unique opportunity to address design and planning for the 21st century with new approaches of integrated systems that recognise the need to act and behave sustainably.

Preserving and reusing traditional building elements and materials, diverting them from landfill and finding alternative uses, is the ‘front of house ‘ mission’ for MASCo Walcot together with plans for a comprehensive conservation and sustainable design community to create ‘thinking’ to change our world

Never the ‘Right Time’ …Changing the World

Inflating expectation in a world that overstates most ideas has a horrible tendency to rebound on the proposer.

Contrastingly, we have reached a ‘tipping point’ in the debate on environmental sustainability that means we need to be radical.

It may be that it is too late to avert much of the consequence of neglect and indifference. Perhaps we should be reconciled to mitigation as the most that can be achieved. 

Announcing the MASCo Walcot PLAN

Human resolve and the probability that we can apply technology and science to avert the predicted problems of environment and resource efficiency is always a possibility.

We are going to look very foolish if as yet undiscovered solutions, delivered by research, fail to materialise.

In the meantime to give credence to a personal belief that analysis and negativity are valueless without commitment  to changing  and struggling  against problems that confront society,  MASCo Walcot have a Plan and the resolve to do our part to address the challenge.

Our Grand Experiment gathers momentum

The acquisition of the Walcot Street Yard in Bath enables  a ‘Grand Experiment’.

The Architectural Salvage yard at 108 Walcot  Street will continue to function as a resource for architectural features and period and traditional materials.

Together with conservation skills to support the City of Bath’s status as a World Heritage Site we intend to make the yard a centre of excellence for Architecture, Design and Sustainability .

A Sustainable Plan – but yet to be revealed

The Plan includes a scheme which will change the way Sustainability effects all aspects of our built environment.

It is too soon to expand on the detail of our scheme, there is much to do and lots of work ahead before our exciting proposals can be revealed in-depth. It is never the “right time” to over-hype an intention, but we  believe the need exists to engender both urgency and optimism for change through action.

It is our intention to extend the institution of Walcot created by Rick and Jane Knapp to become a pivotal element in all things of environmental excellence to bring about the change that will alter the way we regard integrated environmental thinking.

Watch this space.

Three new appointments next week…names to be announced !

EcoBuild 2010: MASCo speaks on Sustainability

 

 

Steve Tomlin, MASCo MD, attended EcoBuild at Earl’s Court on 2nd March. Here is a blog version of his speech:

Sustainability, like the use of the word recycling, has come to mean all things to all people.

The danger of buzz words and their proliferation is that everybody comes to believe that prolific use and repetition are the same as meaningful change and real progress.

Sometimes it helps to reduce things to fundamentals. Our planet and its resources are becoming exhausted – and even if not yet imminent – it is useful to understand what our society in my lifetime has, effectively, been responsible for.

Look what we’ve done in 50mm of time

On a time line continuum  of some several hundred metres representing the length of time some form of life has existed on planet Earth:  The Roman Invasion, the Renaissance, Tudors, Stuarts, the Industrial Revolution, the advent of the car and the latest micro computers. We, identified as the  ‘written history of man’; our time line representation, would be  less than 50mm  of the overall length.

During that   ‘tiny’ window of   influence we have contaminated and exhausted our planet disproportionately by any measure. 

Now, driven by the need to address our excessive carbon footprint, we are  championing  sustainability as we did recycling to solve matters

Upcycling, not recycling

Recycling has for twenty years enabled a comfort zone of activity which changes nothing as we continue to crush and incinerate vulnerable materials that could be recovered or upcycled, thus making a significant improvement to our attempts to address embodied carbon values.

Let me just illustrate what I mean. if you crash to the ground a steel frame building and send the metals ‘recovered’ to the metal recyclers you will save 5-7% of the embodied carbon value. However, if you save and reuse the same RSJ’s, the embodied carbon recovered is above 95%.

Olympics 2012: the politics of sustainability

The relevance to my topic is that we should ensure that sustainability is not just more jargon like supplying “goods in green packets” to borrow associated benefit. Many of the problems are political and my work with Hyder Consultancy on the sustainability and pre-demo auditing is a good illustration of the problems.

To get the site developed and the Olympic Games actually built, ‘pragmatic’, you might argue ‘compromised’, decisions were made.

The Games at Stratford are, in the end, justified as designed for sustainability on the basis of Legacy; that afterwards the improved infrastructure and facilities will allow the East End to go forward and prosper. The jury is out and, to the ODA: we are watching and monitoring to ensure promises are fulfilled.

Sustainable design will build value

Again, I use the Olympics as an example – albeit a grand one – of designing with sustainability in mind. When talking to the planning authority and demolition industry, much material cannot be saved for reasons of time/cost and, more rationally, because the materials involved have little intrinsic value.

Confronted by the incredulous demolition contractor who honestly cannot see how you apply the ideas of reuse and reclamation to the average 1960/1970’s building, it is hard to mount a defence.

In this situation we have the very essence of both the problem and solution: we need to build with intrinsically valuable materials and stop creating architecture that is intended only to satisfy the need for a 15 year investment return lifecycle.

We need to forward-build durable architecture that considers end of lifecycle deconstruction and recovery

It is an indictment of our age that we are demolishing buildings constructed in my lifetime whilst we renovate and celebrate buildings constructed by the Georgians & Victorians that are still going strong.

We need to start introducing some caveats & qualify arguments. We need to understand what our political masters cannot grasp and why we have generally such appalling modern housing.

Local authority bureaucracy: no imagination, no creativity

We have charged legislators, who have struggled in the first place to comprehend the issues and delegated responsibility to local authority planning officials, with a challenge that is failing on all fronts. Instead of addressing imaginatively and creatively the problem, we regulate and administer a lowest common denominator approach swathed in bureaucracy and stifling mediocrity.

Local authority personnel recourse to a ‘by the  book approach’ for fear of punitive litigation and will not countenance risk, whilst conforming to long bankrupt ideas that are safe and predictable.

We need to break out of these structures.

Creating a fully sustainable supermarket across the UK

I know that some of you may be sceptical or feel a lack of realism. Let me address this possible criticism by saying that, for and on behalf of Britain’s leading retailer, I carry out sustainability policy development. The Chief Executive of that major chain has charged his colleagues with the creation of a fully sustainable supermarket within 20 years – across the board.

I say across the board for SUSTAINABILITY needs to address not just material recovery and architecture but an integrated system that applies to human resources and buildings alike, from procurement to deconstruction and reuse.

Commercial success through sustainability

That process is begun and is driven by, arguably, the most enlightened management team in the UK who have identified commercial success as interdependent with sustainability. Some of you may be familiar with Cheetham Manchester or more recently the new supermarket in Cambridgeshire; both represent first steps in a direction that is cutting edge design.

Every steel and timber element in these buildings is being bar coded with specification details, structural values and information that will allow end of life cycle recovery.

Local authorities: watch and learn…then act!

Of course, aesthetics and design can always be improved and it would be folly to boast the end result is a total and resolved solution, BUT it is happening and domestic housing and town planning need to catch up.

We need to insist that paramount consideration is given to how materials are deployed and how they can be modified in the lifecycle, as well as deconstructed at any end point. The more durable the buildings are, in terms of quality, the longer the lifecycle.

Construct, plan, develop sustainably

The salient and most important themes remain that we cannot continue to disregard the wanton waste of materials and we need to design sustainability into all elements of the construction, planning and development process.

There is no time for despondency; we must address these matters with both urgency and creativity.

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