2. Architecture is a Material Practice

Architecture creates physical objects – some of humanity's largest works. These objects embody abstract meanings and values, but at their core, they are deeply material. The impacts of construction extend far beyond the building site itself, reaching the places where the materials are sourced and processed, as well as the people whose hands shape them. 

Architects struggle to address the effects of material extraction but have embraced timber construction as a possibility to harness material usage into something positive. Using timber in long-lasting structures furthers the industry’s decarbonization efforts, as the embodied carbon in wooden structures functions as carbon storage. This does, however, hinge on forests being replanted so that they can keep functioning as carbon sinks

Carbon sink = something that absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases.
Carbon storage = something that doesn’t actively absorb carbon anymore, but holds embodied carbon

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This shift to renewable materials has sparked debate about resource availability. Are we using timber from forests faster than they are able to regenerate, thus depleting increasingly valuable carbon sinks? From this perspective, other faster-growing bio-based materials, such as straw, may be preferable to wood. Extraction of straw does not place significant strain on the environment. 

The discussion around the ecological effects of bio-based materials stands in stark contrast to the silence surrounding the origins of minerals and other abiotic virgin raw materials. We deplete virgin materials from the earth’s crust at an accelerating pace, simultaneously creating a waste problem, which we then try to answer by burying these hard-won materials in landfills and roadbeds. At which pace can we consume materials, which have taken billions of years to form?

The greatest shift must occur in our attitudes towards materials already in human use. There’s no longer space for disposability. Harnessing the existing but unused building stock as a resource – urban mining – is a way to step away from architecture’s extractivist practices.