VELUX Editorial

“Touch the earth lightly”

– Aboriginal proverb

 

What traces, what ‘footprint’, will our civilisation leave behind in 500, 1,000 or 10,000 years? This question has often been asked by philosophers and other people capable of thinking beyond the limits of their era. Today it is gaining a new significance, as global warming and resource scarcity are putting human society to the test. The way the built environment has been planned - from macro city planning to individual habitable units - has always had a significant influence on human footprints, and architects and planners have historically had important influence on many aspects of human life, from energy use to public health.

 

Today, a new set of challenges has arisen. How to enable human beings to reduce their ecological footprint? According to the World Wildlife Fund, we are currently over-using the planet’s resources as well as its capacity to absorb our waste (including carbon dioxide) by a factor 1.3. Or in their words, we would need 1.3 ‘Planets Earth’ to satisfy our resource
hunger. A typical Western European would need as much as three planets – a figure that is still rising.

 

A turnaround of this trend will not come by itself. Like many other stakeholders, architects, engineers, planners and the building industry are required to take part in the effort to reverse it. It will have to be an effort at all levels, from urban planning to building to product design. This issue of Daylight & Architecture discusses the human ecological footprint from a variety of angles. We take a look at cities and their efforts to become ‘greener’, we explore how lightness in product design and architecture relates to sustainability, and we describe the joint effort of planners and users to make buildings more resource-efficient. Finally, we take a look at how the WWF initiative One Planet Living – providing places for people to live happily with a reduced ecological footprint – works in practice.

 

For decades, the Australian architect Glenn Murcutt has demonstrated a committed approach to reducing the footprint of his buildings. Murcutt’s designs embody the Aboriginal proverb “touch this earth lightly”: a perfect building in Murcutt’s sense is the one that leaves no traces behind once it is removed from its site. To achieve this, Murcutt takes into account literally all the external influences on a building, not only the vegetation of the site, its climate and irrigation patterns, daylight and natural ventilation, but also the supply of building materials and energy.

 

As VELUX is committed to creating better living conditions, and to making buildings more energy efficient, we would like to discuss the themes of sustainability, resource efficiency and low energy consumption. This issue of Daylight & Architecture raises a series of issues that will provide a platform for this discussion.

 

We wish you a pleasant read of Daylight & Architecture 08.