Sustainability7 min read
Designing for the Next Hundred Years
Sustainability is not a label. It is the discipline of making things that are worth repairing.
By Elias Varga
The greenest building is not the one with the best rating on opening day. It is the one still standing, still loved, and still repairable in 2126.
Repairability as a design brief
We ask of every detail: who will mend this, with what, and in which century? A bolted connection can be replaced. A glued one cannot. A lime plaster can be patched invisibly; a polymer coating must be stripped.
“Embodied carbon is spent once. Maintenance is spent forever.”
Our rammed-earth work in Oaxaca is the clearest expression of this idea: a wall made from the ground it stands on, which can return to that ground when the time comes.
∞Keep reading
Light6 min read
The Weight of Light
Why thick walls make the best light, and what a single slot of sky can teach a house.
Materials5 min read
Limestone: A Slow Material
Notes from the laboratory on how pale stone ages, stains and — eventually — heals.
Spatial design4 min read
The Grammar of Thresholds
Compression, pause, release: how the smallest spaces in a building decide how we feel in the largest.