Integrating design teaching and practices

Architects in Germany typically design for a building life span of one hundred years according to the standard calculation basis of real estate managers. Depend-ing on the location, many buildings will not have a lifespan of a hundred or more years. In Frankfurt, for example, many buildings in the business district that were built in the 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s are being demolished in a systematic way. For example, the historic 19-floor Zürich Versicherung Opernplatz was demol-ished although it was only 41 years old. It was replaced by a new 42-floor office building called the Opera Tower. The same applies to numerous other buildings in the central business district that are being replaced by taller more modern build-ings that fit contemporary architectural expectations. The structure and building services of these buildings that are being demolished are intact and generally well maintained. Largely because of marketing and investment value it makes sense from a financial point of view to demolish them. The embodied energy and resources are considerable in such buildings, and the building thermal per-formance which is normally considered most relevant in terms of sustainability, becomes irrelevant in this context. This raises the question: how can designers more effectively prioritise energy consumption of a building, or its embodied energy value and the related carbon emission in the context of such strong market forces?
This applies to many central business districts in the western world but may be irrelevant for the majority of the world population, which faces other pressing problems resulting from climate change including wars, poverty, water shortage, and rapid urbanisation. These issues are made worse by incremental deforestation. The University of Maryland, Department of Geographical Science published the forest loss map 2018. A gigantic area of the size of Bavaria has been lost in the last year. The list of known converging drivers of change in human society may lead one to question if people are capable of the rapid and far reaching change needed. In this context what role can architects and sustainability architecture play?
This situation humans have created for ourselves and other species on the planet is overwhelming for individuals. Defeatism is an understandable initial reaction, especially among designers and professionals of the built environment, where we may be limited in what we can achieve, as agents for a client and on one-off isolated projects. So can architects play a role in slowing down the processes that are driving negative ecological and social impacts? There are technologies and methods we can employ to improve the current situation (Pedersen Zari and Hecht, 2019).