Global sourcing is the standard in the construction industry: bricks might come from the Netherlands or Poland, cement from Spain, steel and marble from India, aluminium from Brazil and wood from Canada or the tropical forests in the Far East. Due to the rising cost oftransport and the growing importance of managing energy and other resources in a sustainable manner, more and more specifiers demand the return to the use of locally produced building materials.
Until recently this change of attitude would have been regarded as some romantic fancy. However at the DesignBoost conference in Sweden in October this year, Roy Antik, the Development Manager for Sustainability at Skanska announced that the company will reduce its energy and resource consumption by 50%. A key part of this strategy will be local recycling and the use of local materials. Skanska is one of the major players in the construction industry.
Mass production, global sourcing and the availability of cheap labour has had a huge impact on the quality of our built environment, but also the traditional skills and methodologies in the construction industry.
In a separate initiative,Atelier Rang – an architectural practice based in Frankfurt – recently finished the Tower of Bhaktapur in Nepal. In this project they not only resourced the building materials directly on site, but also combined the traditional hessian building traditions with the local skills of the Newars. The team exported the forms of the Frankfurter Ziegel (brick), but used the local clay dug up on site in Nepal. The scaffolding was made from bamboo grown in a grove next to the site. The bricks were laid in a structure which reflects the Himalayan Mountains.
The architects describe the building as a brick sculpture and the project could be a prototype for local sourcing of materials. The history of architecture is full of such examples. Older brick building in London, Amsterdam or Hamburg are a reflection of the local clay and building traditions. The Tower of Bhaktapur can offer many lessons for the future.
Text by Dr. Sascha Peters, all rights reserved © 2009