Another Earth Day Social Media Post? Not So Much…

While you may have already seen coverage marking the annual festivities for April 22, I propose we flip Earth Day. Instead of trumpeting the myriad examples of how we saved energy on this building or achieved net zero carbon on that one, could we perhaps own up to our consumptive habits in architecture? Is it not better to start expressing our thanks to the Earth for giving us the resources we’re consuming, to be transparent about that consumption, to assign value to the things we actually used rather than the things we managed to efficiently design out of the project?

I’ve never walked by a building and said “I’m so happy they managed to design out that extra mullion during the plan review phase.” Of course, in everyday life we respond to what’s physically in front of us, everything else is a memory. I wanted to call my sustainability newsletter for Woods Bagot, Not So Much, partly to redirect our attention to consumption as a destructive endgame in contemporary architecture, but also to conjure up the informality of the phrase when used to express a relative indifference to something. Is Earth Day going to prevent the climate crisis? Not so much.

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