Negroni Talk #39 - Talking Shit! DRAIN AGE

Talking Shit! DRAIN AGE Stone Age... Iron Age... we are now living through the Drain Age... Regular news reports of flash flooding showing homes filled with filthy water suggest that our treatment of water maybe based upon suspect principles. The mounting evidence is that our ‘interventions’ within the natural world are more and more frequently coming back to bite us in our cities, towns and villages. Is architecture a key factor in our divorce from reality? We put bleach in water, and we drink the water. Man-made fat-bergs cause sewers to back up and the pressures put on pipes appears to coincide with the shameless profiteering that comes with pumping raw sewage into our wildlife, watercourses and seas. We should ask ourselves what and where we are building. Flood plains made rigid by acres of tarmac and paved hard landscape leave water with nowhere to run except funneled down into hidden tubes that lead ‘somewhere else’. What is out of sight, remains out of mind. We also have to look inside and question the impact within buildings. Architects and designers seem stuck in a tug or war between consultants, subcontractors, and the estate agents doctrine of the ensuite 2nd bathroom, where the volumetric space in which people are to live comes in second. Rooms seem required to work around the unmovable obstacles of the service pipe and its associated boxing out. Water, so vital to life itself, is in its cyclical nature the most recyclable of resources, so what of its use and its waste? For millennia, humankind lived more humbly amidst nature. Buildings tend to create comfort and convenience by ‘protecting’ us from the elements, but in the landscape of the future can they play a greater role and a more holistic approach to health and sustainability? Speakers: Dave Hill, OnLondon (chair) Dr Julia King, London School of Economics Andy Downey, Elliot Wood Katharina Erne, HTA Design Michael Judd, Hawkins\Brown amongst others….