Green Washing Architects

It seems Finnish Architects just declared a Climate and Biodiversity Emergency. I am not aware what these architects are doing in practice about it except saying they are concerned about it and spending 1 min in signing a petition in a website. Will they stop building new stuff and focus on renovation?

Construction industry is the most polluting industry worldwide. Are they shifting their focus and refusing contracts if a whole building just beside is empty due to market speculation?

I am an Architect and I shifted my focus the last 10 years from new built, to renovation. I focus on designing communities not designing golden toilets. For example through our company of Gamified Cohousing Oy, turning abandoned buildings into economies (current pilot project is in Hyrsylä, near Helsinki, Finland).

If we architects all do that, if we enact a moral architecture (as the German Architect Ingenhoven professes about), then we do bring in something into the table, otherwise, such declarations are nothing but green washing. But the world does not work in such a way, most of my colleagues cannot refuse contracts and they will indeed build a parliament for a dictator or a mansion for a drug lord, anywhere, anytime, if that allows them to pay their running bills.

The architect Philip Johnson was aware he was a "whore" and most of us architects are indeed "whores'', we bend over for the paycheck. I hope my class will raise up the intellectual responsibility we owe to the society we are building.

Pedro Aibéo

03.06.2020