Summer Islam on building with biomaterials.

Summer Islam is a founding director of Material Cultures, a not-for-profit organisation that in its own words ‘challenges the systems, technologies, processes, supply chains, regulations and materials that make up the construction industry with the aim of transforming the way we build’.

Currently, Summer has an installation in London’s Building Centre, along with her partners, Paloma Gormley and George Massoud. Homegrown: Building a Post-Carbon Future is notable for the large straw and timber structure at its heart. The trio has also published a new pocket-sized book, Material Reform, that attempts to set out the way we should build in the future, examining the ‘technification’ of architecture, our reliance on extractive processes, and investigating how we should build with biomaterials. 

It’s a fascinating, far reaching, read. 

In this episode we talk about: the philosophy behind Material Cultures; the problems with the construction industry and why it needs to change; being a ‘reformist’ rather than a ‘revolutionary’; disagreeing with Norman Foster on concrete; how biomaterials can simplify the way we build; factories as places of experimentation; the importance of repair; architects’ ‘arrogant’ use of timber; why straw is vital to our future; and putting Material Cultures’ ideas into practice. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Hello and welcome to another episode of Material Matters with Grant Gibson. The show is four years old now, but for listeners who might be new to all this, the idea is that I speak to a designer, maker, artist or architect about a material or technique with which they're intrinsically linked and discover how it changed their lives and careers. My guest this week is Architect Summer Islam. Along with Paloma Gormali and George Massoud, Summer is the founding director of Material Cultures, a not-for-profit organization that, in its own words, challenges the systems, technologies, processes, supply chains, regulations, and materials that make up the construction industry with the aim of transforming the way we build. The trio currently have an installation in London's building centre entitled Home Growing, Building a Post-Carbon Future, which is notable for the large straw and timber structure at its heart. And they've also just published a new pocket-sized book, Material Reform, that attempts to set out the way we should build in the future, examining the technification of architecture, our reliance on extractive processes, and investigating how we should build with biomaterials in the future. It's a fascinating and far-reaching read. Summer, thank you very much for doing this. How are you?

SPEAKER_00 1:26

I'm very well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

That's a complete pleasure. We have a tradition of this show of trying to give these conversations a bit of context. You're not in your studio, I suspect, looking at your background on Zoom.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Not today, no.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Not today.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

It's very loud in there.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

So you're in your flat, but maybe we can cheat. Um what does your studio look like? I'm I'm interested in how you work.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

We have a fantastic open plan space in a wonderful light industrial building. Yeah, we love it. It's a great workspace. Um we share it with friends who are also young practices. It's got windows either side and it's full of materials and mock-ups, and it's usually a bit chaotic. But we love the place we're in and I guess the atmosphere we've cultivated with our friends and the other practices who share the space with us because it's been a place where we've been able to support each other while our practices were growing and share our knowledge and our experience. Um we all started practices at roughly the same times in our careers. Yeah, it's very precious to us actually, the place we work in.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

And where? Where is this? Oh, where is it? Precious place.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

The precious place, sorry. Our office is in Bethnal Green, it's in a building called Regent Studios, uh, just off Broadway Market.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Okay. So as I said in the introduction, you're part of Material Cultures, not for profit organization. You co-founded with Paloma and George. Can we talk a little bit about how it works and why you founded it? Because there are two separate practices coming together, aren't they? Paloma has practice architecture. You and George co-founded Studio Abroad. So how did you decide to come together?

SPEAKER_00 2:49

When Paloma and I met, we started talking almost immediately about our role as architects, the love we have of making buildings, and the difficulty sometimes that we find in doing that in the industry. And our perspectives and our experience in practice are quite different. So I'd been working for other architects. I used to work at 6A Architects, and Paloma had founded Practice Architecture. And alongside my work in practice, my friend George and I had established Studio Abroad many years ago, when we were students, actually. And so between the three of us, we had very different experiences in practice. But the conversation that started me and Paloma off on the route that sort of became ultimately material cultures was about what it is to make buildings and why it is that sometimes your relationships with contractors can be so fraught, why it is that the practices that we perpetuate are so problematic, and what it is that we could do about that. We've always been very involved in making our projects ourselves. So directly making the furniture or being involved in the practice of building as much as possible, and particularly Paloma's work of practice architecture, is very engaged and has always been very engaged with the making of the work itself. And I think when you do that, you come so much closer to the problems in the industry, you know, the questions around labor and around material sourcing and around responsibility and liability, when you're kind of at the face of that work and you're engaging with very problematic practices yourself, you become much more exposed to them and much more invested, I think, in how they could be better.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

So, how do you three work together? I mean, you have projects you do by yourselves. When do you decide to come together?

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Well, we have actually formally merged or in the process of merging at the moment, I think, as of um the end of last year. So uh Studio Abroad um and some of the work in practice architecture is moving into material cultures. And so the three of us work together all the time, every day.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

And you have collaborators according to your website, there are lists of people.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Uh yeah. So we we like to think of a way that we work as collaborative. Uh, we try our best to be inclusive and to share as much as possible. Um, so our collaborators are the wonderful team that work with us at the office, but also the extraordinary, very knowledgeable consultants and makers and craftspeople who we draw on all the time and who we try and work with and and foreground as much as possible. You know, the plasterers and the people who make Hemp Creed and the all the skilled professions that we completely rely on for our knowledge and experience because they really know exactly what they're doing and and we're kind of only borrowing their expertise every time we have a project that we work with them on.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

I quite like that. It's a nice turn of phrase, borrowing their expertise. The three of you have been particularly busy recently. There's the installation of the building centre in London, entitled Home Growing, as we said in the intro, notable for the large straw structure. And this new book, Material Reform. So let's talk about the book. Why this book and why now?

SPEAKER_00 5:36

It felt very timely for us as an organization. I think that we were we were very lucky, we were privileged to be offered the opportunity to produce a book. So that's something to say at the beginning. I think it was an extraordinary offer and really a luxury, I think, to put the time aside to be together, to have those conversations at a time when we're forming material culture's ethos, setting our values down on paper and uh trying to really articulate the different areas of interest the organization has. And we often were doing that together kind of on the fly, you know, project by project. Every time we wrote a piece of text or an article, things started to distill. But to be given the opportunity to sit down and have formal conversations together and say what it is we think we would like to be involved in reforming and changing as much as possible was really exciting. And it felt like we're on the cusp of a movement now. I think that, you know, the building industry is changing, architectural practice is changing. And really we've, I think we're very fortunate the book has been so well received because it feels like it's come at the right time when people are looking for people are aware that there are so many problems in the industry, all the different environmental biodiversity, climate and housing crises that we're grappling with at the same time. We know that there's things that need to change. And and we're all looking to figure out how we do that and continue um to practice and to use our skills in the best possible way. And so it felt like putting all of that down was useful, not just for us, but for lots of other people. And in a way, they're not our ideas. We're kind of distilling lots of ideas that we've taken from different books and from our conversations with Amica and Sarah, who collaborated with us on the text, um, and also with Jess, who's the photographer, Jess Goff, these beautiful photographs illustrate the book. And so all of those different perspectives and viewpoints kind of came together.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

Did you have a sense of its format, how it would look, how it would act? Because it's definitely not it's not a typical architecture coffee table type book. It is something you can slide in your pocket, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:35

That was one of our first starting criteria for the book when we talked about what it would be to make a book um as a young practice who hasn't produced very much work and built very many things and and what the value was in us putting something out there. And we felt that that was much more in sharing our conversations and and illustrating those with imagery. And the idea that it was a book that you could just have in your pocket was um really important to us and kind of defined the formatting and the way we approach the process of producing the book.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

I mean, there's a mixed audience on this podcast summer. There are architects and designers who'll be well acquainted with all this, but there'll be others who who aren't. So, in a nutshell-ish, can we unpick what the issues are with the construction industry as it stands?

SPEAKER_00 8:20

How long have you got?

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Well, it's a podcast we could go on for days.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Oh, there are so many. Yeah, exactly. We could do series. I think there's actually an episode in every single one of these issues, so just get ready. Oh, there are so many problems. It's really sometimes it's a bit overwhelming actually in the work when you sit down.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

Especially in the research work that we do where um we might be involved in setting out strategies for supply chains and how you might transform industry supply chains. And you sit down and unpick the whole supply chain and you look at materials being grown or produced, how they get transported, how skilled labor is educated, how they get involved in practices on site, how a building is put together, designed, and specified, and how it's lived in. And at every one of those points along the production of space, you see the perpetuation of environmental problems, labour issues, people being taken advantage of by kind of capitalist structures. I suppose the kind of defining issue of the book, the kind of the starting point for us is the environmental crisis, the climate crisis. And the fact that we have to accept now, I think, that we have been, for a long time as a profession and industry, very complicit in perpetuating harm, not just in the landscape that we exist within, in producing buildings which are poor quality, an urban fabric which is not sustainable or healthy to live in or good for its inhabitants, but also every time we do that, in wreaking havoc and violence in other places. And it's been very easy, I think, to be dissociated from that damage in the way that we produce buildings today. We have all these digital tools and bits of software which facilitate our specifying materials. And the industry ultimately is responsible for deforestation and enslavement of peoples and pollution and all sorts of I mean, all of the things that we can identify as being problems within the climate crisis, the building industry is very complicit in and huge waves of emissions. I mean it's 40%, I think, is a figure that's bandied about. 40% of uh global emissions stem from the building industry. And that's a very significant portion for which the building industry is responsible and is not really affecting change or taking action.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

You seem wary of the word revolution, and you're saying in the book it belongs in the imagination, but isn't that fundamentally what you're asking for? I mean, you also say this book isn't a manifesto, but it it kind of is, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Yes, possibly. Um depends how you interpret it. Um yeah, we spent a long time, that was maybe our longest conversation, talking about reform and revolution. And so it was important that we started off, it's one of the first chapters in the book, that discussion about language and positioning ourselves in that conversation. I think even still after we published and we've had conversations like this where people talk about the reception of those ideas, maybe week on week we shift our perspective and we maybe we regret reform and we feel more like revolutionists, and then the week after it's we're in a position where we feel like reform is the only way. And I think I think they're interesting ideas to hold together. The reason that we sat on the side of reform, I think when we wrote the book and why the book is called material reform, is every day we're engaging with a very conservative construction industry, so slow to change, and it feels like it's far behind all the other industries, you know. Agricultural and food industries, you know, is decades ahead in terms of talking about sustainability and the impact of their practices. And somehow construction just hasn't really caught up and doesn't really seem to be remotely sincere in its professions to change. And so when you're talking about trying to reform labor practices in the industry, material sourcing practices, design and specification softwares and building regulations, you know, every one of the conversations you might have with a different stakeholder in that part of the industry feels very unlikely to shift in the next decades. And somehow I think we've come to the position that our skills can be put best to use in reforming those different sections of the industry, trying to unpick each of those problems and start to address them one at a time. A wholesale revolution in lots of ways is such a tempting and promising idea because we need wholesale transformation of the industry and of society to make all these grand net zero promises realistic and possible. But at the same time, that feels very, very out of reach. And I think we can use our skills as reformists. And so that's where we started, at least for now.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Well, it's it's interesting because, as you say, the book is really about architecture and the construction industry's need to reconnect with nature by using local biomaterials, shortening supply chains, and as much as possible turning its back on petrochemically derived products and globalization. I mean, none of this is straightforward, as you say, as things stand, as you write in your first chapter. Working with non-standard materials sets you outside of most of the infrastructures that support and regulate construction, which means that designers and builders are held more accountable for the decisions they make. So you've touched on this a little bit. You talk about being a reformist, but how do you see your role? Is is this a provocation to the construction industry?

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Yeah, absolutely. Also to architects. It depends on the audience that we're talking to. And on different days, I feel differently, I think we all feel differently about it, but um often we're speaking to architects and we're trying to provoke them and I suppose demonstrate an alternative way forward for architects to be more conscious of the consequences of the decisions that they make. And in other ways, as designers, we look to use every opportunity we have to build a building or introduce a piece of design into the world as a way of demonstrating that it's possible. And we talk a lot in in the office about our work as demonstrators, using that kind of language of a research project, which is maybe the kind of prototype, the first demonstrator of a possibility of new technology. And every time we are commissioned to do a piece of work or build a building, we sit down together and discuss what that building will be about, what that project will be used to demonstrate. Are we going to talk about how foundations could be differently detailed, or how insulation in the walls could change? Are we going to talk about using straw in this project or maybe around earth, which might be, you know, something for us to explore, but makes so much sense in the regional context of that particular project. So we use the different bits of work that we do to address different audiences, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

One of the interesting things about the book, as you point out, is construction doesn't sit in a silo. What you're proposing affects the way we use our land, its ownership. You're not fond of private ownership. What's grown, our diet, presumably, our education system, because the jobs market would fundamentally need to change. The population would need to develop a slew of craft skills, many of which have damn near been lost. And and obviously it would change the markets. So it's it's quite significant. In a very small book, you were asking for very significant change.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Yeah, but we need very significant change. We don't really have a choice. In a way, we just have to come to terms with the fact that everything needs to adjust and everything needs to be adapted. And yeah, and maybe it is a revolution and not individual pieces of reform, but but every bit along those supply chains has to be adapted if we're going to take seriously any of the things that we talk about in public policy today, about the climate crisis, the housing crisis, all of the different policies which are being bandied about in many ways are completely at odds with each other and with everyday practice and our lives on a day-to-day basis. The government is just not taking responsibility for any of that. It's very frustrating.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

Well, it isn't, is it? I mean, I mean, that's a question of political will. We've had two opportunities, it seems to me, to completely fundamentally change the way we think post-banking crisis, obviously post-COVID, and actually we've just pieced the whole thing together, back together as it was. We kind of lack the visionary energy that the Nye Bevins and the Clement Athleys had after the Second World War. Anyway, shall we dig into the various chapters of the book?

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Because you have a couple of kind of scene-setting chapters before you throw the focus on materials themselves. You start with soil. Why'd you begin there?

SPEAKER_00 15:57

Lots of the materials that we are talking about using in construction today are bio-based. So they're inherently low carbon, they're natural materials, and what that means are their materials derived from plants. So we work with timber derived from forests or straw, maybe hemp or wheat straw, which would come from agricultural landscapes. And both forests and farming systems, inherently their health depends on the health of the soil from which they grow. And so it feels to us very fundamental that we engage with and understand the consequences of using it as materials, not just in terms of how they work in buildings and how they work for people, but also what that does to the soil from which they come. And one of the things that we're really interested in now as an organization in the research we do is understanding if we were to scale the use of these materials in the way that we think would be great, does that cause other harm? Does that cause further damage to something that we don't fully understand? My personal understanding of the soil and of my cedial networks and the ecologies which that fosters and the biodiversity living within the soil is very superficial. But I'm aware that it's there. And I'm trying to understand more what it means if suddenly the wholesale use of straw and construction becomes very popular, that would be fantastic. Were that to happen, would those materials be derived from industrially farmed landscapes or could they come from more regenerative land management systems where you are mixing different agroecological systems to the benefit of biodiversity and people? And it's understanding what that means. You know, if we can talk about scaling these materials and scaling up the use of these different systems in the built environment because we believe it to be beneficial for everyone involved. But I would like us to understand what that means for the landscape systems from which they're derived. And within soil, even there's so much to unpack because soil is also kind of the foundational nurturing base of from which you grow food, and to understand the opportunity cost of growing a material for construction instead of using that land for food or for housing or for conservation use for the landscape itself. You know, there's so much in the land, and I think all of our conversations at work now kind of come back to the soil through different circuitous routes.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Yeah, yeah. I mean the scaling up issue is interesting because there is a sense of our need to return to the methods of the past in the book. You talk about the properties of Wattle and Daub and how clay has a role to play in regenerative construction, despite the fact that it's extractive. And I'm interested to know how that might work. We can't endlessly keep digging up clay, presumably, or can we?

SPEAKER_00 18:28

No, we can't. In lots of ways, I think every decision about every building we make today is very important. And the starting question I think that we have to ask ourselves when we're asked maybe a client might approach us, or in general, when you might be asked to engage with a building project as an architect in the industry, is do we need to do anything at all? Do we need to do any buildings? Are there already buildings we could be using? And obviously that suggests a completely different understanding and engagement with ownership structures, I think. And that's particularly difficult in the UK where land ownership is so predominantly private. So we have a different set of policy problems to engage with, but you cannot assume that just because a material is better to use than a petrochemical derived alternative, that we can just continue to use that in perpetuity. You know, clay's taken thousands and thousands of years to form. And that's why we, as a practice, do keep coming back to biobased materials, because they can regrow. They can regrow and they come back and they rejoin the carbon and nutrient cycles at their end of life. But even within that, there are decisions about how long those cycles are, which crops, which materials and which plant species you engage with, because the carbon cycle of a tree, hundreds of years, and the time it takes to grow hardwood timber is beyond our lifespan, it's beyond our understanding, really. And something like straw, where the crop rotation is a few months, is it has a different appeal, I suppose, and it also has a different um possibility because we can engage with replenishing the nutrients to that soil much more quickly than we can within a forest system.

SPEAKER_01 19:58

It seems to me as I was reading that there is a meeting between vernacular architecture and modernist ideals about truth to materials, isn't there? Often what you're asking is that materials are treated honestly, so bricks are used to bear loads rather than as a decorative veneer. Stone is often used in a similar way as we've discussed on this podcast before. Intriguingly, Norman Foster used a similar argument to defend the use of concrete in an interview with D Zine, the digital design magazine, recently, saying that it can be used as both structure and lining of a building so that other materials become extraneous. It isn't the material itself that's bad, seemed to be his argument, but how you use it. Is that something you buy into, Summer?

SPEAKER_00 20:36

No, not really. What did you think I was gonna say? Yeah, exactly. Um no, nice try, Norman. Um well, yes, he's right in lots of ways. With all materials, it's not what you use, it's how you use it. That is true. There are so many misconceptions, and I think there's lots of things to question about what materials are being promoted and why. And every time we follow along the thread of a particular material, even ones that we think are really sustainable, there's always some harm that you find along the line of production. And it's very hard. There aren't materials which are, broadly speaking, completely good. Materials aren't like that. Production of space isn't like that. And that there is no good. There are probably ones which you could equivocally say are bad, but even that is it's truthy, you know, there's kind of grey areas around all of those questions. But what he's saying about concrete, in as far as that you don't need to line out concrete buildings with materials, and therefore it's really the bonus. It's always been true. That's not a new innovation. I mean, that's what modernist concrete buildings look like. They weren't lined out for design intent and for all sorts of other reasons, probably because we hadn't fully understood the thermal requirements of our public buildings at the time. I do agree with what you said about kind of modernist thinking, and as much as certainly the education I received at architectural school, we were still talking about those ideas, you know, the truth to materials and you know, letting a brick be a brick. And in lots of ways, maybe that has influenced the way certainly I think about you think. Use materials construction. But at the same time, modernism has led to the kind of 12 material external wall build-up systems that we use so commonly today in the building industry. And we're really interested in how you can simplify the way you make buildings. Partly also because it's very engaging when you can understand what the space you're standing in is made of. I think you have a very different relationship to that space. And buildings today sometimes they feel a bit like MacBooks, you know, like if you open up and you break the warranty and you try and fix it yourself, like no one's going to help you if something leaks in the future. And so much of that is to do with ownership structures and knowledge sharing and the technification of architecture in general. The simpler you make a building, the easier it is for everyone who's involved to engage with it.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

And to understand it. It's about material intelligence, fundamentally, is what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

Yeah. And when you get into the chapter on extraction, there's a fascinating quote where you write, it's no longer tenable to think of a site of extraction as a single place. Instead, sites of extraction are best understood as always plural, as complex systems made up of interdependent sets of people, sites, processes, and infrastructures. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 23:07

If you think about it very simply, if you're involved in making a building and one of the more extractive processes, let's say, that we could kind of clearly identify in that is that you specify a material which has to be taken out of the ground. It's literally being extracted. So you specify, let's go with timber, because it's quite an easy one to follow the line of thought. And you specify a a beam in the building, which spans kind of a long way, because you'd love a big, beautiful open span living room in your design. And that necessitates a kind of structural grading. So it has to be a particular strength, that piece of the building, and that particular beam. And that structural grading maybe isn't grown in vast quantities in the United Kingdom. So we're talking already now about getting a piece of timber.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

C24 timber, right, is what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

Well, C24 is one of the higher grading categories, yeah. So C24 timber is maybe a standard go-to classification for the grading of a piece of timber and structural use in the UK. So you might work with an engineer and they'd say, Well, we'll definitely be sure that that beam's going to hold the load we need if we get a C24. It's sort of an insurance, even though it might work with C18. We tend to just go C24 because it's an industry standard. So we'll specify a lovely piece of C24 timber for this beam. They don't grow them here in the UK, or maybe I specified one that I'd like it to look a particular way or be a particular tone. It's maybe it's a hardwood. We're talking about extracting that hardwood from a forest, potentially somewhere like a rainforest, and that has already tipped you into a whole host of extractive networks very quickly that are completely opaque to us. So the certification around sustainable forestry is often very opaque or blissful understood. It's very easy to kind of wash the documentation around illegal logging practices. It's very hard to be certain if you specified tropical hardwood in your building and it's being certified as being sustainable, that that actually is the case. It's very hard for you to be sure that the labor involved in that felling and the processing of that timber were being paid a good wage or weren't actually enslaved or indentured labor. It's very hard for you to be sure that the consequences of exporting that timber to the UK haven't had detrimental implications for the environment on the way. And so there's a whole host of consequences beyond just the extraction of the material and the biodiversity and the ecosystems around that tree. You know, there's ecological consequences to what we do. And it isn't something we're ever really taught to think about, you know, the insects and the animals and the birds and the mycelial networks that depend on diversity in forests. And we just assumed they will just continue to exist, but they are unlikely to if we continue to specify exactly the same material used in vast quantities, which necessitates plantation models. We are, through our design work, transforming the landscape irreparably, changing the way we manage and cultivate very precious resources, not just to us, but to all the life on the planet. And we have to have better awareness now, I think, of what it means when we do that through a piece of NVS software at our desk. And even I think just having a better understanding of that, which we hope the book will cultivate, I think would be a really good start that people begin to ask questions about what it means to do things the way we always have done them.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

Hope you're enjoying the episode. Just to let you know that the Material Matters Fair is returning to the barge house from the 20th to the 23rd of September. Once again, each of the five floors will be doing something slightly different, but all will be related to materials. There'll also be a talks programme, some returning exhibitors, so the wood awards will be there, as will the excellent Hagen Hinderdale and Mixed Metals, for example. And there'll be some exciting new names such as Nova Vita Design. If you're interested in taking part, do drop me a line at hello at materialmatters.design. That's hello at materialmatters.design. Your use of wood as an example there is kind of intriguing because I think there's a group of people who think that CLT engineered timber is a panacea to all architecture and construction issues. And we've done podcasts on CLT on this show. And you're quite clear it isn't in the book. I mean you talk about wood's benefits and you use wood a lot, but it it isn't the answer to all our issues.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

No, I don't think it is. I think we we don't believe that to be the case. I'm also not sure there is one answer to all our issues anyway, in any circumstance. I think every project is specific and you have to look at where it is and what the materials are around it and question the assumptions we've had about kind of materials being kind of global in that way. But it's an interesting thing, this kind of propagation of CLT in the industry as being the kind of cure all for the substitution out of concrete. You know, if you take concrete out of buildings, we need something that can go back in with kind of the same simplicity and standardization and CLT is being offered up. There are lots of reasons why locking lots of carbon into a building, which you do through introducing more biomass into a built structure, is a good thing. But there are also lots of reasons why felling vast quantities of trees to make buildings in very simplistic ways is not an inherently good thing. And for us, actually, the provocation first came from a conversation we had with Jez Ralph, who is a very knowledgeable timber consultant and engineer based in the Southwest. And he came to do a talk to us at the practice, and he said something kind of off the cuff, like, well, obviously CRT is the most arrogant use of timber you could possibly imagine. And we were like, What? Did you want to expand on that for us?

SPEAKER_01 28:29

Yes, that's quite interesting.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

That's really that's really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

And I'm intrigued, what did he say?

SPEAKER_00 28:33

Yeah, he said exactly that he said that the volume of timber that it demands is completely impractical. The idea that you would be making all of your buildings out of solid mass timber in that way necessitates and demands forestry systems beyond the ones we have. You know, our consumption of timber in the UK is 80% imported. We have none of the resources to use timber in the way we want. So, the very least, talking about using CLT in all our buildings is really talking about taking trees from other places in huge, huge quantities. And we don't do that already. So we're talking about increasing the demand we put on our forestry systems to very pressured and very precious. And then sometimes I think CLT is used in ways which is arrogant or is superfluous. I mean, there is no need really to use solid timber in a wall when you can work with stick systems which are much lighter and leaner and more efficient. I guess the general premise is you need to question these things. When someone offers you a solution, is it really necessarily the right one? And the problem we have always had, and the reason I think that we were so engaged with what Jez was saying, was you can use timber in construction in very simple ways, and then you can also take it all apart, cut it down into small bits, glue it back together with really toxic chemicals, coat it in fire retardants, and then put it back in a building. And actually it's not doing the same thing that it was doing when you were just using that timber straight from the sawmill. And so one of the reservations we've always had about CLT is the different chemicals and glues that are used to bind it together, what their longevity is in their lifespan, because actually we haven't had CLT buildings long enough to see what happens over time and to really understand the consequences. And actually, it makes the timber when you coat it in these different chemicals and glues very hard to compost. You can't put that back into the ground after you've covered it in this stuff. For us, it's a real problem. We we really don't want to be using materials which can't go back into a into the carbon cycle and back into the soil because if you don't feed the soil, we're not going to be able to grow more things.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

I'm quite intrigued, Summer, by your relationship with the factory. You talk about it as being a site of experimentation as opposed to what often people would think about it as being a kind of Fordist, tailorist type place. So how is it a site of experimentation for you?

SPEAKER_00 30:47

Yeah, I think the factory was one of the first things that brought me and Paloma together, our kind of excitement about the opportunities we think it offers, this place of production, particularly around the ideas of prefabricating buildings, because one of the issues maybe in architecture that I see and we've been frustrated with for years is that we have given the responsibility for the tools that we use away to different parts of the industry. So we're not really involved in the design of the software that people might complain about, you know, things like building information modeling softwares, which can streamline data management of buildings, but at the same time, they can limit the way that you design. But of course, they might do that if we're not involved and engage with the practice of developing that software and taking control of how it's used. And I think the same thing about factories, you know, we can talk critically about how poor quality modular housing and prefabricated housing perpetuates problems and systems which we don't think are good. But if we don't engage with systems of prefabrication, we are handing the control over that very vast portion of building to different sectors of the industry. And, you know, the house building industry is building swathes of our land. You know, they are responsible for how lots of the country looks today. And if we aren't engaged with the systems they're engaging with, I think we are effectively giving control of the appearance of our buildings and the quality of our land and urban fabric away. We also imagine, I think, the a factory offers so much. You know, you're in a safe space, you're not working at height, you're not working in the rain. The kinds of work and the culture of working in factories is different to the kind of work you do on a site. It allows different people to be involved in the practice of making buildings, it allows greater diversity, it builds different cultures of teams. It offers the opportunity for different disciplines to work together in the same place, you know, that you can have design and fabrication all under one roof. So I think we think there is an opportunity there for us to grasp, I think, as an industry, you know, and as a profession, to think about systems and scaling. Because ultimately, I think if we aren't engaging with the materials that we talk about at scale, we aren't engaging with how they will affect change for everyone. It's very easy, I think, with natural materials and low carbon systems to operate successfully financially for a long time in a world of bespoke one-off homes. And we're not interested in doing that for our the length of our careers. We're interested in how we can change the quality of the lowest common denominator housing in the country. You know, how do you make these materials affordable and effective at scale? You know, how do we get Barrett Holmes to use them? How do we get Taylor Wimpy involved in wood fiber insulation or straw insulation? That's really interesting and that's really difficult.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

So it's a marriage fundamentally of craft the factory and technology for you.

SPEAKER_00 33:32

Yeah, absolutely, I think.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

But you've been working at H. G. Matthews Brickworks in South Buckinghamshire. How did that relationship begin?

SPEAKER_00 33:39

The relationship began when my partner Paloma was working on a project called Flat House, which is built in Cambridgeshire. And I think she was working very closely with Jim Matthews, one of the directors of the brick factory, in the production of the hemp creep panels, which were used in Flathouse, so they're prefabricated hemp creep panels. And they were actually put together at HG Matthews because I think really interestingly, and it's very exciting, that a brick manufacturer has their own RD department. So HG Matthews, they've been developing what we would call uh innovative materials and what other people might call traditional materials for a long time. So they have uh beautiful clay plasters and they were making hemp creek blocks for a long time. And they've also been developing a product called Strox and Stroquettes, these adobe bricks and blocks. So they've been invested in, I think, and interested in how their knowledge, which is working with clay and their skills, could translate into developing new products for a low-carbon market. And so they felt like a really appropriate partner and they were really interesting business. They're still a family-run business, and they've been making bricks the same way for, you know, over a hundred years, I think now. It just felt like a really great partnership. So we collaborate with them as much as possible. We try and promote their materials wherever we can, and we're now working with them and developing a series of construction skills courses, so material skills courses that we run from HD Matthews in Buckinghamshire, where we're will be facilitating the teaching of lime plastering and clay plastering and working with hempcrete and light earth construction, so that we can expand the pool of access to these different skills and start to engage with that section of the industry, I think.

SPEAKER_01 35:11

And talking of skills, repair is a very important element, the new construction landscape you're envisaging.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

Yeah, it's really important. And there's so many ways to think of what repair is and what it means. You know, one of the ways we talk about it most at the moment, I think, is kind of landscape repair and reparations, which in itself is a huge topic to get into. But maybe on a day-to-day basis for us, that kind of repair is thinking about how you know agro-ecological systems could start to undo some of the damage that the industrial landscape systems we've been relying on have done. But there's also the maintenance and repair of buildings on a day-to-day basis and building a culture of that repair. Every time we talk about working with, I don't know, let's say clay, plaster, or lime or straw in a building. Conversations around repair are really at the forefront of our minds and also our clients, I think. And it's really important for everyone involved to be brought into the idea that there'd be part of your role as a owner or let's say or if a user of building is also custodial. If you have the privilege of existing within a space, you also have the privilege of maintaining it. And to understand how you can do that is really important. So we really try to share that knowledge with people who work with us or people who might, you know, take on buildings that we've designed afterwards. So there's kind of manuals to help you understand how you can repair it. You know, working with lime and clay is actually fairly straightforward. With a bit of skill, at least you could fill a hole after you've hung up a painting, that kind of thing. So there's kind of like the micro reparations, you know, like filling and plastering, and then there's the kind of macro ones where we're trying to think about landscape systems in this country, but also global ones and how they could be improved.

SPEAKER_01 36:42

We have a massive skills gap in this country. It's going to take at least two generations until we have enough, I don't know, thatchers to thatch the number of thatch roofs that you might want.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, there's a huge skills gap. I think it's really exciting and interesting, actually, that section of the built environment and the opportunity there for quite radical change, quite transformative change to happen very quickly. In lots of ways, it feels so tangible because shifting the way we teach construction skills and shifting the way we understand how you implement them in the built environment would affect change overnight. So, one of the places, you know, this project we're doing in Buckinghamshire with H. G. Matthews, where we'll be teaching construction skills, is is just the kind of starter for us. But we've been doing lots of research work this last year looking at how you might transform more, let's say, infrastructural construction education at a national level and how you start to intervene at different apprentice levels across the education system. There is a huge skills gap, but it there is also going to be, I think, an opportunity in that where jobs, you know, there'll be the need for climate-resilient skills and jobs over the next decades. And the construction industry can be a place where they are fostered, not just within the making of buildings, but also within the growing of the materials and the forestry industries that also have skills gaps so which could be filled. So I think there is an opportunity, we would love to be engaging with how that is taken up. But yeah, at the moment, one of the limiting factors for us in putting buildings together is finding the people who are knowledgeable and invested in doing them in the way that we think they should be done. It's particularly difficult, I think, once you're working on buildings at scale and working with contractors who maybe haven't heard of Hemp Creep before or don't really know some of the materials and backing boards that you've specified that work better with clay plasters than others. Every project now for us is a process of upskilling the team that we work with, you know, showing them and sharing the knowledge that we have learnt with them. But there's an opportunity, I think, to do that kind of wholesale at Skills Academy level, which would be much more effective.

SPEAKER_01 38:42

It's shifting people back to land-based jobs fundamentally, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 38:45

Yeah, absolutely. In lots of ways it makes so much sense because the processes of maintenance of, let's say, a continuous cover forest over a monoculture plantation forest demand so much more labor. But that is in lots of ways a great thing that there are more jobs and that those jobs can be rooted in the communities in and around those landscape resources rather than outsourced to places that don't have a direct relationship with where those materials have come from. But at the same time, I think you know, we need so much investment from the state in that transformation because for a long time we have subsidized harmful industries and practices, and we have allowed large-scale manufacturing lobbies to completely shift the way our regulations are structured and written. And actually now the overnight transformation of a forestry industry into a more sustainable one is not possible without intervention from the state and without the kind of subsidizing and support that we offered the concrete industry and the steel industry at the time that they were in their inception.

SPEAKER_01 39:44

Have you send the book to Keir Stelmer?

SPEAKER_00 39:46

No, I haven't. I hadn't thought about that.

SPEAKER_01 39:49

Maybe, maybe we should. I am jumping around a little bit, but in some way that book its coverage is vast. And we have touched on land use, but I'd like to come back to it if I may, because this is a vital model you're proposing. And essentially, we need to turn more of our land over to biomaterials. At the moment, nearly half of the UK's land is used for grazing or growing feedstock for animals. And in your view, this has to stop. So, what would your model look like?

SPEAKER_00 40:16

We're working on developing that at the office now, so give me some time and we'll show you a drawing. What is interesting in what you said, because I'm not entirely sure that it does necessarily demand great shift in land use. We're talking about working with materials that are grown in from the landscape. So we're talking about using more timber and we're using more straw, let's say, as an example, if we pick two kind of classic biobased materials. There are huge swathes of agricultural land given over to the production of wheat in the UK and to other grains as a global condition. You know, straw is being produced all over the world all the time. And actually, one of the things that we're interested in doing is understanding if there is enough of that being produced as a secondary waste stream to fulfill the demands in housing that we foresee, or the kind of new construction which is anticipated. And some of the papers that we've been looking at recently actually suggests that there is. But straw has other demands on it. It's not just demanded by housing and construction. You know, it's used by farmers to fertilize their own soil. It's used as bedding, it has a whole host of other kind of applications. So maybe what we're talking about is taking that secondary waste stream and diverting it to a new industry in vast quantities. But we are, I think, talking about hectares and hectares of afforestation and reforestation as much as possible. And that would suggest a very different landscape, I think. And we're also interested in how you might start to blend those systems because actually, if you look at maybe historical and talking about, you know, thousands of years ago, different landscape systems which might have naturally existed, there would have been places where we would have had openings within forestry systems and then kind of uh forestry cover within more, let's say, like kind of open landscape systems. So kind of agroecological farming, which is something that we've been looking at a lot more recently and are really interested in, offers, I think, a means of having greater biodiversity and climate resilience from which you draw food and materials and offer livelihoods. So I guess our vision for a different landscape and how the built environment might key into that is one where you have many more trees, but where you are growing things for food, you're growing that in a kind of mixed systems where you have a blend of trees and shrubs and crops which all support each other in a kind of holistic system.

SPEAKER_01 42:31

And fewer animals? I mean, are you advocating, I don't know, removing sheep from the lake districts and reforesting that area, for instance?

SPEAKER_00 42:38

I think yes, that we should have far fewer grazing animals in this country. I'm not knowledgeable enough to say with any particular landscape system whether that's the right place to do it. The the issue we have with the UK is that we have very infertile, poor quality upland soil and very good quality lowland fertile soil. And in the lowlands, we farm and grow food, and in the uplands we've had sheep. The uplands would also be a good place to reforest, but that is not going to be the place where we will be reforesting for construction use because the trees will be relatively poor quality for timber because you can't maintain those forestry systems in the way that you maintain lowland forestry systems. Things have come about in the way that they have for a reason, but we have to we eat too much meat and we have too many grazing animals, and that's an accepted truth. What we do with that land afterwards, I'm not the most knowledgeable person to say, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

Okay, I won't pry. The book finishes with a chapter on straw, and we've mentioned straw a lot in this conversation. Can we talk about the big benefits of straw?

SPEAKER_00 43:37

Yeah, there are a lot that we are excited about. I think for me the main one is the one I've talked about already, is that straw is a secondary waste stream. It makes it a really exciting and promising biobase material for a kind of post carbon construction industry where you're not talking about generating new material systems, you're not talking about putting further demands on a very constrained land use, you're not really talking about shifting dramatically the practices we exist with today. You know, you can imagine a world where we will still demand as much wheat as we do today, if not more, from which the secondary waste stream of straw could be offered to the building industry. So there's kind of a an opportunity there, I think, to work with something without dramatically adjusting agricultural practices and the way we eat and the way we live. But also it's very insulating material. It's very low cost. It's very simple to put into buildings and it makes buildings which are warm and safe to live in, but that I think at a very simple level don't look very different from the buildings that we exist within today. You know, talking about living within a rammed earth house or a kind of mass CLT building, one made entirely of Adobe, those are kind of cultural shifts. And in all of those buildings you can go around and line plaster and render them internally, but straw has to be lime plastered or covered in clay to make it fire resistant. And ultimately there are straw buildings all over the UK. It is a vernacular system that we inherit in our landscape. It's not one that has been propagated recently for all sorts of different reasons. But we have that knowledge, we have that understanding of how to live within those buildings and we have an abundance of straw being grown very regularly. So it feels like a great opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 45:17

And actually I tell a lie because I said straw was the final chapter but then you have this incredibly long glossary.

SPEAKER_00 45:24

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

Language obviously very important to you and changing the language in the construction architecture industry seems important.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

Yeah it was very much part of our conversations in developing the book with Amaka how we talk about the ideas that we're discussing and how we share them, you know, it's as important to us that the language was accessible as possible, that the book was very small and could fit in your pocket because we don't want these ideas to sit and stay within an academic context. They have done for a very long time. We want to be talking about these ideas at the pub or you know with people at the park. Like they're kind of everyday changes I think that we could all be thinking about. And so talking about making the language not academic was very important for us trying to share our understanding of the words we use. I mean it's really interesting I think today in sustainability how language is bandied about and misused and misrepresented and so you might see a project being promoted as being regenerative design. What on earth is regenerative design? You know it really depends who you ask what it means. And our definition and our use of the word regenerative is different from someone else's. And sometimes you might drill into someone else's sustainable building award and you'll find there are lots of things about it that you think are super unsustainable. Making the terms clear, highlighting them in the book so that you could find their definition at the back. So as you go through the book words are highlighted in yellow if it's a term that we thought we'd like to expand on so that you could at least see our interpretation of it. You know, they're not dictionary definitions they're just how we're using the word while we're talking to each other. But that felt like once we'd done it, we'd compiled this glossary it was so nice to share it with people. Maybe even more important at the end of the glossary we have our kind of further reading list and the useful organization. So all the organizations who we draw on or refer to and all the books that we've read some of the books that we wish we'd read between the four of us and we put together this list of books that are places but lots of the ideas that we refer to kind of originate.

SPEAKER_01 47:16

Kind of finally as a codes to all this can we talk about how you're putting these ideas into practice there's the flat house which has received a lot of publicity we've talked about it on this podcast at Marchant's farm made of hemp in the Cambridgeshire countryside. But you more recently did the block house in Somerset which again uses hemp crete and timber but the foundations are interesting.

SPEAKER_00 47:37

Yeah that project was I guess for us yeah an opportunity to build another demonstrator to try something new and the foundations became really fundamental to our conception of the building because it was next to some quite mature trees and the reason we were building that building was that a very mature beech tree had fallen in a storm and crushed the building which had previously sat on that site. It was a beautiful 80 year old tree the diameter was something like I don't know 1.2 meters it was a really extraordinary thing. But we found that there was a kind of fungal disease in the soil and which is the reason that the trees were destabilizing. And we looked at the root balls and we had an arboriculturist come and work with us on mapping out where the root balls of those trees ended. And so we moved the building to just outside of that zone so that it wouldn't we hoped destabilize any of the other trees in the future because the previous building had a concrete slab and we think that had been part of what had damaged the tree which had fallen. Thinking about how we could make then very little impact on the ground was kind of a starting point so we didn't want to damage the soil as m any further. We didn't want to introduce a new ground bearing slab if we could avoid it. And there were lots of ways of doing that. We looked at screw piles um which are these like basically the massive screws that you can like wind into the ground and they're quite cool because you can then wind them out again after so you can the foundations can actually leave the ground afterwards. You don't leave them in the soil but they're quite expensive and they're they're made of steel. And then actually talking to HG Matthews we found that they had introduced some flint into trench foundations on a project that they were doing and flint is pretty readily available all over the country especially where you've been extracting clay there's with flint in the ground it's used as rubble in laying hardcore or in concrete and so we have these trenches of flint which we worked on our detailing with our engineer which the building sits on and then a kind of capping which is a lime creek capping on which the building sits and then the timber building floats across those two foundations. So it's basically trenches of rock and rock's very good for foundations. But yeah it was it was an experiment it was we were lucky to have a kind of engaged building inspector and an engineer who's on board with trying to think outside the problem.

SPEAKER_01 49:34

And then there's the Phoenix project which is what a 700 home sustainable development in Lewis in Sussex. What are you doing there?

SPEAKER_00 49:41

Because this is on scale right yeah this is for us it's really exciting because we're working finally to take these ideas to a multi-story building scale. The project in Lewis is led by a developer called Human Nature and they have engaged a number of different architects across the 700 unit site to develop designs which sit within that kind of design code so as sustainable as possible, making great places to live, but also working with timber supply chains from in and around Sussex is the idea. And so we're developing uh hundred units of that project so a number of courtyard or kind of open courtyard buildings which are about four stories with different mixes of housing so some apartments some duplexes and then also some kind of full terraced houses. Yeah our design is maybe lots of ways derived from flat house they're timber buildings with hempcrete in fill cassettes.

SPEAKER_01 50:28

Very good and you've recently written a report with ARUP about the biobased future of the North Eastern Yorkshire. So change is happening.

SPEAKER_00 50:35

Yes we hope so one of the things we found when we did that work was that there was lots of opportunity and also lots of industry in the Northeastern Yorkshire kind of exciting material manufacturers who were setting up different companies, starting to think in different ways and provide materials to the industry and lots of opportunity within as a deindustrialized landscape to provide jobs where they needed the most towns and villages and cities that have lost a lot of employment opportunity by starting to source materials for the construction industry regionally. So growing materials that you would need for the construction industry in let's say Yorkshire and supplying them within Yorkshire and using them to build Yorkshire's housing suggests a kind of re-shifting or reallocation of employment opportunity to the region, which is really I think really promising. And there were lots of great conversations and and also like we think lots of fantastic recommendations in that report to the local authorities and in lots of ways now we're dealing with the traction that you find with the mechanisms of state in implementing and following through on work that they commission for us from us because we put all these recommendations together and I think there are lots of levers that could be pulled at planning level a local authority level to start to implement this change.

SPEAKER_01 51:49

But they are yet to be pulled right right so you have the exhibition you've got the book you've got this big project in Lewis traditionally I round these interviews off by asking what's next but is there anything else that that we've missed out?

SPEAKER_00 52:02

Yeah this year for us is really great. We're starting a number of new build projects a couple of them are in agricultural contexts so that's really exciting that we're developing buildings on land from which we can also draw the materials for the project. So one of those is going to be in Suffolk and the other one is in the southwest. So we're quite excited to be designing buildings very sort of hyper-regionally engaging with the materials that are derived from the land right next to the buildings. But we're also starting a couple of new research projects this year as we have these two quite distinct arms of the work that we do in the office, kind of the strategic research and then the the building design and we're now expanding our work in forestry um that we've been doing this last year into research into agroecological systems. And we're also starting a project in Berlin with a group called Bauhaus Ur, looking at taking some of the work we've done in Yorkshire in the Northeast and trying to think about how different parts of Germany could also be doing more in their transition towards bioregional and biobased construction. We're sort of starting to take those ideas and think about how they could work and export them. Yeah, across different boundaries and borders.

SPEAKER_01 53:10

Very good summer I've taken up loads of your time. Thank you very much that was great.

SPEAKER_00 53:14

No thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 53:15

Thank you for having me material reform building for a post-carbon future is out now. Home grown at London's building centre runs until the 15th of April and you can discover all about summer and material cultures at materialcultures.org. As ever there are images from the interviews on our Instagram page materialmatters.design and you can find all the podcasts that I've done sign up to our newsletter and lots of other stuff at materialmatters.design Finally this is really important too if you've enjoyed listening and want to see this podcast flourish then please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this from and it would make me incredibly happy if you went to my Patreon page and made a pledge at patreon.com forward slash material matters. For as little as two pounds fifty a month you can receive exclusive posts, blogs and thoughts from yours truly as well as getting access to each episode before it's published to the wider world. Material matters is a completely independent concern and any help you can offer would be hugely appreciated. Ultimately you'll be helping to take the message to the importance of materials skill craft and design to a whole new audience. Next week I'm talking to Darren Apiegi about turning wastewood. Until then thanks very much for listening