The Uncommon Sense of Thorpe and Wilkhu's The Sustainable City
By Kate Mazade
It's just common sense.
Those four words resounded in my head when I was reading The Sustainable City: London's Greenest Architecture — my internal dialogue more energized and hopeful than when typically reading architecture books.
Why isn't every architect constructing creative and resilient spaces? A repurposed high rise or an office in a railway tunnel — genius, but so simple. Maybe it's more like uncommon sense.
Published by Horton Mini Press in 2022, The Sustainable City is a masterpiece by design writer Harriet Thorpe and photographer Taran Wilkhu.
The book starts by defining sustainable cities as places that "provide all the basic and necessary provisions for the people who live in [them], including safe resources, services, and affordable housing" and "present dynamic opportunities, shared prosperity, social stability, and make environmentally friendly living an easy choice for [their] citizens."
Sounds perfectly practical to me, albeit unusual to the way cities function today.
The Sustainable City book spread.
The book is set up as a straightforward manual, separating 34 projects into four categories — Live, Work, Play, and Share — preceded by a short guide outlining six ways to build a sustainable city.
The short, colorful chapters walk through exemplary projects that transform a historic world capital into a forward-thinking metropolis — one that will still be historic and forward-thinking for centuries to come if we use these projects as inspiration.
The projects — ranging from Nimtim Architects’ Cork House to Surman Weston's Hackney School of Food — focus on reusing the resources the sites already have, not just sustainably, but aesthetically. Smartly, the buildings recognize the beauty of the site's previous life and use it as the foundation for the future structure.
The recycled paper cover provides a spine for numerous full page and full spread photos that bring life and light to the projects included, showing the real and imaginative spaces that comprise the resilient future of a city.
The Sustainable City book spread.
Beautifully captured by Wilkhu, each chapter also features a portrait of the architect in the space they designed. What I noticed immediately was how happy they each looked, as if making the world a more resilient and beautiful place brought them infinite joy, which of course makes total sense.
The chapter “Create places people care about” — the sixth way to build a sustainable city — poses the question "Whose responsibility is it to care for a city?"
The simple answer, it's all of ours. And yet, have I done anything today, or even this year, that contributed to the longevity of my home?
Perhaps it's time to re-examine why we as a society are so hesitant to implement practical, good ideas that not only make the world a better place, but might also make us happy. Why does common sense feel so far-fetched? And what can we do to change that?
We could start with a little refresher course, like reading a delightful book that harnesses the simplicity of sustainability.
The Sustainable City is available as a carbon-neutral hardback.