Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans
'Thrive in Construction' is the only podcast that delves into the personal journeys of sustainability leaders and innovators in the construction industry across the UK. Our show differentiates by offering unscripted, passion-fueled conversations that go beyond the buzzwords to the heart of what's driving the industry forward. It's tailored for aspiring professionals, seasoned experts, and anyone with a keen interest in the sustainable evolution of construction. We're here at a time when the call for sustainable development is not just a trend, but a societal imperative, empowering listeners to build a career that contributes to a greener future.
Thrive In Construction with Darren Evans
Ep. 64 ‘There’s No Such Thing as Waste – Just Resources Waiting to Be Reused’ | What Is A Circular Economy
Sustainability expert and architect Duncan Baker-Brown discusses innovative approaches to sustainable construction and the circular economy on this episode of the Thrive In Construction podcast. Duncan shares insights from his groundbreaking project, the Brighton Waste House, a teaching facility built using 55 tons of discarded materials, which not only meets passive house standards but also serves as a beacon for sustainable design.
Duncan explores the impact of construction waste, which accounts for over 60% of the UK's total waste, and the urgent need to rethink how we use and reuse materials in the built environment. From using reclaimed materials like old toothbrushes to developing buildings designed for disassembly, he explains how the industry can shift away from its wasteful linear model to a more resource-efficient circular economy.
Throughout the conversation, Duncan also touches on the role of policy and initiatives, like the potential for regulations on embodied carbon in construction, and how cities can become "material banks" for future developments. He gives an in-depth look at his book, "The Reuse Atlas," which features case studies on how circular economy principles are being successfully applied in architecture and construction.
Links:
Duncan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncan-baker-brown-b1890924/
BakerBrown: https://bakerbrown.studio/
Duncan's book 'The Reuse Atlas': https://www.amazon.co.uk/Re-Use-Atlas-Designers-Towards-Circular/dp/1859466443
Darren: https://darrenevans.komi.io/
The next episodes of Thriving Construction come straight from FutureBuild. Huge thanks to EcoCocoon. The space was great for chats, acoustics and, even better, well-being.
Speaker 2:For every five houses built in the UK, one house worth of material went to landfill and incineration. One in five, one in five. We've improved it. It's now about one in six. One in six and a half, but not much. I was going to say that's not a big chunk. Six, one in six and a half, but not much. I was gonna say that's not a big chum, no.
Speaker 2:And if you think we're, you know housing in this country is built mainly by, uh, commercial entities of developers wanting to make money. Well, and they're buying big ones, aren't they? Yeah, but they're buying stuff that gets thrown away. Why would you? So? What I was trying to do is shine a light on that, because the construction sector forms over 60 63 percent of all the waste in the UK is from our construction sector. So I'm thinking well, we can see we're house building, but not just house building.
Speaker 2:The construction industry is wasteful. It's maybe not today because of Trump's tariffs, but normally it is cheaper to throw material with building site to keep the labor force busy than it is for them to run out material and then charge you for an afternoon's webinar and done anything. So sites tend to get materials thrown at them and if, at the on a friday, you're throwing a load of stuff in the skip, so be it. But when you look at the statistics on waste streams coming off construction sites, it's something like yeah, 14% of waste flow from a construction site is surplus material that's never been used. So you know, this is quite shocking. So we started with that and thought right, what we'll do is working with the Mears Group, by the way, and this is set in Brighton campus of the, the school of art and media, um, and we'll work with the local big contractor who services and maintains social housing in Brighton, because the city owns its own social housing and builds its own social houses. That's quite unusual. So the city helped us, um Mears, who are the contractors. They helped us. They ran the site, they set up the site, they let us have a site agent for 18 months for nothing, and he ran the site. He knew about building and along with him came uh, four or five of their apprentices, but their apprentices will get called off to real work, as it were, normal work on occasion. So what we brought to it was um students learning construction skills from the brighton Metropolitan Technical College as well as our own architecture, interior architecture students.
Speaker 2:They came together and we started building this thing made out of whatever waste material could get hold of. Initially it was construction waste. So even when we chose to found the site on campus it's a raised bit of site at the corner of this big sort of quadrangle campus, the School of Art we dug down thinking we were on chalk. Where Brian's on chalk, we're on a landfill site, so we're on a pile of rubbish, a big hole. And then we got chalk from a neighboring site to impacted that, you know, got us compacted. That made a stable base out of waste chalk from someone else's site.
Speaker 2:Then we built up off of that and we started, by the way, we were designing this thing to passive house standards. So we we actually the walls are all built off these what are called perensil blocks, which are really expensive. They're spun glass with bitumen so they're load-bearing, they're damp-proof and they're a block Really expensive, but the site was throwing them away. So we've got that and that's Passive House detail, that's to make sure you've got a sort of proper thermal wrap and no breaks. And that thermal wrap and no breaks and that, and then off that we built, um, an unusual, uh, timber column and beam system, which was boxes 400 by 400 wide box beams and box columns made from 360 sheets of waste ply that we collected, plus off cuts of timber, stud that we got out of stud petitions and stuff, but it was. I mean, we really had to look, um, but once you start looking, people start giving. We'd get swamped with stuff as well. And luckily, brianhoe city council they gave us a building that we could store stuff in, because some of it we were. We were getting stuff. I'm thinking I don't know what we'll do with that, but give me a couple weeks or a couple months to grow. And we then partnered um free freegal uk, which is has three and a half million subscribers now, but it's an online swapping major.
Speaker 2:So, like Freesight, and one of its founders was from Brighton, there's a woman called Kat Fletcher. She started sourcing stuff for us, but she's a real sort of activist in the world of waste trying to turn that linear system into a circular one. And so she said why don't we? And this was 10 years ago, remember? She said why don't we? And this was 10 years ago, remember. She said why don't we make people aware of the stuff they throw away every minute, every hour of every day. So basically a lot of plastic stuff.
Speaker 2:So we started asking for secondhand toothbrushes, old toothbrushes. We thought Brighton's got a population of 270,000. That means it's got at least a million toothbrushes in people's meds, so couples and these. So we got about 1, a million toothbrushes in people's meds, soup capsules and these. So we got about a thousand toothbrushes, which wasn't very much. Then we got a call from a cabin service company from Gatwick airport, someone that cleans out airliners when they land, when they've come from JFK in New York, gone across the Atlantic and landed in Gatwick. They said we can get you toothbrushes. They got us 25,000 toothbrushes collected in four days. Four days, yeah. So why did we do that? Because we then put it in the cavity of the walls.
Speaker 2:I mean, basically the way the house was constructed is, between these 400 by 400 ply coals was a gap of about two and a half metres and we just made these other ply boxes that were 400 deep, 900 wide and then two and a half meters. And we just put, made these other pie boxes that were 400 deep, 900 wide and then two and a half meters high, and we filled them through a stuff to collect stuff. And this stuff had different reasons for being collected. Initially it would have been just construction waste. It's not waste, it's valuable. But then, with the toothbrushes, it was because, um, the building's actually a teaching facility for young students from the university and beyond. The point of the toothbrush is saying do you realize that, if you think of the life cycle of this toothbrush, it's gone from being a valuable fossil fuel from oil processed into plastic, processed into a toothbrush, put on an airplane, flown from New York to Gatwick and then incinerated. Don't be the person that designs that thing. Design that out that process. Decouple from that wasteful process. So the waste house, completed, has got about 250 stories associated with different materials and products.
Speaker 2:We made sure that from the outside it looked like a complete building. Um, it looks like a black tile building with, uh, you know it looks like a house at the end of the draft. But, for example, when you go up to the black tiles and you have a look, they're carpet tiles. So the reason they're black is because it's the side that's stuck down to the floor. Normally, the black rubber and the colorful side is on the other side, so you don't see that. So you got this sort of black rubber facade. But even that we, you know we wouldn't have put it on there if we, if it hadn't got, hadn't passed a fire test. So we got building, regulate building control at um brian host city council. They were heavily involved. They actually witnessed the fire tests we did with a blow torch on these, these tiles. They didn't burn, they just smoked. I don't know why they don't burn, but they passed the fire test. So they're on the facade and they make the building look quite cool. You know it looks like a contemporary building. But when you go up to the height, wow, what's that? And then you notice this black tile whatever it is, a corner, external corner. It bends around you Like, oh, it external corner. It bends around me like, oh, it's floppy as well. So it's interesting because he's now 10 years old and the calf excels still look great.
Speaker 2:But since then we've had other layers of stuff and other research projects, um, and that often involves our students. So you know, the first time we built this thing it was a year on site, it was on budget, on time, built by over 360 students with amazing staff. For example, you know we've got the staff who teach people how to be bricklayers, electricians, plasters, plumbers. They were signing off the work that then building regulations signed off. So we had a system of making sure it was all done properly where structural engineer involved etc. So it's all signed off from a planning and building regulations point of view. When you walk inside it looks pretty normal downstairs but upstairs is this big vaulted space and the timber structure for that vault we salvaged from a project I was doing which was a new country house for someone. They they had a 1970s sort of eight or nine-bedroom big house.
Speaker 2:As a practice we try not to demolish buildings and this building was a sort of deep green retrofit extension and transformation of this building, sort of wrapping it with insulation externally, using timber from the client's estate to clad the building, all that stuff. But there was a point when the VAT element, because if you're retrofitting existing residential buildings you pay VAT at 20 to 10. If you demolish that building and start again, it's a new build and there's no VAT. So it got to a point where the VAT on this retrofit extension was over 370,000 pounds. So the client said you know, I can get this building demolished for seven and a half thousand pounds. So we made sure it had to come down, which is madness, because the week get this building demolished for seven and a half thousand. So we made sure it had to come down, which is madness because the week after it's demolished we're putting walls back where they were last week, but it's now as a new build and not attracting vat. So that material came to the timber from that house, from the house of the way, the roof of the house, of the waste house, and now I can point to and say that was a gift from george osborne, who was child to trust of the exchequer at the time. But it's so.
Speaker 2:We've used this building as a sort of thought provoker. We're not saying you should be building the toothbrushes, but in the middle of of the waste house is a two-story, uh, ram chalk wall. I would say build with ram chalk. It's beautiful and we, our students, took a day and a half to build that wall. It's 400 mil thick. Again, it's one and a half stories high, is 10 tons of chalk compressed and it's load-bearing and it costs the same amount to construct because you may need labor, as it does if you poured concrete. So it's just a lot better. It was. You know, I actually paid a lorry driver £110 to dump the chalk in his lorry on our land at UMass Lebrun so we could ram it and make a wall out of it.
Speaker 1:It seems as though to me that there's kind of two themes here. One is the money from a taxation point of view, or from a profit point of view, or from a profit point of view. The other theme as well to me is that actually there is no such thing as waste. It's just a resource that people don't know what to do with, and so what we just need to do is hide it or try and convert it into energy, which you know is effectively, is burning it right, yeah, yeah so so how do you think that these two elements can come closer together so that this one-off can become an attractive or a norm, maybe not for the big, big house builders, but maybe for the medium size or the or the smaller house builders?
Speaker 2:I think it's for everybody, because I think what you can learn about it is designing out waste. So the big house builders will be using modern methods of construction and offsite construction. That's a big tick, because you eliminate waste by having the thing pre-made in a factory and then waste flows on site are dramatically reduced. So that's for everybody.
Speaker 1:So you're saying here that, in terms of my question, that, um, that this shouldn't be just for the mid-size and below?
Speaker 2:this needs to be, that we're talking about systems change here. So so, from a sort of take, make and throw away society to which is the linear system, to a circular system where sort of waste from one system is a resource for another. And so I often say our cities are our hope, because where this is done, so because most stuff produced ends up in cities, whether it's clothes, food, food or cleaned water or energy or building products or whatever they come into cities, they at the moment they flow in and out and actually these different flows don't tend to touch each other. They're different businesses, low and silos, yeah, flying size. So it's about understanding how this works and there are people who that's their job to look into that. There are people that map the flows, stuff in and out of cities that I work with, and so you can look at that and basically, instead of it going out the city again, if you can grab it and say no, he stays here. You, then your city is a material bank for future developments.
Speaker 2:In the netherlands at the moment would have had a circular economy plan for the city for a decade to not city for the country for a decade, and they've got really ambitious um, zero waste targets for their cities there? Um, you've, they've had to look at how to design out waste. They've had to look at mapping their cities as a resource bank and seeing how waste from one sector can be a resource for others. And that's why in my book, the Reuse Atlas, which was published last autumn by the RIVA, a lot of the case studies are from the Netherlands. Just because of this high-level policy, which is about the whole country and all industries, but actually the construction sector, which is one the whole country in all industries, but actually the construction sector, which is one of the biggest industries, has been profoundly affected by that, and I don't think we're that far away from having that in the uk as well, for different reasons I'll be talking about in a minute. So I I think it's, it's gonna be best practice. I mean, we're in a world of resource. Resource security is a thing of the past.
Speaker 2:Yeah, whether it's because of, you know, climate, um, induced fires, floods or whatever, or wars, or donald trump putting tariffs on things, yeah, if you want to be tariff proof, rework what you already own. So you know, there are, there are companies in the in the netherlands that one of their largest banks, the amb amro. They give their clients circular economy advice. They describe themselves as not only a financial bank but a materials bank, because if you think you've got that, you know they, they say that they.
Speaker 2:Their portfolio is over 600 billion pounds worth of properties around the world. If you think a lot of those commercial properties, that's all the buildings in financial districts. I have a 20-year business back which assumes at the end of that 20 years that building's destroyed or profoundly knocked down and started again. What about if at the end of its life, it's a material asset, that you redistribute that material around other buildings or your, your own building stock? So that's becoming a reality? I I think you then decouple to a greater or lesser extent your financial reliance on an unreliable source, which is the commodity markets at the moment.
Speaker 1:And the fascinating thing about that is in the commodity space. That's where the drive for price then starts to go through the floor and then they start to look at how can we make things cheaper, can we get more of it so that ultimately we can throw away? Yeah, I love that concept. So talk to me about why you don't feel that we're that far away from being in the same position which they are in the netherlands by where you mean in the uk, um, with the previous government, the conservative party, uh, when they were in power, um, there was this.
Speaker 2:There's been this campaign for something called Part Z. So Part Z being a fictitious part of the building regulations that doesn't exist yet, and it's the part that would quantify, benchmark and restrict the amount of embodied carbon in a building, in other words, the amount of stuff that goes into a building by default. That would encourage retrofit and reuse rather than knocking down, because you'd be knocking down and that'd be a big carbon footprint and then you're importing new stuff big carbon footprint if you reword what's there small carbon. So I was even with the previous government. There was a bill for recognizing embodied carbon and whole life carbon in the construction sector. It was presented three times, almost passed. We're now with a different government that's a bit more inclined towards this sort of thing, so I think that might happen soon. In addition, for the last three or four years, there's been an initiative which is construction industry wide, which is called the UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard. Which is called the UK Net Zero Carbon Building Standard, which has got client-facing organisations, all the institutions and other groups involved around the table agreeing how to spend our mega carbon budget if we're going to meet those 1.5 degree targets. What's exciting there is that that standard is out there now it's got. I was on the government's board of it, representing the RIBA, and we had over 3,750 case studies submitted. So it's data-led so we can see how so-called good buildings from different sectors schools, commercial buildings, et cetera how they're really performing and what we need to do with them to get them to perform even better are really performing and what we need to do with them to get them to perform even better. And is at the pilot stage phase now that it will be, or it is a sort of set of rules for the construction industry to say this is how you build housing, this is how you build schools, this is how you build commercial buildings, etc. Different carbon budgets, and that we're lobbying government with that. At the same time, defra has got got a circular economy task force at the moment started. In November by the end of this year it's going to produce a circular economy plan for the UK. So it's two or three things lining up and I think it will only take one or two things to nudge a new bill for embodied carbon in Parliament. Half the people that vote for it won't realize the impact of it. But just to tell you, if you, if you're mapping embodied carbon, everyone's going to be looking at how to do retrofit and reuse, how to deconstruct a building instead of demolish it, because that's the valuable stuff and, like I said, there's a I.
Speaker 2:The first time I did my reuse atlas was in 2017, um, and the reason we've done a new edition is because it's almost totally new case studies, because there's so much going on. So I can cite. You know large projects. So you know building in the city of london, number one, triton square, which was going to be demolished. It isn't't. It's been extended and retrofitted. But that included deconstructing nine stories of curtain wall system, cleaning it up, getting a new warranty on it from the original supplier and putting it back on. So you know that's in the most commercial situations. And there you know I can point you in the direction of commercial office buildings made out of commercial office buildings from the 1970s. So you have to add new stuff, but you know you're seeing bits or whole parts of buildings reuse.
Speaker 1:I love that. I'm wondering now, um, how this can translate into um, a space where this is something that the user of those buildings are looking for. So I, as a user of a building, I'm more interested in being a part of a building that has been made of recycled or reused materials and coming back into something which would change in that language, and understanding the difference between recycle and reuse, understanding what circular economy is versus to linear, but instead of that being in the architect's mind and heart which of all of the architects I've spoken to really, really clear, how do we put that into, not just the supply chain within the construction industry but, I think, more importantly, into the people that rent and purchase these types of buildings?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, for me it's more about the building owners, because adapting the things they own would be more attractive than throwing the thing away and starting again. It will be cheaper, so it can be a more cost-effective way. So I think it's the responsibility of the design team, architects especially, to say you know, this can look good, this can look better. These are the benefits. So I think we've got to be shining a brighter light on and be clear about what good looks like. But you know, for example, if you think about all the poured concrete in a city, if you think about that as your sort of infrastructure that you build around, because you could really reduce the amount of concrete that we pour at the moment we don't need to pour as much as we do. We're doing it in an excessive way at the moment, but we could rework what's there. So that's almost like the sort of geography of a place. The geology is the word, sorry, the geology of the place. And then you add to that by taking away from another part of the city and using it here there. I know, for example, the city of rotterdam has got a plan where they've mapped the sort of they've done a resource map of the cities so they can tell you different blocks of the city, what the sort of dna of the buildings are in these different blocks. They know where they want to develop. They know where they're going to demolish. So instead of demolishing they've done a sort of deep materials calculations audit on the area they're going to demolish. They know what that is. They know what they can expect to get off that site to in over the next five or ten years. As that site comes down it will fuel and be part of the material resource for the new sites. So cities are thinking about it strategically already and I know most cities in the netherlands and a number of cities in the uk have these sort of material audit maps of the city. So for example, in lond I know a number of structural engineers working on bigger commercial projects who were doing deep dive survey audits of an existing building stock which is commercial building stock and others. And they know the steel frame in those buildings and if the client, if they can find a client for those buildings might be the client they're working with anyway or a new client, those buildings will be deconstructed rather than demolished to get at to get the steel frame out there.
Speaker 2:So the re the sort of the second-hand steel frame market is is a sort of startup, um, but a very exciting startup. At the moment it really is expanding. So architects not just me, but lots of architects now are asking for second-hand steel. It's often better quality than new steel, because a lot of new steel has got recycled components in it but eu and other legislation demanded it. But it's it's getting contaminated and it's slightly weaker steel. So if you can get steel from the 90s, 80s or the 20s it's a lot better. So it's actually the good stuff.
Speaker 2:But, um, yeah, I know structural engineers that surveyed hundreds of buildings with that in mind. I know it's a bit more radical in a way, but an artisette researcher I know in the Netherlands, elma Demizovic. She's been looking into this for years and she was telling me about a hospital complex in the Netherlands where they'd done exactly that. It's a massive complex. The netherlands, where they've done exactly that. It's massive complex. It's due for demolition. It's empty at the moment. They know exactly the space of the steel, the grade of the steel. They know how much it is. It's for sale at the moment. If someone buys it. They won't demolish the building, they'll deconstruct it. No one buys it. It will be demolished.
Speaker 2:But we're at that stage now where people are spending the time finding out what constitutes that building and, of course, we've been doing it forever with buildings from the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. You know, when we were when our brick buildings had lime based mortar, we always knew we could reuse the bricks. There isn't a building for an agricultural building in um from the sort of 16th through to the early 20th century that isn't made from another agricultural building. It's just how we used to do it. Getting your head around a 25-storey building in the city of London doing it is another thing, but it's very doable and a lot of these buildings, by the way, they're quite straight and the way they're put together they're quite straightforward and the cladding system is modular. It's great and there's lots of it. So you know it's right for sort of reuse rather than being thrown away can you talk to me a little bit about your book?
Speaker 1:um, I think you said it's been out for three years. I probably got that wrong. Is it five years? No, I confused.
Speaker 2:It's two editions, okay, okay, okay. The first edition came out in 2017. It's called the reuse, that list this subtitle, the designer's guide towards the circular economy and the first edition came out in 2017 and it had about 27 case studies in it and I drew from fashion and textiles, food industry, as well as architectural products, as I am and it it has four main chapters and it's they chapters take you on a journey towards a circular economy. So the most basic thing you can do with the material is recycle it, but that involves energy, creates waste and you also lose the provenance of the material. It might have been a lovely old bit of something and it's now that's new again and you've lost its history, and actually that's what a lot of people like. But there were examples of recycling and then examples of reusing, which is a profoundly big improvement, where you take something apart and reuse it. And then a third chapter was reduced where you do whatever you normally do in the construction industry, but you hardly use any material how, and the last chapter was always dedicated to examples of proper circular colonies.
Speaker 2:Fast forward to last summer, or last autumn actually, where the second edition of the book came out. It took three years instead of one because there were so many amazing case studies in the construction sector. So it's basically a new book. It's got 40 case studies in it and there's only a few in recycling and a good number in reuse. But the good news is the biggest chapter it's got about 15 case studies in. It is all around buildings of the design with the circular economy in mind, so where they get their materials from, but also how the building's put together so it can be easily taken apart. It's even examples of buildings that have had that happen to them. So in the last seven years there was a temporary courthouse in amsterdam which is substantially large building. It was designed, deconstruct, um, occupied for five years, deconstructed, reassembled, was a university building and it looks like what you'd expect a contemporary courthouse to look like. So it's gone completely new site and new use now. So now we're in a world where there are lots of case studies, commercial, commercially, um viable stage, and that was the point with all the case studies in the book.
Speaker 2:Their projects that have happened have been delivered. So why have they been delivered? How? How did you get the warranty on that secondhand glazing system? So you've gone into that details. But I'm interested. I'm an architect of practices, you I'm also a teacher and academic. But I'm much more interested now in not just talking about something but saying see that, that does it because of this. What contract did you use? Who's got the warranty? Who stuck their neck out on the line for that or not? How's it? Easy there and not easy there? Why did that hodja get put on hold? Easy there and not easy there? Why did that hard drive get put on hold? That's what I'm interested in, because I want to deliver these things.
Speaker 1:So we've put the link, or we will put the link to your book at the bottom of this podcast, but can you just kind of sum up what it is that the reader will gain when they've completed your book?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a book you can dip into. So it's 40 case studies and the case studies are about 500 words each with a 250-word summary where I say this is what I think, but a bit like this podcast, every case study I interview the person responsible. So I will ask the person like why did you get into construction? So I'm trying to work out who are the people and why. So they're interesting little stories and I just think it's a book you can drop into, open up.
Speaker 2:And, by the way, this is a lot bigger than it was, sort of like a. You know it's an A4. It's an atlas and it's beautiful. This time, first edition, bit of a cog, but second edition looks great. And in fact I'll tell you about the front cover. Just, it's the reuse, at least in big letters, but each letter is a photograph of a material that's featured in the book. So you know whether it's a secondhand material or innovative material like mycelium or something like that. So but the point is that individual case studies, nice big photographs, lovely drawings, because how do, how do architects and engineers draw a building that's designed for disassembly? So I'm interested in how the ideas are communicated, as well as what it looks like to deconstruct a building rather than demolish it. So it's got great images so it's not too wordy.
Speaker 1:I love what you're doing there. I think knowledge takes us so far, but then we just need that ability. We need to find out how we actually do it. And, from what you're saying there, it's just wonderful how you've identified that and how you've provided a solution, because I think that that's a big missing element within not just the construction industry, but within the discussion around how we improve our surroundings, our environment, our well, well-being, our connection to one another. Yeah is is. Everyone wakes up in the morning wanting to do good things and wanting to get to a better place, but most people don't know how to do it. Yeah, and so what you, what you've described there within the book, is it's just absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm I'm privileged to be able to do it because I've always combined teaching with practice. I've never done a five-day job, it's always been three and two, and two and three, and it's been supported by the University of Brighton where I teach. I've been able to write these books. But because I'm supported by the people in my practice, which is called Baker Brown Studio, I've got people that have worked with me for 15 years. So they're delivering that random fall, that building made of waste or whatever it is. They're doing it in practice. They're doing it practice, and I'm getting on a weekly basis all that different experience. But I, you know, I really work as a team. I couldn't do it without other people. If I was on my own, none of it would be happening and and, and that is a hundred percent.
Speaker 1:No one can do anything on their own of any great value, and definitely I'm grateful for them, because without them I wouldn't be able to have this conversation and the people listening and watching this wouldn't be able to be part of it. But it still goes to say that it's really uncommon for someone or a group of people to identify this is how you do it and that's one of the things that I'd love to see more of and that's one of the things that I'm trying to do, hence the podcast. I've got a sustainability and energy consultancy behind me that's doing that, but I think just to keep that intellectual property to yourself of this is how I do it, or this is who I work with to get.
Speaker 2:I think is is just defeating the object. Yeah, but I mean, I can see a podcast. Is your version of my book, isn't it? You're collecting all these different stories together and then you'll reflect on it and you'll maybe write a book I don't know, because you're going to hear so many people talking about similar and and disconnected and connected issues and you'll begin to develop an opinion. I think so. I think it's fantastic. You're doing this, bob.
Speaker 1:You're doing this great shit well, I am really grateful for your time, the time that we've spent together. Now is is drawing to an end, but I'd just like you to just reflect on all of the people that you have taught over the years at university and, if possible, come up with a summation of some advice that you would give to someone that's on the start of an architectural journey because they want to make a difference. What, what advice would you give? What guidance, what pointers would you give?
Speaker 2:okay. It's what a lot of people are asking the industry of architecture at the moment how to make it affordable. It's a big deal because it takes a long time. So I would actually say, just as an aside but watch out the way that we're teaching architecture and the process of doing an undergraduate post and then a postgraduate course with a year out in the middle. That is about to change. So the architecture registration board, who dictate these things, have just said that undergraduate courses are not part of how to qualify to be an architect.
Speaker 2:So you can do a degree in architecture, but that doesn't get you onto the sort of road to being an architect you have to do that at postgraduate level. So I would say take it's changing out there. It's difficult to earn money, um, but you can affect an amazing amount of change. Yeah, it'd really be impactful. So I would say take one day at a time, enjoy it. Sometimes I say it in a different way. Which is doing it badly is hard work. So you might as well do it well, because it's hard work. But I studied my degree part-time. I would recommend that, if there's different apprenticeship routes, I do it part-time and work for a practice. Get a feel, because there's so much possibilities. You can be designing a door handle, a theater set, a house or a city. You know it's so many different scales, so you can feel like a graphic designer one minute, a book writer, the next, a product designer and an urbanist in one week. So it's the most exciting industry to get into.
Speaker 1:Thank, you, duncan. It's been a real pleasure to have you on the show. I really appreciate your time, your wisdom and your passion as well. Um, I'm really grateful, and for the team that sit behind you or sit with you should I say I was behind you yeah, different definitely with you and um, and you know the support that you get from from brighton university really grateful for them and for you thank you, darren, you're a star.
Speaker 2:Thanks for watching to the end. I think that you'll like.
Speaker 1:Brighton University Really grateful for them and for you. Thank you, darren, you're a star. Thanks for watching to the end. I think that you'll like this, but before you do that, just make sure that you've commented and liked below and also that you subscribed.