Sustainability

Vanessa Norwood sat down with Hortus Collective Directors Amy Langron and Mark Rogers to talk about all things landscape, from materials reuse, the importance of creating biodiverse small spaces and the architect who was happy with flowers of any colour - except yellow!

A Victorian terrace in Birmingham becomes a living laboratory of ecological retrofit and community co-creation.

The interior design industry utilises many more materials and processes than the fashion industry, yet much less is known about it. We mine and extract products from finite materials, process products at high temperatures and use large amounts of water and toxic chemicals.

Vanessa Norwood spoke to Raghav Kumar about his ethos of building through care, community and conscious materials, all powered by a serious amount of dancing!

Vanessa Norwood spoke to ORCA founder Molly Sedlacek about the company’s origins and ethos.

When architect Jonathan Mizzi took his young family to the Green School in Bali he wasn’t planning on building there. Feeling despondent at the rate of development in his birthplace of Malta where growth was coming at the cost of history, Jonathan needed a change of pace.

Demolition debris, olive pits, spent coffee grounds, and fruit husks become starting points for new, durable products. Forward-thinking companies are asking: what overlooked abundance lies in the piles that others discard?

Thick stone walls, dense timber frames filled with straw, and packed-earth structures held in warmth through winter and repelled heat in the summer. These materials, raw, organic and local, were not chosen for their insulating properties alone but for their abundance and endurance.

Challenging current linear practices from extraction, to construction, to waste, Scottish startup Kenoteq is reimagining the brick by creating a climate conscious circular ecosystem.

Building sustainably at scale is still viewed as problematic, with concrete and steel seen as a default for larger developments by a risk averse construction industry but the 19th century builders of Brighton had totally nailed it with bungaroosh.

Nikolay Shahpazov is a man on a mission to change our preconceptions that sustainable materials are challenging to use at scale.