For many years it has been recognized that improving the energy performance of the existing housing stock is vital if energy demand is to be reduced to combat climate change. The art of retrofit is posited as a way forward beyond today’s weak pseudo-Modern architecture, all that is left as the final echo of Modernism’s original utopian impulse.
Central to the book is the presentation of domestic street by street retrofit as an issue with technical, financial, and societal dimensions. A holistic view of the complex, interacting factors that have held back any advance is interspersed with a historical account of retrofit’s faltering progress over the last twenty years. The crucial challenges that have been encountered are described, including the technological and human factors that urgently need to be addressed. It is suggested that the utopian instincts that propelled early modernism can be redeployed in finding an approach to retrofit that will pave the way towards a politically engaged architecture of social purpose.
A Future for Retrofit’s goal is to involve the creative imagination of designers and form an alliance with policy makers and the many others in the business of urban improvement, it is intended for all these audiences.
List of figures
Introduction
Part One: The State of the Art
Chapter One: Which Way to Jump?
Case Study: Energiesprong
Chapter Two: The Carrying Capacity of the Planet
The Anthropocene and nature
Sustainable Development, its origins and implications
Ecomodernism and the magic of technology
The climate crisis and the crisis of culture
Cultural juncture
Case Study: IFORE Innovation for Renewal
Chapter Three: Re-evaluation of Modernism
Tipping point
Regulation
Alternative directions
The ecomodernist direction: geo-engineering
Case Study: Parity Projects
Chapter Four: Sustainable Retreat
Technology (alone) is not the answer
The future slowdown
The idea of progress
Modernism and the natural world
Architecture as a belief system
Case Study: Link Road Birmingham
Chapter Five: Caring Architecture
The future role of the architect will be to build sparingly
Building little implies making good what we already have i.e. retrofit
Part Two: A Brief History of Retrofit
Chapter Six: Size of the Problem
The energy case for retrofit
Problem #1 Determining the outcomes
Chapter Seven: Pre-requisites for Retrofit
Retrofit at the urban scale
Retrofit origins
The 40 per cent house
Problem #2 Insulation
Chapter Eight: Drivers for Change
Problem #3 Overheating
Chapter Nine: Home Truths
40 per cent House to achieving zero
Problem #4 Ventilation
Chapter Ten: Anticipating the Green Deal
Problem #5 Air-tightness
Chapter Eleven: Retrofit Comes to a Halt
Problem #6 Renewables
Chapter Twelve: Measuring Success – 80% Reduction and ‘Retrofit for the Future’
Low carbon Britain
Problem #7 The occupants
Chapter Thirteen: The Progress of Retrofit
Retrofit and performance
Architects as retrofit leaders
Architectural skills required?
Part Three: Towards a New Utopia
Chapter Fourteen: The Art of the Imagination
Retrofit realigned
Retrofit and utopia
Chapter Fifteen: The Problem of Theory
The politics of architecture
Capitalism and creative destruction
Modernism and radical politics
Chapter Sixteen: Architecture’s Very Uniquely Compromised Position
The roots of modernism: Hannes Meyer and the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit)
The hidden aspects of consciousness, the uncanny, Gothic and Surrealism
Urban ecology
Chapter Seventeen: Echoes from the Past: Herbert Marcuse
Society as a work of art
Retrofit as the representation of society as a work of art
Marcuse’s utopia of hope, utopia as a realisable dream
Retrofit as subversive art
Chapter Eighteen: Retrofit and Architects: A Future.
Architects and innovation – our utopian mission
Architecture or Extinction
Index
Biography
Mike McEvoy studied at Cambridge prior to registration as an architect, then went on a postgraduate scholarship to Cornell, his PhD is from the Bartlett. He was in practice in the US and Canada, and for a decade with Arup Associates in London. Subsequently, he was Coordinator of Technical Studies at the University of Westminster; on the faculty at Cambridge and a Fellow Commoner of Downing College; and latterly, Professor of Architecture at the University of Brighton, where he led EU IFORE an Anglo/French €6.3million street by street retrofit programme (which is the background to this book). Previously, he had completed, and published, the outcomes of several funded research projects into low energy construction. He has written three other books on architectural technology: Architecture and Construction in Steel, External Components, and Environmental Construction Handbook.
