This lecture marked the opening of To Build Law. Excerpts of the transcription are also published below.

A question that will come up again and again in the lecture is how we value certain things and not others.

We operate as three different entities:

One is b+, an architecture practice that focuses on adaptive reuse, that is, on the renovation and transformation of existing buildings. The office is a continuation of brandlhuber+, originally founded by Arno Brandlhuber, and we are now four partners, operating as a cooperative.

We are also teaching, with Station+ at the ETH Zurich, the Chair of Architecture and Storytelling. Since 2017 we ask students to work with time-based media to make them realize that architecture is not only about the design of buildings, but that every project needs a narrative, a story to convince the people out there about why change is needed or how we can achieve it.

And the third entity is HouseEurope!, which is both a non-profit that we founded acting as a policy lab—that is, a group of people who try to come up with proposals for new legislation—and the title of a European Citizens’ Initiative that Alina is going to present later.

In our collaborative issue with Arch+, The Business of Architecture, the core question is summarized by the following quote by the architect and transformation scientist Saskia Hebert: “The greatest challenge for architects is to create a self-sustaining practice in times of post-growth.” We are all aware of the ecological crisis but still want to practice as architects. What does it mean and how can we, as architects, build a practice that is no longer part of the problem but tries to be part of the solution or deliver certain answers?

This issue of Arch+ is linked to our teaching at ETH Zurich, where we were confronted with the reality that while there has been a 38% increase of the architectural market in Europe since 2012, the contribution of the building sector to global CO2 emissions is also 38%. And while many of us operate in this growth logic, students argued that we can no longer design new buildings because that makes us complicit in this problem. To address this conflict, we must actually redesign our practice.

When we look at the European building market, we see that already today 50% of it corresponds to the renovation and transformation of existing buildings, although this number varies from country to country and in Italy this figure is already 84% of the market.

If you zoom out, you realize that 75% of the European building stock is not yet renovated and we only renovate around 1% of the building stock per year. This is particularly relevant when you think about the goal that we agreed on in the EU to decarbonize our building stock by 2050. This means that we only have 25 years left to renovate all of Europe’s buildings and, at the current pace, we would need 75 years to renovate them. To do it in 25 years, we need to triple the annual renovation rate. This is a fantastic fact to share with students, who are sometimes overwhelmed by the direction the market and the practice are developing.

But it’s not only a question of facts and numbers, it’s not only about how you design the thing but also its advent into culture, to quote Keller Easterling in the series of video interviews presented in the exhibition. Because it’s not only the facts, the building, it’s also the narrative, the story that we tell to convey the idea that we want something or need something.

We began to work on HouseEurope!—although it wasn’t called that yet—in January 2023 as a research project and teaching venture. I joined the team as a communications person and we dedicated the first year to understanding how we could use a European Citizens’ Initiative as a tool.

Today, HouseEurope! is both a non-profit policy lab and a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) that advocates for new laws to make renovation and transformation of existing buildings the new norm. The ECI is a tool that was invented by the European Union twelve years ago to counter skepticism toward EU politics and rethink how direct democracy functions. Petitions are a way for people to have a stake in politics and you can start an ECI with whichever claim you have (the most successful ones were on animal rights or banning pesticides). For us, it was interesting to understand how you can step out of an architecture discourse, or the architecture bubble, and try to make people understand that the built environment really has an impact on their daily lives.

Before properly setting up the campaign, we conducted a market study with 8,000 people in eight EU member states and we learned that many people don’t understand that renovation has anything to do with their lives—and that the built environment is not something people typically think about. So we looked at which were the conversations that we needed to have in order to bring these concerns into a public discourse.

We started with a social premise, which is that renovation saves homes by keeping prices stable, and residents can remain in their homes and are not displaced. Neighbourhoods can keep their identity and communities stay alive. Of course this is not always the case and there are many conversations today about “renovictions”, but we started using “renovation stories” as we called them, for example the Lacaton & Vassal project le Grand Parc in Bordeaux, where residents were actually able to remain in the home while the renovation was going on.

Then there is an economic premise, which is that renovation saves jobs by creating more local work. Small businesses can survive and will not be pushed out by big firms. And markets can thrive on labour rather than materials. European architecture practices, are typically small, with 92% being composed of a maximum of 5 members, and if we renovate more this would mean that these offices would also have more work. One of the examples that we used here was the M27 single family house by BAST Architects in the French countryside, in which they collaborated with local workers.

And finally there is an ecologic premise, which is that renovation saves energy by keeping what is there. Materials can be sustained and will not be wasted, hence CO2 emissions and resource extraction can be reduced. And our favourite example was the renovation of De Voortuinen tower by Elephant, a former bank that was converted into housing, and these housing structures are examples of scalable initiatives in Europe.

And while social, economic, and ecologic objectives define sustainability, we always add a cultural premise, because that’s what will allow us to change the narrative. From a cultural perspective, renovation saves history by valuing the existing. Memories can last and are not forgotten, while stories can continue to inform future generations. For us this was a very big learning curve. Many conservative people, or people that take positions with regard to the preservation of heritage, can subscribe to this message. And the example we looked at was a former wine factory that also became housing, the Wohnen in Weinlager project by Esch Sintzel Architekten.

We must communicate that our buildings have a lot of values, that we need to recognize them and make renovation rewarding. We need new laws and incentives to make renovation the new norm. The three pillars that we are using right now to draft new legislation regarding the right to reuse existing buildings include: 1) tax reductions for renovation; 2) fair rules to assess the potentials, not only risks; and 3) new values for the embedded CO2.

To create a campaign, we realized that the most important thing was building allies: we needed to reach out not only to people who are already working on these questions but to understand how specific moments can bring other people together.