Six years ago, one of the UK’s leading architects said he was on the fence about the state of the world and climate issues.
There remains little to cheer about, says Patrick Bellew, founder of London-based environmental design consultancy Atelier Ten. “Has anything happened with the global climate? Probably not.”
But the world has shifted in other ways. “The biggest change we’re seeing is that the investment and occupier markets are demanding much higher standards of sustainability in projects they sponsor and are looking to undertake,” Bellew tells The Edge Singapore.
Precisely 30 years after its founding, Atelier Ten joined the Surbana Jurong Group at the end of 2020, rounding out a group of nine-member companies under the Singapore-headquartered infrastructure and urban development consultancy firm.
The Briton himself is no stranger to the city-state. Bellew and his team were behind the design of Jewel Changi Airport, Gardens by the Bay and The Esplanade, whose creation he sketched in a London pub and later presented to a crowd of bureaucrats here — without knowing about the durian fruit it resembles. “I had never seen a meeting that large, about 70 people typing away at their laptops,” he remembers of that Singapore visit.
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Sustainability was almost an illicit concept before the built environment industry knew about its emission obligations.
Says Bellew: “30 years ago, we did sustainable things in stealth. We put them on the projects because we the architects wanted to do it and didn’t necessarily make it clear to the client why.”
Bellew acknowledges that the industry has moved in “the right direction” over the decades. “We’ve moved away from being stealthy, from covert to overt.”
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Still, progress is not universal. “Sustainability is pretty much baked into most processes, but we must be aware that we’re working in the developed, mature market,” he says.
Sustainability is still “somewhat regional”, even within the US and the UK. “You see it in America’s southern states [or] the Republican states in the US, where climate change denial is still in fashion.”
How much does your building weigh?
Demand has swelled in major cities for green buildings, all touting more negligible emissions, lower energy use or even a biophilic exterior.
Here, Bellew warns of a plateau in real impact. “Everyone’s trying to ‘outgreen’ each other, with a very limited number of solutions you can bring to bear. The competition is healthy, so I don’t mind that. There’s a lot of hypothesising and a bit too much greenwash out there; that bothers me.”
While he used to turn his nose up at buildings that took greening literally by adding plants, Bellew has since warmed up to the idea. “I probably would have said that slightly bothered me a few years ago. But actually, I’m finding that biophilia, and that kind of green building, I enjoy. I think it’s been a very good signal of what green buildings are about.”
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Lately, the construction industry has been grappling with its raison d’etre (reason for existence). While green buildings of the past focused on reducing operational carbon, such as reducing emissions from heating or cooling, the industry now faces a reckoning with embodied carbon or emissions from the construction itself.
“Our electricity is getting greener and greener; we’ve spent 30 years focused on operational energy and driving energy out of buildings, which is still important. But increasingly, recognising the carbon impacts of all construction processes is the biggest game in town,” says Bellew.
However, this requires a “huge amount of data”, he adds. Bellew cites the late American architect Buckminster Fuller, who famously asked a British contemporary: “How much does your building weigh?”
“His idea of weight was a proxy for carbon. What are all the materials in your building?” says Bellew. “If we are genuinely trying to reduce emissions by 2030, focusing on operational carbon for buildings that will not be built until 2027 won’t move the dial.”
What does embodied carbon mean for Singapore and its constant urban renewal? “I think there’s a need in Singapore and Asia generally to focus a lot more on the carbon produced by constructing buildings and the carbon in cement, carbon and steel,” says Bellew.
Some 40% of Atelier Ten’s work in London is repurposing old buildings. He adds that deciding between knocking down a structure or refurbishing them is a delicate matter. “You’ve got to be careful not to take the view that we have to refurbish at any cost,” says Bellew.
On the other hand, a progressing society cannot put construction on hold entirely. “It’s tricky. As professionals and property people, we must continuously refresh and grow our cities as places for people to live, work and enjoy their lives. It’s not the intention of a low-carbon world that we stop doing anything that represents the advancement of our society.”
Futuristic buildings today
Creating a greener world does not necessarily require more construction — even if they are built sustainably.
Even the tiny LED bulb can bring about great changes. To Bellew, this replacement for traditional light bulbs was a game-changer for reducing energy consumption. “That still is [important]; we still focus on lighting as one of the big energy savings.”
Advancements in other materials will help further the green journey. Bellew is excited about two frontiers in environmental design. The first is switchable glass. “[It is] a way to have a building effectively put sunglasses on, to switch the glass to dark when it’s sunny.”
He adds that this could let light into only a particular spot in the building. “For example, if you’ve got trees inside a building that you want to put light onto, like in Gardens by the Bay or Jewel, we know where the tree is, where the glass panel is and where the sun is; you could control every glass panel on the roof to beam sunlight down, and that would move throughout the day.”
This also avoids solar gain on the rest of the floor space. “The combination of smart, switchable glass and the use of very simple geometric algorithms — this stuff is easy to do, and yet, it’s seen as being too futuristic for wide adoption,” Bellew adds.
The second development he highlights is Singapore’s energy mix and the potential of hydrogen power. “Most Singapore buildings run on electricity. It seems to be the emphasis has to be on the quickest changes that will come from greening the supply of electricity, whether that’s bringing in renewable energy from Indonesia, Malaysia or Australia; or bringing in hydrogen.”
Singapore began importing renewable energy in June with the Lao PDR-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore Power Integration Project (LTMSPIP). The project imports up to 100 megawatts (MW) of renewable hydropower from Lao PDR to Singapore via Thailand and Malaysia using existing interconnections.
Another project plans to lay a 4,200km-long undersea cable from solar farms in Australia’s Northern Territory to Singapore.
Co-developed by SMEC, another of Surbana Jurong Group’s member companies, the Australia-Asia PowerLink project is expected to begin supplying electricity to Singapore in 2027. It is touted to provide up to 15% of the nation’s total electricity needs in a year.
As for hydrogen, Singapore opened the $25 million Centre for Hydrogen Innovations at the National University of Singapore on July 1. The research institute aims to make green hydrogen a commercially viable clean fuel to power Singapore’s needs.
Bellew envisions Singapore becoming the world’s first hydrogen-run city. “It’s probably not the most fashionable answer, but I think in the next eight years [up to 2030 targets], you’re only going to refurbish a small percentage of the building stock, and you’re only going to build an even smaller percentage.”
He adds: “You’re not going to move the dial; you’ve got to improve that over time. The biggest win you can have is reducing the kilogrammes of carbon for every kilowatt hour of energy delivered.”
Photos: Albert Chua/The Edge Singapore, Bloomberg
