The very act of building has always been associated with a dubious morale and a hypocrite stance. With reason. But there’s a better way forward.

Let’s assume we all agree nature needs to be treated with the utmost respect it deserves for nurturing and providing us with everything we need in order to live and love with abundance. It’s stating the obvious, not even worth saying out loud. But what’s also clear is that besides living outdoors in and with nature we also need a roof over our head, based of course on the consensus we outgrew the caveman lifestyle (at least for some). By extent, being the social animals we are, we need places to gather, worship, create, work and - most importantly - shop and consume (pun intended!). So there’s going to be buildings to accommodate that way-of-living we chose by design.

The layers on top of the layers we refer to as culture and society require lots of infrastructure which happens to consist of buildings, roads, airports, trains, boats, cars and cell-phone masts. If this is how we chose to live as a species, then let’s move on from the negative bias that all (new) construction is bad an annoying (the noise, right?).

Obviously from our point of view we love architecture and we love making, building and constructing it, but we also love and respect the planet on which we are lucky enough to reside. Love it or hate it, a lot has been built and a lot more will be built in the foreseeable future. But we have learned a lot along the way, and can use that knowledge to our advantage going forward. So how can we adapt and adjust in an intelligent and sustainable way?

It’s true that for every house that’s been built, sadly, trees and plants had to be chopped down. But it’s probably also true that everyone who is reading this from the comfort of their own living room clearly wasn’t against the construction of their own house back when it was built.

So how do we get out of this faux moral impasse? As always, the answer is in front of us. If we’d just focus on improving what’s already there to modern day standards we’d already have our hands full for the next - let’s say - twenty years or so.

Work smarter, not harder. We’d recuperate the (latent) energy already spent by former generations and we’d add value to the premises for which they didn’t have the means, knowledge or interest to do better at the time. Renovating and refurbishing, if done well, is compound interest in its purest and most tactile form. Incremental improvements.

In the past half a century (especially on this island) many buildings have been erected of dubious architectural quality. So let’s just be open about that and give free way to renovate and refurbish at full-force to improve what’s already there to the highest possible standard. It’s the most ecological use of resources, land and workforce imaginable that beats any solar paneled, carbon-neutral new-built villa with a Tesla on the driveway (not that there’s anything wrong with that to be clear, on the contrary).

Promote and reward renovating, instead of complicating it and holding back investments. It will free up the means and the space (both literally and mentally) for a fine selection of energy efficient new-builts of the highest possible quality, while implementing the lessons learned from the past. It’ll take off the pressure of a heated housing market and will keep our desire to keep putting our flag in the ground under modest control. We don’t need more generic sprawl, we need less but better built constructions. Quality over quantity.

It will take a no-nonsense, engineering mindset shift to provide the solution to a dilemma that shouldn’t be one in the first place.

Respect what is, add what should.

Credits: Can Marti - Casa Payesa - Eco Hotel, Photography: Luana Failla