"Plants on a building doesn't make it sustainable, any more than a basil leaf on a steak makes it vegan"

Plans for a large new building in Rotterdam intended to encourage people to lead more environmentally friendly lifestyles are wrong-headed and should be scrapped in a blaze of publicity, writes Barnabas Calder.

Putting plants on a building doesn't make it sustainable, any more than dropping a basil leaf on a steak makes it vegan. Yet image searches for "sustainable architecture" puke out a page of gas-guzzling big new buildings with greenery on their walls or balconies.

Dutch architecture studio MVRDV has won a competition with a new specimen of plant-washing, the Shift Embassy. Let's hope it remains unbuilt.

The client, social enterprise Shift, declares that "a fossil-fuel-based economy built on the unsustainable myth of perpetual economic growth [is] leading us toward ecological and social catastrophe." True, and each summer the proof obtrudes itself in longer, hotter heatwaves, bigger wildfires and worsening crop failures.

I would be happy for it to look considerably worse if it were less harmful environmentally

The Shift Embassy, also called "Rotterdam Rocks!", is a bizarre response to the organisation's anti-growth stance: a 200-bed hotel, posh restaurant, offices, and a 5,000-square-metre exhibition space for attracting international tourists to Rotterdam, in the hope that once they are there they will think hard enough about sustainability to go home and change their lives.

Its aesthetics are attracting the usual derision that clusters round different-looking buildings – comparisons with the Flintstones, with faeces and with genitalia. The same practice's Marble Arch Mound showed how hard it can be to make urban vegetation schemes convincing.

Looks, though, seem a trivial concern in the face of ecological catastrophe. I would be happy for it to look considerably worse if it were less harmful environmentally.

The "rock-like" surfaces of the architects' press release turn out, on some more clicking around, to be concrete. MVRDV promises "low-carbon concrete", but if that's a matter of swapping cement for industrial co-products such as GGBS the benefits for emissions may be negligible at best. As the Institution of Structural Engineers warns, the supply of GGBS is already almost at capacity, so trucking it in for this building likely means another project will miss out, and have to use normal higher-carbon cement instead.

The engineering relies on reclaimed steel. Reusing a beam is often better than melting it down, but again, if not reclaimed for this project the same steel would be either reclaimed or recycled for another project. Around 70 per cent of all steel still comes from ore, with recycling and reclamation already using most scrap steel. Reclaimed steel is, in other words, also no magic bullet for decarbonisation.

There are some good initiatives in the proposal. The exhibition area will be allowed a certain latitude of temperature variation across the year, as opposed to the offices, hotel and restaurant, which require "high-quality indoor environments" – code, presumably, for the uncomfortably excessive cooling of most commercial interiors in summer, and overbearing heating during winter.

The message given by the building as a whole is wrong

The restaurant will be plant-based. Shift also aims to grow as much greenery as it can around the building. If you really must build a new building, a wider temperature range, extensive planting and meat-free catering are good measures.

There is a welcome honesty to the way Shift discusses the downsides of an "iconic" new building. Its argument is that by influencing visitors' future behaviour, "the societal impact is estimated to be 10,000 times greater than the environmental impact associated with the building's construction and energy use".

This figure assumes that over 50 years, 20 per cent of 25,000,000 projected visitors will lastingly drop two tonnes per year from their personal carbon footprint as a result of the visit.

But even if that figure proves robust, what about the societal impact of the architecture itself? Unfortunately, the more successfully Shift establishes itself in the minds of a wide international public as a leader in sustainability, the more harm its building can do.

Whatever nuanced analysis Shift conducts of the qualities and problems tied to experimenting with low-carbon materials, the message given by the building as a whole is wrong. It supports the myth that sustainable architecture means new, tall concrete and steel buildings with lifts and powerful air-treatment systems, but some plants on them.

Shift acknowledges that retrofitting an existing building would have been more sustainable, but says there was no suitable candidate in the big new Waterkant development its embassy will be part of. Instead, the organisation ran a major architecture competition for something new, dense and iconic – a brief that could only realistically be executed with profoundly unsustainable materials and methods, and that depends thereafter on millions of tourists flying round the world in environmentally destructive pursuit of distraction and novelty.

If Shift now abandons this project in a blaze of publicity it will do immense good

This is not the degrowth that Shift calls for, but it's not too late to fix things. If Shift now abandons this project in a blaze of publicity, explaining that the environmental cost is too high – an example of outdated and profoundly unsustainable architectural thinking – it will do immense good, and will demonstrate a profound and inspiring commitment to degrowth.

Should that lose the organisation some funding, so be it. Maximising income, investment and capital expenditure is not a degrowth approach.

Shift's own estimates of the good its building will do are based on pilot activities where it reports participants dropped their emissions by an average of 30 per cent. Why not spend the reported €240,000,000 that the building will cost delivering more of these remarkably effective pilot activities instead?

That would save the 15,000 tonnes of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions that it reports will be required to produce and power the MVRDV building over 50 years, and the 35,000,000 tonnes it assumes will be emitted as a result of people travelling there. More importantly, though, Shift could push back against architecture's devastating environmental harms by setting such a powerful, well-evidenced example of having the courage not to go ahead with an avoidable building project.

At present, the construction industry and the running of buildings together amount to 37 per cent of global carbon emissions. The most inspirational thing that any architecture practice or client can do is to radically opt out of this harm: make brilliant use of what's already here; tweak and improve in modest, impactful ways; spread the word about the immense ecological harms done by our making and running new buildings.

Shift has the chance to be the ambassador for a real shift – a shift to understanding that sustainable architecture means a new wooden shutter on an old window, not a big bulk of concrete, steel and HVAC peeping out guiltily from behind a leafy toupée.

Barnabas Calder is head of the History of Architecture Research Cluster at the University of Liverpool, and author of Architecture: From Prehistory To Climate Emergency (2021) and Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism (2016).

The image is by MVRDV.

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