Architects Building Laws

There is a growing awareness on the part of architects that the best tools at their disposal for reducing carbon emissions are buildings themselves: the preservation of existing buildings and their renovation for longer use or their transformation for other uses. While renovation and adaptive reuse projects give architects more agency today, the urgency and massive scale of the climate emergency means that individual renovation and adaptive-reuse projects, while commendable, are not enough. More needs to be done on a much larger scale to eliminate unnecessary demolitions and promote building reuse.

One firm all-in on reuse is b+, the collaborative Berlin firm that has been specializing on reuse projects since it was founded by architect Arno Brandlhuber in 2006 as Brandlhuber+ (it became b+ in 2021). The practice gained attention for turning an old lingerie factory into a studio and residential building, and, among other projects, it has converted a former church and community center into an arts and culture complex and has been transforming a silo and other parts of a former factory into San Gimignano Lichtenberg, a nucleus for architectural prototyping. The work of b+ is remarkable for its stringent belief in reuse, in finding the intrinsic qualities of existing buildings, and in creating unexpected syntheses of old and new.

But these and other architectural projects are not enough — and b+ knows it. So Brandluber, working with director Christopher Roth, ventured into film as a means of architectural storytelling and examining architecture's intersection with politics. First they made Legislating Architecture, which screened at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016. One year later Brandlhuber established Station+ (s+), a teaching and research platform at the Institute for Design at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich with a similar goal (other team members at s+ include fellow b+ partner Olaf Grawert and activist Alina Kolar). If b+ is building reuse, s+ is telling stories about architecture through video and other time-based media, to explain projects to a wider public and increase the impact of individual projects. In the seven years since s+ was established, the various b+ collaborations have resulted in two more films (The Property Drama and Architecting after Politics) and the co-curation of 2038 – The New Serenity, the media-saturated German Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

If we continue forward in time, the next milestone that gets us closer to the subject at hand — the second installment in CCA's Groundwork series — is the efforts of b+ to save and propose alternative uses for the former Central Animal Laboratories of the Free University of Berlin, known familiarly as the Mäusebunker (Mouse Bunker). Built in the early 1970s with battered concrete walls punctured by projecting triangular windows and blue pipes, the brutalist landmark was set to be demolished after the lab closed in 2020. Although the one-of-a-kind building was saved in 2023, when it was given protected status, during the process b+ grew frustrated with the way renovation was perceived as riskier and therefore more expensive than demolition and new construction, and with the lack of any legal framework that would incentivize reuse.

Early in To Build Law, Arno Brandlhuber, Olaf Grawert, and Alina Kolar visit the Mäusebunker, expounding on the difficulties in countering the building's demolition. The scene follows the group convening a roundtable inside the silo at San Gimignano Lichtenberg, in which the participants dissect the phrases that might be used in the HouseEurope! campaign: transformation, stop the demolition, ready for renovation, etc. So here, at the beginning of the 48-minute film — 314 days before the start, in Feburary 2025, of the one-year period for gaining one million signatures — the people in To Build Law are focused on messaging, on how European citizens will react to certain terms and, in turn, if they will support the initiative. This makes sense because, even though the documentary is focused on architecture rather than law, director Joshua Frank's film captures architects politicking rather than designing.

It is often said that architectural education readies graduates for many roles outside of architectural practice — from animation and set design to real estate and urban planning — but an architect-turned-politician is rare. Nevertheless, with the outsized role of buildings in contributing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, more architects should be active in politics, in shaping how certain laws can address the climate crisis. Such is one takeaway from To Build Law. Another is that, even if HouseEurope! does not gain enough signatures to advance to the European Commission to be considered for legislation, it could still have an impact. The fact HouseEurope! was selected by the CCA for its Groundwork series hints at the initiative's importance, and the attention it gains over the one year of voting may just spur other legal proposals in other jurisdictions. Architects, like other people, are frustrated with government inaction over climate change, and To Build Law captures one attempt at overcoming that frustration.