Harriet Thorpe’s festival collection of sustainable architecture.

For the Open House Festival’s 30th anniversary, we have brought on three different Londoners to work on the programming of the festival. Janet Street Porter, Harriet Thorpe and Shahed Saleem have work worked with the festival team each curating a collection. These collections are their chance to share with others the buildings and places they see as being worthy of celebrating and exploring.

Harriet is the co-author of the upcoming book The Sustainable City has curated a selection of buildings and landscapes that will be open for free public visits during the Open House Festival all of which relate to the climate emergency by embodying aspects of ecological architecture and sustainable design.

Here is what Harriet has to say…

What do you imagine when you picture a sustainable city? This curated list hopes to inspire you with some buildings that are making London a cleaner, healthier, greener, more circular, and happier place to be!

There’s a plethora of approaches to sustainable design on the list happening at all scales. You’ll explore; buildings built from natural and recycled materials; plenty of ‘retrofits’ – old buildings made more energy efficient, adapted for new uses and future proofed; plus buildings that reduce our energy consumption through materials and design.

As well as being green, all these buildings promote sustainable social ecosystems of living, working, playing and sharing in the city too. Whether that’s by listening carefully to the needs of communities, preserving cultural heritage to connect people to history, combating gentrification by creating space for everyone, or protecting green spaces that make us, animals and plants thrive.

This is exactly the type of city that Open House celebrates with its festival, which physically opens up all these fascinating buildings to everyone and starts conversations about architecture.

This year in 2022, sustainability needs to be part of every conversation. Cities after all are here to stay – over half of the world’s population live in cities and urban living is on a steady upwards climb. Yet cities account for about 70 percent of

global carbon emissions even though they occupy just 3 percent of the world’s surface. If we are to unlock a greener future for the world, ensuring cities are built and operated more sustainably is an increasingly urgent task.

Importantly, a city should not make us feel guilty or confused about sustainability, nor present it as a luxury only available to a few. A sustainable city should repair, enhance and contribute to the regenerative health of our Earth. It should make good environmental decisions on behalf of its inhabitants, and promote a better quality of life for us and the natural ecosystem.

It’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by the climate and energy crises, so this list hopes to break down sustainable architecture into something digestable and optimistic – hopefully you’ll start some conversations about sustainable design across your Open House Festival experience, and maybe learn something that you can apply to your own house or neighbourhood along the way.

Click here to go to the programme.

Stock Orchard Street, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects,

Architect Sarah Wigglesworth’s experimental house and office completed in 2001 was designed as a testbed for eco-friendly architectural ideas. It is built of natural and low-tech materials such as straw and sandbags, employs passive design principles and shows possibilities of living off-grid in the city. The building has recently undergone an eco-upgrade, using new technology to better insulate and reduce the building’s energy use – all resulting in a 62 percent reduction in heating demand.

2. Sands End Arts and Community Centre, Mae Architects

This welcoming community building in Fulham creatively combines recycled materials (over 35 percent), timber and retrofit. Commissioned by the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham and opened in 2021, it is a functional piece of the urban park, providing a cafe, toilets and events rooms. It has a sustainably sourced cross-laminated timber structure and is clad with bricks upcycled from over 28 tonnes of construction waste typically destined for landfill. Plus, it’s been nominated for one of British architecture’s most prestigious awards, the RIBA Stirling Prize 2002 (winner to be announced in October).

3. Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED), ZED Factory and Bioregional

This pioneering eco-village (of 100 homes, an office, a school and a field) empowers individuals to live a sustainable lifestyle with ease. Located in the south London suburb of Sutton and built in 2002, its interlocking buildings with colourful window frames and air cowls, roof gardens and pedestrian bridges have a utopian feel. Bioregional, a charity and social enterprise focused on sustainability, teamed up with architects ZEDfactory and London housing association Peabody to build the village to a design that results in 68 percent less heating and energy bills than the London average.

4. Phoenix Garden Community Building, Office Sian Architecture + Design

This modest building protects a hidden oasis of wildlife a stone’s throw from London’s Covent Garden. The garden opened in 1984 on the site of a former WWII bombing. It is the last remaining of seven community gardens in the West End. Architect Gurmeet Sian designed this building to support its activities, inspired by its ethos of nurturing sustainability and community. Durable and low-maintenance, the low-energy brick, limestone and timber building has a green roof and was inspired by English walled gardens.

5. Yorkton Workshops, Cassion Castle Architects, Pearson Lloyd

In Hackney, an unruly crop of mismatched buildings – including five former Victorian stables and a 1990s factory-style extension – have been transformed into a characterful studio space for designers Pearson Lloyd. Realising that the most sustainable and low-carbon approach would be a strict retrofit, where all materials would be reused or recycled, they have given the awkward buildings a whole new life. They added a bright red steel staircase and birch plywood partitions, while keeping the spaces as flexible as possible for any type of future use.

6. Oasis Farm Waterloo, Feilden Fowles

Built in 2014, this low-tech, flat-pack city farm transforms disused land near London’s busiest station into a thriving community hub. It’s a unique hybrid farm that also includes workspaces, education spaces and a multi-purpose barn. It shows how combining several functions into one complex can be mutually beneficial for community wellbeing. The beautifully crafted buildings – mostly built of UK-sourced Douglas fir and larch – include features such as passive cooling and water collection. Plus, it can be disassembled and reassembled elsewhere – responding to its temporary nature on a site that will be redeveloped in the future.

7. CAN Mountain View

With its ‘waste not, want not’ mantra, this resourcefully designed renovation and extension of a once-derelict Edwardian semi-detached house in Sydenham makes a surreal impact with repurposed materials. Architect Mat Barnes experimented with materials otherwise destined for waste, and used them in highly crafted and unexpected ways. Colourful kitchen countertops are made from a terrazzo of recycled chopping boards and milk-bottle tops, while the living room is decorated with broken plaster moulds from the local plasterer. A highly personal house has emerged from the rubble of an old one.

8. Golden Lane Estate, John Jobertson Architects and muf architecture/art

A 20th-century beacon of modern city living, the Grade II listed Great Arthur House is a 15-storey residential building at the heart of the Golden Lane Estate, one of London’s most influential post-war housing estates. Originally designed by Chamberlin Bon & Powell in the 1950s, the light-filled, sunshine-yellow building unfortunately, like many ageing residential buildings in London had leaking windows, drafts and poor insulation. John Robertson Architects replaced the curtain wall, improving insulation to result in a 30 percent reduction in heat loss, all while preserving the building’s distinct DNA.

Elsewhere on the estate, a playground for children under five designed by muf architecture/art is an ‘urban rockery’ of reclaimed, recycled and natural materials. Reclaimed stone nods to nearby Brutalist architecture and the Roman London Wall, while Ecodek, a composite of recycled wood and recycled plastic, is used for the benches. The design was informed by the ideas of local children and encourages them to safely explore materials and their very own micro-city.

9. Hackney Bridge, Turner.Works

In Hackney Wick, this vibrant, industrial-inspired temporary workspace has been designed to be deconstructed, recycled and reused at the end of its proposed 12-year life. The lean architecture uses minimal, low-cost and recycled materials. Steel frames are numbered, bolted together and left exposed. While plywood and OSB boards, made in the UK from waste timber, finish the interiors. With rising rents in the area, it has been specifically shaped to kick-start local business and community activity in the new neighbourhood. Plus, to support this infrastructure, there are food kiosks, event rooms and a friendly public yard.