What is an appropriate institutional response to climate change?

What did you do during the thaw Daddy?

The cultural tension between architects and engineers is one of the things that makes construction tick. To generalise, architects, who exist in one institution, are expected to have a vision for the whole project while engineers, who exist in a multitude of institutions, are expected just to focus on making that vision work.

As with buildings so it is with climate change. For architects the requirement to have a vision logically extends to the whole planet and so they are comfortable about entering the policy arena and supporting one policy over another. Engineers, on the other hand, think to step outside their specific area of expertise and say anything is to risk reputational damage. Is this a fair characterisation and if it is, is climate change an issue that should break the mould.?

The debate took place on Waterloo Day, famous, amongst other things, for a clash on institutional thinking. Do we want architects to behave a bit more like engineers and/or engineers to behave a bit more like architects?

This debate was chaired by Dr Scott Steedman FREng, ICE Vice President and Director of Group Strategy High-Point Rendel.

Speaker 1: Mark Whitby

FREng, and ICE past President

Speaker 2: John Armstrong

FCIBSE, Independent FM Consultant CIBSE President

Speaker 3: Dr Sunand Prasad

Partner, Penoyre & Prasad and RIBA President Elect, Executive Director of Renaissance Bedford and formerly co-author of the Halcrow Report into the Unification of Consent Regimes [2004] commissioned by the ODPM