Going Round in Circles: Disruption, Recycling and Sustainability
With Iris Ceramica Group we are launching a new series of global events dedicated to Circular Economy
How can we reinvent the term “sustainability” and use the design tools at our disposal to transition to a circular economy? We will try to aswer to this question with a roundtable discussion hosted by Iris Ceramica Group London Showroom. Our international guests will be Annabel Koeck, Associate of Grimshaw London, Clare Brass, founder of Department22, Mario Cucinella, founder of MC A – Mario Cucinella Architects, and Michael Braungart, founder of Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute. The talk will be moderate by Paul Finch, director of WAF World Architecture Festival. The London Roundtable will be the first event of a series who will get a global audience during the upcoming Milano Arch Week and the next Dubai Design Week.
All living organisms change throughout their evolution by reacting and pro-acting to the constraints of their environmental context. This might explain the perfect beauty of ecosystems whose players, although acting for their own survival, contribute to the achievement of a circular balance. They actually do more than that: they are able to store much more CO2 than they produce. Today, architects and urban designers are being called on to take urgent action. We have the power to contribute in a significant way to global de-carbonization, but this is by no means an easy task. We need to turn human environments into ecosystems. This means redefining our approach and eventually reshaping our working methods; what is required is more a cultural than a technological shift. The terms ‘circular economy’, as well as ‘sustainability’, are so abused in global discourse that they are losing meaning. How can we reinvent the terms, measure their success, and use the design tools at our disposal to transition to a circular economy?
