The damage that we do to ourselves and the environment by continuing on the throw away, everything is disposable track, whether cheap, one wear fashion or needlessly demolishing existing buildings is at last coming into focus.
NLA's Conservation award is therefore bang on the money in terms of being timely and relevant to the important change of direction away for thoughtless waste towards sensible and sensitive preservation of our built environment.
The apparently clean sheet of paper provided by a cleared site often encourages designers and developers to reach for the demolition contractor rather than the thinking cap.
Developers and landowners should be encouraged to reverse that approach by thinking long and hard first about reuse and conservation and last about destruction.
The opportunity to build bigger if the site is cleared does provide a temptation to close the eye and the mind to conservation. Unfortunately site values, inflated by the potential to build bigger are often the enemy to sensible reuse. However the development equation may look different when the damage to society and the environment are factored in.
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