Category: TradBuilding

How Energy Availability Influenced Building Form (and what this tells us for the climate emergency) by Dr Robyn Pender. “For many thousands of years, buildings all over the world were constructed using just a small corpus of materials. But as a timeline of building materials shows, as we began to exploit high-energy materials, everything changes: slowly at first, then faster and faster as we began to exploit ‘fossil fuel slaves’. New materials introduced new opportunities, but with them new problems. Over just a few centuries our whole relationship with the ways we constructed and used our buildings changed radically, and we are still finding out the unintended consequences of a giant experiment.” – Dr Robyn Pender. Dr. Pender is a Senior Building Conservation Advisor at Historic England, working in the Building Climate Change Adaptation Team. A physicist specialising in building environments, with a degree in Wall Painting Conservation from the Courtauld Institute of Art, she helped to write and edit English Heritage’s 10-part Practical Building Conservation Series, which introduced her to the history of building materials and systems. Robyn remains fascinated by the links between that history and the availability of energy, and how this can give new insights into the causes of the climate emergency.