Sustainable development, even economic circles agree, is of paramount importance to the future of the human race. Most people agree, in principle, that one keystone of sustainability is the construction industry. This is because buildings and their upkeep, as well as installations that make up the infrastructure, not only use limited goods, such as raw material, energy and space, but because they also have a direct impact on our lives and life-styles. A look around today's building activity, at home and abroad, quickly makes one realise that we are still a long way away from the ambitious goal of sustainability.

Two-stage competition

The Holcim Group (1), a global player in the cement business and active in 70 countries, now wants to counteract this lethargy with the help of its new foundation. "The aim of the Holcim Foundation (2) is to provide incentives to think about and act on the principle of sustainability in the building industry all over the world," said Markus Akermann, chief executive of the company, last week at the first Holcim Forum. It is no coincidence that the meeting took place at ETH Zurich because the university serves the foundation as a technical competence centre.

The Holcim Foundation is following two routes to achieve its goal. On the one hand, it will organise regular conventions at which experts from all over the world can meet and discuss issues surrounding sustainability. In particular, it is hoped that participants at these events will benefit and learn valuable lessons from experiences made in other countries. The second route is the Holcim Award, which the foundation will be announcing in November 2004. The competition is a two-stage one. In the first stage, a total of five regional prizes will be awarded worldwide. In the following year one of these five successful projects is selected for the global award. The foundation is donating a sum of two million US dollars for prizes for each competition cycle.

Verbal agreement–not much action

The organisers of this first forum were successful in bringing some distinguished speakers to Zurich for the meeting last week. Simon Upton, Chairman of the OECD Round Table on Sustainable Development (3) "warned" the audience that sustainability is a highly sensitive political issue. There was wide consensus amongst politicians and decision-makers, he said, on the importance of sustainability. But the consensus quickly began to crumble when it came to defining what the term actually means. Upton was critical of the attempt to attack real problems–such as the destruction of the environment or poverty in lesser developed countries–with sweeping solutions. Often, he said, such solutions were of an academic nature and only served to establish and underpin a verbal consensus while in reality nothing concrete came of it. Over the past decade many international agreements were signed. But he suspected, said Upton pointedly, that lots of politicians did not really understand what they were ratifying.

"Poverty cannot be blamed on the poor." Mohammed Yunus, founder and Director of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. large

In his delivery, Winy Maas, from the Dutch Planning Office MVRDV (4)(5), took an unusual position on the theme of sustainable development. Using provocative development proposals, which elicited occasional bursts of laughter from the audience, Maas attempted to show that sustainability is a relative concept. The needs of society were changing all the time, he said, and it was difficult to predict today, what would be right for coming generations.

Students present their projects

The meeting was rounded off with a contest for the rising generation. Students from various countries presented their projects and these were then judged by the participants of the forum. The presented projects ranged from the disposal of building waste in Brazil to a new, tree-like construction in China. Apart from several other teams from ETH Zurich, Ivica Brnic, Florian Graf and Wolfgang Rossbauer also took part in the contest. The three had already won the ETH Jubilee Competition "Luftschloss" (6) with their project and were now selected as winners at the Holcim forum.