MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS

The first thing we associate sustainability with is the use of building materials that are very efficient in isolating an interior from an exterior space, reducing the amount of undesired heat and energy losses. Sustainability was mainly invented in the northern hemisphere, so it was originally mainly about reducing the central heating bill—double or triple glass, double walls with air chamber, insulating layers of products everywhere, avoiding thermal bridges. Over time, the notion was expanded to that of the carbon footprint of the materials used in the construction: How much energy was used to create this material? A third moment arrived when the notion of recycling was introduced; diminish the amount of waste when buildings complete their life cycle. However, recycling implies dismantling, selecting, and transporting matter, all operations that increase the carbon demand and energy consumption jeopardizing the logic of the model. Incentives may be so perverse as to take us to the point where things are so disposable that consumption becomes rampant.
Christ & Gantenbein are based in Switzerland, a developed country. But instead of enjoying the fact that almost all basic needs have practically been met, they have been leading the path to where sustainability should go next. And they are interested in contributing to the environment by allowing things to last longer. They are interested in amortizing the energy spent in construction by producing an architecture able to last longer over time. This means building in such a way that the physical reality of the construction resists better and in good shape not just for decades but hopefully for centuries. Although the real challenge is not only to make a construction physically resistant to time (capable of aging well) but to make it able to be valid for other generations. It is a technical and cultural challenge.
Through this lens we should be looking at the competition Christ & Gantenbein won for the Art Museum of Basel. From one vantage point, this building is built with materials that last longer; seen from another, however, it explores an architectural language resistant to obsolescence. The building character, its intangible core, solves the equation with precision and austerity.