From Donald Trump's executive orderon public buildings to the UK's'Living With Beauty' report, national architectural debate in Britain and the USA is wearisomely prone to restage 1980s battles between lovers of Modernism and those who want new build ings to pay cumbersome tribute to Classical architecture. In the face of the climate emergency, it's time to say 'a plague on both your houses' - and, forthat matter, on Victorian and Georgian architecture, too. In Britain, the age of unsustainable, carbon-intense construction began in the 17th century. Rebuilding London after the 1666 Great Fire produced about 300,000 tonnes of CO_2 from coal burned to bake its half-billion bricks and to calcine the lime for their mortar. The elegant Georgian brick facades and generous glazed sash windows so beloved of 'traditionalists' were, from a carbon point of view, as inherentlyunsustainable as the notoriously wasteful steel-and-glass boxes of the mid-20th century orthe suburban homes of the present - part of the same architectural tradition as Cumbernauld and Brasilia.
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