Constraint Theatre

According to The Guardian, Brussels has built »Europe’s largest frying pan«. The redevelopment of Schuman Square was supposed to turn a traffic roundabout into a greener, calmer »urban agora«, a »symbol of Europe«. The winning design featured a steel canopy with a green roof, intended to provide shade and shelter. It was also, apparently, meant to make the square green.

»A green roof is not the climate. A carbon certificate is not a reduction in atmospheric carbon. A rendering of a tree is not a tree«

The canopy was cancelled when its cost rose from €5m to €13m. Brussels now wants to do »something as green as possible« within the constraints of the square.¹

That sounds like a small story about a badly managed public project. But it contains a larger one: we have turned "green" into a political requirement that is structurally biased towards things that can be seen.

Professor of science communication Lewis Dartnell once memorably explained why your neighbour's lawn always looks greener than yours. Patches of bare earth disappear beyond a particular point, creating what he calls the »despair horizon«.² The landscape hasn't improved; information has simply dropped out of the observer's field of view.

Green architecture presents that problem in reverse. Lush trees, planted roofs, and green façades communicate ecological virtue beautifully. Embodied carbon, material extraction, lifecycle emissions, and heat resilience do not.

Once an image becomes a political requirement, it becomes an optimisation target. Goodhart's Law, with a visual twist: when a measure becomes an image of what it is supposed to measure, it ceases to be a measure at all. It becomes constraint theatre.³

The green roof gives the politician something to point at, the architect something to render, and the developer something to sell. Everyone can demonstrate that they have responded to the climate crisis without agreeing on what the project should actually achieve.

And this is a particularly bad moment to be undecided. Europe is going through another summer of extreme heat, drought, and wildfires; the economic cost of this year's fires has already been estimated at more than €15bn.⁴ Last year's burnt area was the largest on record.⁵ Meanwhile, buildings and construction account for around 37% of global energy- and process-related CO₂ emissions and nearly half of global material extraction.⁶

So stop asking architects to make things green. Ask for less carbon, less material, and less heat; more shade, water retention, biodiversity, and resilience. Ask what should be retained, and what should not be built. Publish the numbers.

And if need be, let the architects fail aesthetically.

The result might be a green roof. Or a white roof. Or a refurbishment, a smaller project, or no project at all. »Green« would no longer be the answer, but rather one possible consequence of answering harder questions.

Brussels is a particularly absurd stage for constraint theatre. Schuman Square sits beside the institutions that are supposed to coordinate Europe's response to problems none of its member cities can solve alone. The square was conceived as a physical symbol of Europe. Now, while Europe burns, the symbol is being asked to be »as green as possible«.

The EU is very good at standards, targets, indicators, symbols. It is also prone to confusing the proxy with the thing itself. A green roof is not the climate. A carbon certificate is not a reduction in atmospheric carbon. A rendering of a tree is not a tree.

Perhaps the better brief is to make environmental performance deliberately difficult to see. Give the architect carbon, heat, water and material budgets. Let the design emerge from them. Let it be ugly. Let it be invisible. Let it be an empty square if an empty square performs better. Let it be whatever it needs to be.

Perhaps the greenest thing Brussels could build is a square that doesn't look green at all. It would be a useful place to start learning the difference between an environmental intervention and an environmental image.

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