Last night, I was on one of my now regular night-time strolls trying to get squalling baby to sleep. To keep me sane, I often give myself a mission on these walks so I’m not just wandering around in circles waiting for silence to envelope my tiny banshee. And last night I went to find the blue plaque on a nearby house where the legendary civil engineer Ove Arup was born in 1895. We can do quite a bit of an engineering tour around my neighbourhood, if that sort of thing turns you on – William Armstrong was born half a mile a way and educated a couple of hundred yards away, and from my window I can see the site of the first stationary steam engine built by George Stephenson after he went into business for himself, just before he started putting them onto wheels.

Ove Arup is most publicly well known for designing the Sydney Opera House, but known within the construction industry for his development of the idea of ‘Total Architecture’ where the boundaries between disciplines are broken down and everybody takes responsibility for all aspects of a design.

When engineers and quantity surveyors discuss aesthetics and architects study what cranes do we are on the right road. 

When I interviewed Chris Jofeh of Arup for The Green Executive, he drew a line between the Total Architecture ideas of the firm’s founder and the work the company now does on sustainable buildings. One of my very, very few regrets about the book I now have is that I didn’t pick up on the ‘Total’ meme at the time and dub the highest level of corporate sustainability ‘Total Sustainability’ as this kind of deep integration of sustainability into everybody’s responsibilities and mindsets is what I was proposing.

I did draw a parallel between what I called ‘Full Integration’ of sustainability and Total Quality Management (as does John Elkington in The Zeronaughts), but the more I think about it, Total Architecture may be a more appropriate analogy. Quality control is an internal, managerial issue, architecture is more outward looking, often inspirational and occasionally groundbreaking – what sustainability should be.

More food for thought for my nocturnal meanderings with the noisy boy!