The Ecology of Buildings

It started with The Hanging – Europe's greenest wall, built on an old prison site. A 33,000 square foot verdant facade swaddling Manchester’s most environmentally-friendly office. Gaudi’s buildings look as if they’re alive, all dripping skin and gaping eyes, but this one partly was, with thirty-three species of evergreen and perennial plants. This living wall boosted biodiversity, absorbed air pollution and, most impressively, made its corporate occupiers WELL. 

The Hanging was pioneering in the drive to net zero, against a backdrop of commercial property producing a quarter of the UK’s emissions, and aimed to be sustainable in every true sense of the term. Some naysayers dismissed the wall as cosmetic greenwashing, more marketing than meaningful – green lipstick smeared on Manchester’s skyline. But you only had to listen to the building to hear its pure heart beating. If you stood at the entrance and opened your ears, sounds of life scuttled. We now know these were earmarks that the spine of the building was moving. 

The Hanging was the brainchild of local Council masterplanner Moses Howard, though the official records state it was borne of a working group: the Commercial Investment Forum. Reports from the time refer to CIF, as though the forum was bleaching the city, but its members followed Moses in calling it “IF”: a title befitting visionary dreams. As all successful Council placemakers know, you must first build democratic structures and architect paper trails before you can send the diggers in. Spads are the first spades in any project. Where Moses was unusual was in seeing the beauty in the bureaucracy – with each tap of the keyboard, she felt drills through her fingers; underpinning the foundations of construction sites, she saw rafts of reports and concrete wet with signatures; driving through the city at night, she sensed the power surging through lit skyscrapers not as electricity but as thousands of open-mouthed white-hot yeses, transparent choruses of government.  

As a junior surveyor on the regeneration team, Moses took me under her wing. I enjoyed developing a spatial side of my mind that otherwise would have lain dormant – such brain training was a form of empathy. In exchange, Moses had me do donkey work like measure The Hanging’s offices and calculate its rents. I far from minded – Moses taught me so much: as you keep water not fish, so you build streets not properties, and you must look beyond the red edge of a development to the love line encompassing the city. I assumed “city” meant Manchester as a whole or at least the entire centre but I soon learned that Moses’ red pen was more select. 

Site visits were my highlight. Every time Moses took me, The Hanging had grown an offshoot of newborn offices, bedorned with leaves so walls crawled into ceilings, flowering into floors. My laser no longer worked to measure up and my plans, never to scale to begin with, started sprouting strange carbuncles. I’d never been particularly good at telling which room I was in, in relation to the rest of a building, so exploring The Hanging felt like an exhilarating cocktail of intrepidation and lost. I’d figured before that I loved maps because I was bad at reading them – so bad that my brain didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between a map and a calendar and instinctively opened the wrong app every single time I needed to tell the place. That click-of-a-moment when you orient yourself in time and space – the tectonic tessellations only a map can mealpiece – were all the more satisfying when your default mode was wherelessness. Moses didn’t have such wayfinding difficulties – The Hanging was her greenprints, after all – she'd lead me down narrow stems of corridors which blossomed into, at first, collaboration spaces, then state-of-the-art gyms and, at a rate of knots, bars bars bars. 

The corporate occupiers (or “Corps.es” as the activists came to call them) loved the Hang, as it was nicknamed, so much that more and more reasons were built for them to stay. Office facilities proliferated, stretching the definition of “workplace” into its own vortex. Initially, press releases insisted on the building’s officeness, admittedly with the most mod of mod cons, until two developments: one architectural and one financial.  

Never still, Moses designed several upper storeys of pod-like residential units. The response from Manchester’s gilded architects was muted at best, fecal at worst: “green flats floated for brown offices” one headline read. But they hadn’t seen what Moses had shown me. In what had become her studio, a ventricle off Hang’s atrium, Moses had presented me with a model of the apartments. Looking perplexed at a green oblong, Moses gently guided my neck up and over like a ventriloquist performing a downward dog. I was indeed dumbed. Internally, the structure teemed with crisscross stalks, reaching from resi pods to offices cutting through various amenities across multiple floors. I assumed these were pipes in an ever-complex irrigation system but I was only part-right – the stalks did include tubes like xylem to transport water around Hang but the “bespokes”, as Moses named them, were there to move people.  

“This is what community actually looks like,” Moses breathed. “Naturally, everyone has their own version of Hang, their own connections to people and places, like their own neural wiring. I’ve constructed the connections themselves. A 15-second neighbourhood, from home to work to play. Think! When is a building a city? When is a city a brain?” 

Moses encouraged, nay demanded, critical thinking so of course I queried the value of living in echo chambers (“eco”, Moses corrected) and the impact on ground stability, not to mention the exorbitant cost.  

“It’s organic,” was Moses blanket answer. “New connections can grow if occupiers just go out of their way.” 

And Moses revealed the second development. The building was infinitely viable because she’d managed to divert funding from three major government investment schemes plus private equity: Hang was now a Garden City, a New Town and, after a pitch arguing it was a post-Newtonian New Town, an Innovation Zone to boot. “Envelop the money,” was Moses’ new mantra. 

As Hang became a soaraway success – a natural ziggurat ascending through emerald mist – my visits with Moses became shorter and less frequent – a dizzy mixture of the stark height, rich air and dollar bill pallor of the corporate occupiers’ skin sliding through routes of lease resistance made me nauseous. Moses seemed to be the only person who could pass in and out of the property’s membrane easily.  

I wasn’t the only sick one. Protestors gathered like clouds in tea, feeding on reading between the lines of press releases plus leaks from an unknown source close to Moses. Their concerns ranged from streetsense (“right to light not right to height”) to poetically outlandish (apparently, the voracious levels of water required to keep the building flowed from the tears of the poor). In response, one viridescent Monday morning, Moses, the master of no comment, emerged from the bowels of the building with a pint glass full of plant juice and downed it in front of the placards in one smirk-eyed gulp.  

Even the greenest of activists, though, had a mature-tree point – Hang was imbibing more and more resources, growing so high, it became the first manmade structure to muster its own microclimate. Even then, gallons of water were sucked from canals and the River Irwell and from Manchester’s famous blue rainsoaked roads. The protestors gave Hang a new motto: “Thirsty? Drink the city”. The building appeared to react by crushing a few students with bursting roots which now surrounded the ground floor like bamboo spider legs. When I read the news, I recognised the disappeared from my old student politics days, back when life was simple: tenants and terraces were good; landlords and swanky apartments were bad. Following Moses tightrope the line between progress and fairness was far harder.  

I learned how hard this highway was when Moses summoned me to her studio to charge me with a delicate mission. Maps of city centre suburbs splayed on her desk, open-legged, while Moses outlined the scarcity, not of water which was still in plentiful supply, but of food. By then, Moses was happy to acknowledge that the building had taken a life of its own; indeed, she enjoyed her reputation as the first urban Frankenstein. Hang, it turned out, wanted (she didn’t say “needed”) a diet of composted city – mulched parkland, sure, but, essentially, bricks and concrete and glass too. Her words surfaced somewhere way above me, as if I were underwater, as she placed a brown marker pen around the Victorian streets of Weaste and filled the box she had drawn with an X, crossing out my own house.  

As a single woman starting out, I’d just about afforded a two-up-two-down back-to-back in the neighbourhood, nudged by Moses’ encouragement that real life started on the first rung of the ladder – when you had brick skin in the game. I was attracted by the relatively cheap prices but also, quietly, by the community which seemed to have clung on like cliffside moss. When I was handed the keys, I felt suddenly weighed down; it was the first time I’d consciously applied a social force to myself – becoming a gentrifier felt like too much gravity. And here I was, tasked to tear the place down. Moses gave me creative license to demolish the homes however I saw fit – her trust felt like a long rope. 

Weeks later, as I delivered spruced leaflets with petalled words like “redevelopment”, which reminded me of bulldozers, and “rehoming”, which made me think of pigeons, I decided to be direct. Like a preacher who’d followed faith into poverty, I told the truth with all I had left, on street corners, in community centres, outside (yes) offices. I daubed red crosses above front doors. This was enough to descend the activists, who muddied the message with politics while whipping anger into a tornado of destruction. The infamous Sunday riot was a blur of sirens and fire and debris.  

Moses rang to congratulate me on my “PR genius” - given how the condemned properties were destroyed, the evicted were classed as “intentionally homeless” so the Council didn’t need to accommodate them and I’d saved money on procurement of the demolition contract. As workmen shoveled the remains of family houses into giant mixers to be pumped intravenously into Hang, I learned that the residents, who’d vanished amid the smoke, had gone underground, tooled up by protestors, tunnelling networks of burrows so they could live within their land and – I’d heard on the vine – plot to poison Hang and its sisters (Moses had conceived triplets) at their unearthly soiled source. A new Manctopia had dawned: people in the ground, Corps.es in the sky... 

My reward for a mission well done was to be displaced as a missionary to my hometown hill in Lancashire. As I parted from Moses, she gifted me a cutting from Hang. I planted it in a raised bed in the service yard of an abandoned factory which I’d allotted into districts. I knew I was onto something when the pallet itself became bark. I sowed questions: Why not let Manchester grow as a mighty oak, and redistribute beauty along all its branches? Why can’t gentrification be the rising tide to lift all boughs? Don’t plants disperse their seeds all the time while remaining rooted? When is a town a garden?  

These days, while I tend my own masterplan, I see one answer only; as I look deeply into shades of spring, fern and forest and know to my bones that green is a spectrum which can mean many things, my professional opinion solidifies and rings like a trunk: we must make green mean – life.