The pyramid of Khufu took tens of million of days‘ hard physical labour to build, yet the total energy deployed by all those workers was less than the lifetime energy consumption today of four average US citizens. Barnabas Calder will look at humanity’s long architectural history to understand and address how humanity and its buildings have become so energy-hungry and so environmentally destructive. This long view offers practical solutions and inspiration for radically decreasing the building sector’s ecological harms.

Dr Barnabas Calder, the University of Liverpool, and head of the History of Architecture Research Cluster – the largest grouping of architectural historians at any UK university. He is author of Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency Penguin Random House, and co-author with Florian Urban and collaborator John Burns of Form Follows Fuel: 14 Buildings from Prehistory to the Oil Age.