Extinction Rebellion's bamboo protest towers that blocked national newspaper printing presses recall the sustainable motives of high-tech architecture and should win the Stirling Prize, argues Phineas Harper.

Last week, under the cover of darkness, a construction team, dressed all in black, set to work in Hertfordshire near London. Within minutes they had erected two bamboo and steel cable towers, each three storeys high, blockading the road to the Broxbourne printworks of media baron Rupert Murdoch.
Locked onto each tower were Extinction Rebellion protesters accusing the Murdoch press empire of failing to report the most burning issue of our time; global heating. Thirteen hours later, despite extensive efforts, the British police had failed to remove the protestors from their perches. Murdoch's Saturday papers had to be pulped. Extinction Rebellion, and their two towers, had won. Architecture rarely makes the headlines, yet all of a sudden these two structures were at the centre of a national debate
Eighty per cent of the UK's print media is owned by just five billionaires, many of whom are major donors to the ruling Conservative Party, so it was no surprise that the protest sent broadsheet columnists and ministers into frothing hysterics. Home Secretary Priti Patel labeled the peaceful demonstration an attack "on society and democracy", while moving to designate the climate change activists as an organised crime group ? the towers had touched a nerve.
Architec...