Architecture after Architecture: Spatial Practice in the Face of the Climate Emergency
Final Report Abstract
'Architecture after Architecture' began with a simple premise. First, in an age of climate breakdown the principles of the modern project—absolute knowledge, the imposition of order, endless growth, an addiction to the new, the separation of humans from nature—are exposed as threats to planetary survival. The ways of thinking and doing that got us into this mess will not get us out of it: they will only deepen the crisis. Second, that architecture in its current guise is fundamentally bound to these principles, emerging as it does as an agent of modernity. This implies that the current project of architecture, too, is untenable in the face of climate breakdown. It cannot effectively confront, let alone address, the conditions of climate breakdown because of the limits of its very constitution. The question then is: What is architecture after architecture? Our answers start with a straightforward assertion: Architecture is Climate. To say that Architecture is Climate is to challenge the orthodoxies, assumptions, and protocols of architecture as it is professionally defined. To say that Architecture is Climate is to situate it within unpredictable and volatile contexts. To say that Architecture is Climate is to open up discussions about past and present violent entanglements. To say that Architecture is Climate exposes the discipline, stripping away the layers of protection that any profession wraps itself in, leaving architecture in a raw state. But it is necessary because climate breakdown engulfs us all, overriding boundaries, disciplines, and professional niceties. Better, then, to engage with it. This project traces these relationships between architecture and climate, opening up architecture to a range of other possibilities. These futures are not conjured up out of thin air but are ways of doing and thinking that we can find, if we choose to look, already all around us. We build these other architectures with the help of ecofeminists and economists who offer revised interpretations of growth and value, with anti-colonial thinkers who interrelate architecture and the wider productions of space, and with those who work with contingency, allowing different routes to emerge from a situated context rather than imposing universal, linear, rules. The project—and its accompanying publications—is a glimpse into the manifold conversations surrounding us all; its arguments are supported and expanded in the accompanying website. The website presents the foundations upon which our modern world was built, its entanglements with colonialism, and its impacts and consequences. The bulk of the website is made up of practices that provide hope that there are compelling and empowering ways of acting in the face of climate breakdown. The relevant practices are included in the book in square brackets which link to more detail in the website entry. The project frames a wider intellectual framework on which to build present and future spatial practice. It discusses different sites in relation to architecture: knowledge, economy, land, resources, infrastructure, work, policy, and culture. Each of these sites describes where and how architecture and climate are entangled. They describe social and spatial contexts in which climate breakdown is both produced and experienced, and so the conditions within which architecture might evolve. The answer to our research question—’What does climate breakdown do to architecture?’— implies an unravelling of the architecture as presently defined. The systemic change in societal norms that climate breakdown demands will have to be accompanied by new spatial formations that reflect, respond to, and interact with the social and material—with political, human and natural environments. We demonstrate that if architecture is seen as a process that negotiates and spatialises materials, culture, power, and politics, then it becomes an important agent in imagining and realising these new conditions of climate. Architects play an important role here, but it is a very different role from the one that is currently prescribed in the profession’s education criteria and championed in its media. The project shows multiple ways in which spatial intelligence and imagination might be deployed to release architecture’s potential vis-a-vis climate.
Publications
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Past, Present, Future Architecture: Historical Examples and Contemporary Possibilities. Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly
Voelcker, Becca
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Care. London: MOULD, 2022
Voelcker, Becca
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Climate. London: MOULD, 2022
Powis, Anthony
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Extraction. London: MOULD, 2022
Powis, Anthony
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Future. London: MOULD, 2022
Voelcker, Becca
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Architecture Criticism Against the Climate Clock. The Architectural Review, no. 1500 (2023): 6–10
Till, Jeremy
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Chronograms of Architecture - MOULD: Architecture Is Climate’. E-Flux, 22 February 2023
MOULD Collective
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Climate, Capital, and Colonialism: A Congolese Perspective. Journal of Climate Resilience and Justice, 1, 55-65.
Voelcker, Becca
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Die Zukunft in Den Lücken Der Gegenwart. Die Architekt, no. 5 (2023): 2
MOULD Collective
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Do Nothing for as Long as Possible. MONU, no. 36 (2023): 24–29
Schneider, Tatjana
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Ein Teil Des Wandels. Stadt Bauwelt, no. 240 (2023): 14–19
MOULD Collective
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Provocation as Care. KoozArch, 2023
MOULD Collective
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Provocation as Care. KoozArch, 7 June 2023
Powis, Anthony, Tatjana Schneider, Christina Serifi, Jeremy Till & Becca Voelcker
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Remembering the Future. In Biennale Architettura, 2023: The Laboratory of the Future, edited by Lesley Lokko, 170–73. Venice: Silvana, 2023
MOULD Collective
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Accustomise the Otherwise. Protocol, no. 14 (2024): 64–71
MOULD Collective
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Architecture Is Climate. Architecture is Climate, 2024
Bovelett, Sarah, Anthony Powis, Tatjana Schneider, Christina Serifi, Jeremy Till & Becca Voelcker
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More Than Words: MOULD and APLO at the IABR. KoozArch, 27 September 2024
Aparicio-Llorente, Pedro, Daniel Blanco Lozano, Janna Bystrykh, Alina Paias, Anthony Powis, Christina Serifi & Federica Zambeletti
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Spatial Justice. Urbane Praxis Zine, no. 1 (2024): 6–10
MOULD Collective
