Climax Change! , livre ebook

Actar D - Pedro Gadanho

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240 pages

English

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Climax Change! represents the much-needed overview of how climate change and the current environmental emergency will affect the practice of architecture, both in terms of its design philosophy and rising opportunities to innovate and radically transform the current tenet of architecture’s aesthetic, ethical and professional drives.

Climax Change! offers an overview of how the current environmental emergency will impact the practice of architecture. At a crossroads in which the construction sector and built environment produce nearly 40% of greenhouse gases accountable for global warming, architects are just starting to acknowledge their complicity in an impending disaster.

In need of a paradigm shift similar to that of the Modern Movement, architecture desperately requires clear guidelines and targets so as to operate its inevitable transformation towards an ecologically-friendly design logic. From historical analyses of ecocide or the environmental avant-gardes, to topics such as decarbonization, degrowth, the Great Transition and the aspirations of Green New Deals, this book features ten essays around today's climate change debates, bringing them home to architectural thinking.

Sujets

green design

Architecture

Informations

Publié par	Actar D
Date de parution	25 mai 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781638408031
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

——— PEDRO GADANHO ———

——————— ———————

Dedicated to my children, Catarina and Miguel

Ten essays zooming into the ways the environmental crisis impacts architecture and its practice, while probing into historical background and some critical reflections on the discipline’s current status quo .

“The most startling aspect of this story is just how much these people knew, and how unable they were to act upon what they knew. Knowledge did not translate into power.”
— Naomi Oreskes, in The Collapse of Western Civilization , 2014.

7 Index

10 Stop Building: A Prelude
22 1. What Ever Happened to the Environmental Avant-garde?
40 2. Start the Change
62 3. Weapons of Ecocide
80 4. The Great Transition
98 5. Thinking Like a Building
112 6. All The Green New Deals
136 7. Magical Thinking & Silver Bullets
156 8. Digesting Degrowth
176 9. One Thousand Pathways
212 10. The Time is Now: Welcome to the Anthropocene

CLIMAX
CHANGE!

How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency

—————————————————

Stop Building: A Prelude

11 Stop Building: A Prelude

More than a decade ago, shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, I wrote a small, polemical pamphlet defending that architects should be the first to tell society a difficult truth: we should stop building anew. Architects should resist a natural temptation to embrace any opportunity to erect a new building, and they should warn society of the hidden future costs of building frenzies like the one that had just helped trigger the great recession.
With their specific knowledge of the impacts of any new additions to the built environment, architects should overcome a selfish want to build from scratch and let people know that there are viable alternatives in recycling existing constructions. They too should join emerging pleas for the three Rs. As designers, planners and creators they should be the first to assume responsibility in helping the construction industry rethink how to reduce, reuse and recycle.
More than the expression of an urging environmental concern, that short essay was a reflection on the paradoxes of an ever-growing building supply in the face of ever scarcer natural resources. Although alluding to sea level rise and ecological distress, the piece rather underlined the need to avoid the economic pressure to embrace new construction in virgin territory. It stressed the urgent need to move forward to practices of rehabilitation and renovation.
Needless to say, the arguments I advanced were coming from a Eurocentric perspective, in a context in which populations were starting to shrink. A situation in which the existing building stock should be able to cover existing and future demand. Even where new needs would arise, conversion of available buildings could provide creative solutions. Yet, anytime I described such notions, immediate protests rose about housing shortages, the urges of developing economies or again the permanent want of new building typologies for novel uses.
Eventually, I gave up on the discussion.
It was only when my awareness of the dimension of our climate crisis rose to new levels that, a couple of years ago, the idea

See Pedro Gadanho, 2009 “Parar de Construir, ou o Regresso à Cidade”, in José Manuel das Neves (ed.), Living City, True Team, Lisbon, 2009

Climax Change! Pedro Gadanho

resonated again in my mind. With the exception of one or another thought experiments along the way, it was also only recently that the idea resurfaced in architectural discourse, if still very discreetly.
So, when I finally decided to take on the project of writing about climate change and its impacts on architectural practice, this seemed like a subject worth revisiting. As calls arose for fossil fuels to be left in the ground, it seemed appropriate to consider that new buildings could also be left on paper. In Russia, in the eighties, a wave of ‘paper architecture’ was a sign of political resistance to a corrupt system. Elsewhere, many contributions to architectural discourse have remained influential without ever leaving the paper on which they were ideated. Fictional architecture at some point grew into a real possibility to inform and enrichen the culture of architecture.
In the face of a growing — and necessary — environmental consciousness, perhaps it was again time for architects to let go of the peer pressure to achieve recognition only through the production of new buildings.
This would imply, first of all, that architects shifted the importance they put on new construction — as a hallmark of authorship, disciplinary legitimation and even the major avenue for architectural innovation. Such a shift would certainly help conceive how our society can stop new construction. It could actually be a good illustration of one of those ‘climax changes’ that this book calls for.
If architecture must undergo a paradigm shift so as to join collective efforts in tackling an encroaching environmental crisis, then the symbolic acts from which we architects get our kicks must also surely change.
A sort of unique orgasmic realization still seems only possible when delivering a shiny new building. So, perhaps we must try and shift the locus of our typical collective architectural desire. As ecological awareness becomes more asphyxiating, we must try and redirect our lust somewhere else, and thus allow ourselves to argue for halting the ongoing rape of virgin land.

13 Stop Building: A Prelude

As we accept urban densification as one possible strategy for carbon dioxide reduction, we architects should definitely start to conceptualize the trade-offs that would allow us to tell society to ban building. But only a full consideration of implications, options, costs and benefits will allow us to properly advocate that new construction beyond the boundaries of urban nodes should stop as soon as possible.
In his book A Country of Cities , architect Vishaan Chakrabarti did not go so as far as to suggest that we should halt new buildings altogether. Nonetheless, he provided abundant signs that behaviors in the construction world, as in everyone’s lifestyles, must per force undergo some kind of collective transformation. As he wrote, “it is now abundantly clear that we use more natural resources than the world can replenish.” With the demonstrated small impact of “feel-good actions,” and with the full perception of how unsustainable our practices are, we should “address resource usage at a global scale” 1 — including notably how we refurbish and make our cities more efficient. Chrakabati goes to lengths to reveal how the densest cities are proven to “produce the lowest greenhouse-gas emissions per capita.” So, this is the first context in which a halt on new construction must be considered.
When calling for a ban on new buildings in non-urban territory, one can actually imagine a regulatory pathway to achieve a built environment with less of a carbon footprint. And one would not be calling for the eradication of the construction industry — as much as many now tentatively ask for the extinction of fossil fuel industries. The lure for such a call is certainly there. When one knows cement alone is responsible for 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions, one may be enticed to plea for its exclusion once and for all.
But, no, we should rather think in terms of incentives. We should rather encourage that, while greening its practices, the construction industry, as society in general, must redirect its efforts to densifying and renewing those cities that are still attracting newcomers from their surroundings. So, perhaps a

1. See Vishaan Chakrabarti, A Country of Cities , in Dan Willis, William W. Braham, Katsuhiko Muramoto, Daniel A. Barber (eds.), Energy Accounts: Architectural Representations of Energy, Climate, and the Future , Routledge, New York: 2016.

Climax Change! Pedro Gadanho

few new buildings will be allowed, but only when they would be contributing to urban densification — and never when expanding the actual foothold of existing cities on their less built surroundings.
In my searches, I did find one other lonely advocate of the need to stop building. Writing fot the HuffPost in 2013, architect Lance Hosey hypothesized how a ban on building would work. 2 He was pulled to that thought experiment by the news of yet another psychological climate barrier broken at the time. This was the first-time scientists registered 400 parts of carbon dioxide per million in the Earth’s atmosphere, surpassing records of the last 800,000 years, much before human civilization appeared.
As we now read on an everyday basis, Hosey underlined estimates pointing to the construction industry as the culprit for nearly 40% of carbon dioxide emissions. He pointed out that LEED certification strategies would not be enough to reduce the footprint of building’s embodied carbon in a significant manner. While such strategies had helped cut emissions, a report by the Preservation Green Lab 3 stated that it could take “up to eighty years for the greater energy efficiency of a LEED-certified building to overcome the harmful climate effects created during the building’s construction.” This would, of course, represent a blunt failure to meet current demands to achieve zero emissio