We are delighted to collaborate with the OBEL Award, which seeks to recognise and reward architectural intelligence for its conceptual, innovative and enduring successes, rather than celebrating a singular object or author. OBEL’s theme for 2025 asks us to reconsider the potential of the ready-made, applying architectural thinking with what already exists to produce meaningful and paradigmatic change.
Sharing our annual collaboration with the OBEL Award — and its chosen theme of the “Ready Made” — we’re buoyed with hope, solidarity and excitement. Founded in 2019, the OBEL Award has worked with precision and drive to redefine the value of awards within contemporary practice. Challenging the canonical format of honours feting the individual architect or singular building, the OBEL endows its prestigious award either to a body of work (as in the case of 36x36 by Colectivo c733); to a pioneering technology or to celebrate a concept — the common thread being that awardees are recognised for their generative potential to be replicated or inspire further development.
This year’s theme of the ready-made builds upon the OBEL’s vision of architecture as a collaborative act, one which involves the joining of hands, the sharing of skills and the recognition of agencies.
Specifically, this year’s theme of the ready-made builds upon the OBEL’s vision of architecture as a collaborative act, one which involves the joining of hands, the sharing of skills and the recognition of agencies. The notion of the ready-made object resonates with entrenched concerns at KoozArch: we are deeply troubled of architecture’s extractive nature, its energy-hungry processes — and conversely, excited by the opportunities that could arise by reimagining that which is already made. As a platform committed to disciplinary intersections, and in continuous learning from other fields, we were immediately drawn to this year’s theme. The OBEL jury, in selecting the theme, was inspired by the revolutionary impact of Duchamp’s ready-mades — ordinary, existing manufactured objects, selected and modified as an antidote to what the artist defined as “retinal art”. Challenging the work of many of his contemporaries, Duchamp wanted to “put art back in the service of the mind.” Flash forward more than a hundred years later, we wonder what it would mean to liberate architecture from the burden of the retinal, of novelty and its agonistic entrenchment with machinations of capital and power? Can the ready-made reroute our practice towards the service of both people and planet?
In 1972, The Club of Rome published the seminal report The Limits of Growth which declared that unless significant changes were made to historic growth trends, life on our planet would become uninhabitable through the 21st century, with 2071 as their horizon. This came among many simultaneous declarations and studies made around earth sciences; certainly since the seventies, the developed world cannot claim ignorance when it comes to environmental awareness, and the active need for more regenerative practices. We can currently measure atmospheric carbon concentrations at a level over 50% higher than it was in premodern times and 20% above what Johan Rockstorm and the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified as the planetary boundary.1 Considering that the building and construction sector is by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases — accounting for a staggering 37% of global emissions — the urgency for change is more than clear.2
This damage is exacerbated by the growing occurrence of climate disasters, whether natural or artificial. Vast swathes of forest are wiped out by wildfires and flooding across Spain and California, inevitably taking chunks of human settlement with them. Across Ukraine, Palestine and other parts of the world, fire of another kind rained down, incurring unprecedented levels of urbicide. When the extractive processes connected to construction are hostile to the environment, perhaps architecture looks to the ‘ready made’ to address these causes — many of which demand the provision of shelter and the visionary power to rebuild beyond that.
From a glance across the OBEL community, it is abundantly clear that regenerative architecture practices rely on extensive forms of generosity and collaboration.
The majority of architecture practice and discourse — throughout the twentieth century, and certainly after the 1970s — has largely trended towards the technocratic framing of a problem-solving activity. We have seen, however, that this approach has been hijacked to solve the needs of the market, rather than the planet. For this reason, we are particularly heartened that the OBEL Awards place their trust in the KoozArch platform, as we look forward to developing and celebrating the endeavours connecting architecture with science, ecology, technology and policy, acting in concert towards greater climate justice. From a glance across the OBEL community, it is abundantly clear that regenerative architecture practices rely on extensive forms of generosity and collaboration. Although exemplary buildings and authors are pivotal in paving the way, it’s of paramount importance that we focus on practice and process, technology and innovation, policy and standards weaving a much wider net of knowledge, expertise and action.
To look at the ready-made requires us to reckon with what already exists, and the extent to which humanity has transformed our planet. It seems fitting to draw on geologist and paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz’s thought-experiment, the Anthropocene Square Meter, and its visualisation made in collaboration with THEMA laboratory at EPFL. A framework which enables the shifting of scale — from the planetary to more prosaic metrics, the A-SQM model unearths the ways in which the Earth has been terraformed. According to the model, 30 trillion tons of material on the Earth’s crust is modified, producing an annual processing load of 100 gigatons.3 Whilst approximately half of this material is consumed as fuel or food, the other half is turned into consumer goods and construction. By weight, the use of construction minerals — the supply of which depends on deeply extractive practices, including extensive quarrying and mining — makes almost every other material (barring steel) look inconsequential in terms of damage. Yet this value does not even account for the waste produced and displaced in the process of extraction — an approximate four kilograms of mining waste for each sqm of the earth’s surface.
Pilot model axonometry, THEMA, 2023. From Jan Zalasiewicz, Anthropocene Square Meter, pilot model.
If it is hard to wrap your head around these figures, then consider the sheer scale of building stock that is left vacant worldwide. Just ten years after construction began on the $100 billion project to create the “ecofriendly” metropolis of Forest City in the Malaysia's coast of Johor, a lonely 1% is inhabited — earning it the nickname of Ghost City, a namesake for its many Chinese counterparts. The situation is not much rosier in Europe, where the slice of vacant homes ranges from 12% in countries such as Hungary — with between 50-70 thousand empty flats recorded in Budapest alone — to 8% in France.4 In the United States, a recent study revealed that, amidst a general housing shortage, a staggering 5.6 million housing units are vacant across the nation’s fifty largest cities. In this sense vacancy is a clear testament to real estate’s role in financial speculation and buildings as investments rather than as spaces for shelter and community.
In this scenario, perhaps our existence within the Anthropocene and its human-centric perspective prevents us from welcoming, in the words of feminist environmentalist Eileen Crist, “limitations of our numbers, economies, forms of habitation, and uses of land and sea, so that humanity may flourish together with the entire breadth of Life.”5 How might terms such as Capitalocene and Chthulucene — as explored by Donna Haraway — help in the sharing of more relational, sympoietic and consequential stories necessary to build other imaginaries? How might this framework propose a different role for the ready-made?
Operating through the ready-made, adaptive reuse addresses environmental concerns around resource depletion, carbon emissions and construction waste, on top of societal concerns regarding access to the city.
In 2020, amid the worldwide halt induced by Covid — which nevertheless saw the continuity of construction work across many regions — architect and urban designer Charlotte Malterre-Barthes initiated a series of debates entitled A Global Moratorium on New Construction. Engaging actors across the industry — from architects to policymakers — in a conversation on construction’s role “in generating untenable ecological and social injustice”, the project offers a compelling and timely provocation on how to navigate a halt on construction while meeting the need for housing. Such endeavours can be both active and instructive; in an inspiring studio project, Malterre-Barthes’ students were invited to deploy their creative imagination by reactivating existing abandoned building stock, rethinking occupancy modes, optimizing existing habitable spaces to house the 30,000 newcomers set to arrive in Lausanne by 2031. Such exemplary practices can be found in pockets across the globe and are testament to an architectural approach which is engaged in redefining the extent of architecture's terrestrial impact countering shiny facades of capital. Within the material economy — and though the use of so-called digital technologies do indeed have their energy costs — artificial intelligence tools are becoming vital to connect salvaged and reused materials with appropriate projects, dramatically reducing demolition debris as well as the quantity of new materials deployed. This involves being alert to the ‘ready-mades’ within other industries and their waste streams. From the upcycling of crushed oyster shells in reconstituted bricks, glass and plastic bottles compressed into partition elements, or the use of agricultural byproducts as building materials, such projects underline the importance of interdisciplinary thinking and doing.
Operating through the ready-made, adaptive reuse addresses environmental concerns around resource depletion, carbon emissions and construction waste, on top of societal concerns regarding access to the city. Indeed, it is hardly a recent practice, whether at the scale of a building or its component: the reuse of building materials can be identified at Roman settlements in Pompeii dating back to 8 BC; such sites reveal the existence of specialised guilds like the Collegium Subrutorum handling the demolition and resale of these elements.6 At the Ise Jingu grand shrine in Japan’s Mie prefecture, the cypress wood structure is repeatedly rebuilt by many hands, in the same way that it has been for 1300 years. Similarly clay, water, shea butter, baobab tree powder and rice husks go into the mud bricks of the Great Djenne mosque in Mali, lovingly reapplied each year by its congregation. This is a recirculation of inherited knowledge enacted in a civic building programme.
What these historic examples demonstrate is the necessity of creating a framework to support and enable adaptive reuse to be a viable and primary mode of practice. Ultimately, legal structures are the prevalent apparatuses to guide, constrict and delineate the construction industry. A paradigm shift towards a more regenerative building industry cannot rely on individual gestures of goodwill; rather, change needs to be systematically implemented, at scale and with urgency. Such a shift can only be achieved through the structural implementation of a framework that accounts for the ecological impact of the demolition and construction of new buildings vs. their adaptive reuse. Proposals like the “polluter pays principle” are pivotal in lowering risks and costs, controlling the ease with which stakeholders are induced to prioritise demolition and new construction over reuse and repair. Systemic change cannot be left to architects alone; it requires the coming together of civic, economic and political actors.
All of these positions and more make the OBEL Award’s theme of ready-made such a compelling topic to unravel across territories and praxes. It can often be hard to indicate the path to bridging humanitarian concern and the application of architectural skills. Singular, salutary projects are easier to identify, but we’re proud to associate with a platform that celebrates exemplary practice, in all its ongoing struggle. Whether this takes the form of building or not, the opportunity to hold up work that addresses broader planetary issues is a genuine pleasure, especially in an epoch as challenging as this. KoozArch is geared up to activate and nurture such exchanges through intersectional conversations, proposals and imaginaries.
Bio
Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.
Notes
1 Johan Rockström et al., ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,’ Nature 461 (2009), 472–475
2 United Nations Environment Program report, ‘Building Materials And The Climate: Constructing A New Future’ [online]
3 Nicols, Sara “Bringing the Anthropocene Down to Size, or, How Can We Understand a Gigaton?”, Journal of Architectural Education Vol. 78, issue 2, 2024
4 Cieśla & Hansens, ’The empty house: a window into Europe’s vacant property problem’, [online]
5 Crist, Eileen, "On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature"
6 Anguissola, Anna “Materials in Flux” Prada Frames 2023
