"Yet what we need is a voluntary cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interruption. Without which there will be no tomorrow."1 - Achille Mbembe
From steel bolts to concrete blocks to wood flooring to polyester insulation panels, every single component of the built environment is the product of extractive processes. Driven by greedy economies—finance, real estate and the corporate construction industry—the global enterprise of space production expands, impacting air, climate, soil, geological features, water resources, fauna, flora, food systems, labor, health, farming activities and vulnerable local populations; humans and non-humans everywhere. “If everything is stopped, everything can be questioned, bent, selected, sorted, interrupted for good.”2 Bruno Latour’s questionnaire was making the rounds in March 2020. Three years later, construction sites worldwide are ongoing—every single one claiming to be "sustainable." The halt offered by the pandemic to question our societal model, as advocated by Latour, did not happen. Critical questions about the profession remained unaddressed. At policy level, little is done to mitigate the harmful acts of excavating, mining, smelting, manufacturing, transporting, assembling, etc. But as housing is both a human right and the mandate of design disciplines, we architects stand at the difficult threshold between home provision and depletion: How to navigate the need for housing versus the destructive practice of construction?
To pause new construction—even if momentarily—creates a radical thinking framework for alternatives to the current regime of space production and its suspect growth imperative. Engaging with unsettling questions, A Moratorium on New Construction envisions a massive value shift for existing buildings, infrastructure, materials, unbuilt land, earth and the labor that holds our world together.3 From housing redistribution to anti-extractive measures, from structural changes to reorienting the construction workforce into renovation and reinvention, from curricula reforms to purging the exploitative culture of the office, from respecting soil to embracing repair, reuse and dismantling, an entire rewiring of design and construction processes lays ahead. The call to stop is not the end of architecture, but the opposite. The task is immense: it demands an alternative way of making worlds, one that demands a careful inventory of actual and vacant stock, the revaluation of caretaking tasks, a global demolition ban, state commitment to public housing, just zoning plans, robust rent control, anti-vacancy policies and ownership reforms, but also materials end-of-life etiquette and maintenance protocols, to be imagined, designed, formulated, planned, implemented according to context. Somewhere between a thought experiment and a call for action, A Moratorium on New Construction is a leap of faith to envision a non-extractive future, made of what we have.
This essay is part of Issue #1 “Agents Provocateurs: agitate normality”, a bimonthly series curated by KoozArch on the agency of architecture and the architect.
Bio
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), where she leads the laboratory RIOT. Most recently Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she taught studios and seminars, she launched there in 2021 with B+ the initiative 'A Global Moratorium on New Construction' interrogating current protocols of development and urging for a profound reform of planning disciplines to face the climate and social emergency. A Moratorium on New Constructionis forthcoming with Sternberg Press/ MIT Press, in the Series Critical Spatial Practice edited by Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen.
Notes
1 Mbembe Achille, Shread Caroline. The Universal Right to Breathe. Critical Inquiry. 2021;47(S2):S58-S62. doi:10.1086/711437
2 Bruno Latour, “Imaginer Les Gestes-Barrières Contre Le Retour À La Production D’avant-Crise" (Analyse Opinion Critique, 2020)
3 “A Global Moratorium on New Construction” started in April 2021 in collaboration with B+, in the form of four roundtables that generated a wealth of ideas. I would like to thank for their generous inputs Cynthia Deng & Elif Erez, Noboru Kawagishi, Omar Nagati & Beth Stryker, Sarah Nichols, and Ilze Wolff (1st Rountable, April 2021); Menna Agha, Sarah Barth, Leon Beck, Silvia Gioberti and Kerstin Müller (2nd Rountable, June 2021), Connor Cook, Rhiarna Dhaliwal, Elisa Giuliano, Luke Jones, Artem Nikitin, Davide Tagliabue (V—A—C Zattere) and Sofia Pia Belenky —Space Caviar (3rd Roundtable, July 2021); Manuel Ehlers, Saskia Hebert, Tobias Hönig und Andrijana Ivanda, Sabine Oberhuber, Deane Simpson, and Ramona Pop (4th Rountable, August 2021), as well as Arno Brandlhuber, Olaf Grawert, Angelika Hinterbrandner, Roberta Jurčić and Gregor Zorzi for supporting this experiment.
Images
Cover: Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Scales of Extraction, after Morphosis, 2-4-6-8 House Parts drawing.
