Confronting Carbon Form—displayed at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of Cooper Union University—is the culmination of a five-year research on the spatial effects of the current fossil-fuel driven society. Started in 2019 when Elisa Iturbe guest-edited Log 47 Overcoming Carbon Form, the project included the panels “Confronting Carbon Form - Five Conversations on Energy, Power, Space, and Architecture” (curated in 2021 by Iturbe, Stanley Cho and Alican Taylan) to further understand the new paradigm of the relationship between architecture and carbon modernity. Throughout the exhibition—composed of ten sections—the curators carried out a consistent multiscalar study of carbon form, contributing to its definition and representation and to the advancement of Western architectural and environmental history and criticism. Thanks to the introduction of a new analytical lens, Confronting Carbon Form, created by Iturbe, Cho and Taylan contributes to the development of new architectural histories that take into account the origins of carbon modernity and their substantial impact on the climate crisis.
FRF | VF What is "carbon form"? Can you tell us how this project started and why you chose the exhibition format?
ALICAN TAYLAN Carbon form is the spatial expression of a fossil fuel-driven society. The exhibition contends that the widespread use of fossil fuels in the 19th century unleashed a specific spatial paradigm that persists today. Instead of looking for technological fixes to the climate crisis, we argue that we must look at the history of the relationship between space and energy to understand its logic and possibly propose alternatives.
"Instead of looking for technological fixes to the climate crisis, we argue that we must look at the history of the relationship between space and energy to understand its logic and possibly propose alternatives." - Alican Taylan
STANLEY CHO Elisa coined the term and has developed, through her courses and writing, a historiography and theoretical basis by which we can understand our built environment from today’s point of view, from a planet in crisis. Spatial “expression” may not be the right word. It’s much more consequential, more deeply ingrained than that, as we now see more than ever. Nevertheless, the “expression” or representation throughout culture is a very significant aspect to defining the “form” in Carbon Form. It is the means to perpetuate the form into a carbon culture that reproduces itself ad infinitum. From our perspective, it provides a record of the manifestations of such form and the ideologies that drive it. Representation became very important for us as a critical lens and the exhibition format has allowed us to engage this problem of representation and form in a direct way.
FRF | VF Can you elaborate on the relationship between architecture and the carbon extractive economy? What design solutions have you identified that successfully tackle the global issue of the fossil fuel era and consequent climate crisis?
ELISA ITURBE The term carbon form was coined in order to address this very question. Throughout my education, environmental issues were treated solely as technical problems related to building technology. In this sense, there was little emphasis placed on the environment in the realms of history, theory, and the study of form. What I’m arguing is that the adoption of fossil fuels changed how we move and how we make. Mobility and production suddenly seemed to have no limit, which, in turn, changed how we think about space: the city could be conceived as infinitely growing, no region of the world was too out of reach, our capacity to produce and invent new commodities would transform domestic space, etc. This transformed the built environment in a profound way and ushered in a profusion of new spatial concepts. In this sense, the project of carbon form does not aim to link architecture and extraction via quantification, but rather by identifying spatial concepts that emerged in the fossil fuel era and that we continue to replicate, intensifying carbon modernity. I don’t think we can really talk about design solutions until we understand that most of what we make is still infused with these ideas. The project of confronting carbon form is a necessary prelude to discussing alternatives. We need to understand what carbon form is, otherwise it will be impossible to know whether we, as architects, are actually proposing something new or not.
"Throughout my education, environmental issues were treated solely as technical problems related to building technology, there was little emphasis placed on the environment in the realms of history, theory, and the study of form." - Elisa Iturbe
AT Thinkers in many fields are trying to frame this question. We can outline two approaches that sometimes converge but often diverge. Firstly, there is the scientific, quantitative, and metric-based approach. Branches of ecology, economy, life sciences, engineering, and architecture use it. Empirical methods such as quantifying carbon emissions characterise this approach, which strives to reduce the figure in question through technological innovation. Certain architects will look for material-based solutions, examining material life cycles and technologies to implement those into their designs. PV panels, mass-timber structures and passive heating and cooling designs are some of this approach’s outcomes.
On the other hand, the field of environmental humanities aims at rethinking an energy-intensive way of living. Literary scholars, historians, geographers, archeologists and architecture historians work in this field to reveal the more expansive, structural issues in our relationship with energy. Projected desires, cultural imaginaries, class relations, coloniality, race, gender, domesticity and religion play an important role here. We situated our framework within the second approach, which architects have rarely done until now.
SC We’re not calling architects to stop working, but we need to come to terms with the origins of why we design and build the way we do. Then we might begin to think of radical solutions.
"I designed a course meant to address a glaring question that was absent in my own architectural education: what is the relationship between climate change and spatial organisation?" - Elisa Iturbe
FRF | VF What is the research methodology that guided your study? Starting from Log 47 and arriving at the exhibition, how did your research evolve?
EI The idea of carbon form was born as a pedagogical framework. When I was hired at The Cooper Union, I was asked to teach in a new sequence called “Environments,” which was meant to introduce environmental matters into the core of the B.Arch program. So I designed a course meant to address a glaring question that was absent in my own architectural education: what is the relationship between climate change and spatial organisation? I realised that reading form and type could be a new way of understanding the formation and trajectory of carbon modernity, and quickly the course focused on history and theory, leaving behind the typical subject areas associated with sustainability, such as materials and building performance. Instead, it focused on colonialism, industry, and capitalism. I sought evidence for how spatial structures were changing as these socio-economic and political structures changed. This allowed me to build the argument for Log 47, and for several years the research continued in this way. Then the research changed when with Stanley and Alican we began to think about how to work on these ideas through drawing, model, and other forms of representation. The drawings and models in the show are their own kind of research. In many ways, they show our findings from extensive precedent studies, but they are also experiments in how the languages of representation can communicate complex concepts.
"Reading form and type could be a new way of understanding the formation and trajectory of carbon modernity, and quickly the course focused on history and theory, leaving behind the typical subject areas associated with sustainability." - Elisa Iturbe
FRF | VF The exhibition presents a large catalogue of architectural and planning case studies born from the carbon economy, but no data or models representing and contextualising the carbon economy itself, its environmental effects, wider implications and relationship with architecture and planning. Can you explain why abstracting the carbon form from the phenomena that generated it and completely excluding data? Is there a risk of not catching the 2-way relationship between carbon economy and architecture, i.e. carbon form itself?
AT One of our primary goals was to decouple data-intensive methods from a more qualitative, historical approach. Numbers can explain many things but conceal and obscure many aspects of the problem. If you work with a data-intensive research method, you assume that the issue’s core will be solved if the numbers align with your expectations. As the late Bruno Latour—and more generally, social constructivism—has shown, there is no such thing as an “objective” experiment or “neutral” data. While their theory had shortcomings,1 they showed that researchers construct scientific facts in research institutions. With that in mind, I am unsure that data generates carbon form. I would say that historical development did.
"You don’t need to measure the carbon footprint of a Modernist project to see that this created a new spatial structure that re-choreographed human life according to an industrial logic." - Elisa Iturbe
EI Carbon form is not generated by data. Humans generate data about the built environment when we study it in particular ways, but it’s not the data itself that is generative of the problem. I would also say that carbon itself is not the cause of the problem; carbon is simply an element, and is present in all living things. What we need to understand is that specific human activity has created an accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but we cannot isolate that as a singular cause of the climate crisis. It matters how it got there! Until we understand the political, economic, social, and spatial processes by which it happened, we are not seeing the whole picture. As an architect, I’m particularly interested in looking at how spatial transformations are part of the causal landscape. For example, the project of Modernism was razor-focused on reorganising space in order to accommodate an industrial economy. You don’t need to measure the carbon footprint of a Modernist project to see that this created a new spatial structure that re-choreographed human life according to an industrial logic. This profound spatial reorganisation is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to address the climate crisis today: an energy-intensive way of life was written into the form of the city while new typologies emerged to cement and crystallise the social relations specific to industrial society. So, your question is whether turning away from the data might obscure the link between architecture and a carbon economy. I would say it’s the opposite. If we only focus on carbon accounting, we are only studying the symptoms and effects of an extractive economy, but not its causes. This is not to say that carbon accounting is not important. It is, of course. But if we are interested in understanding the causes of the climate crisis from a spatial and architectural lens, we have to look far beyond building materials and performance to ask other questions: what role do specific spatial organisations play in forcing us to live in energy-intensive ways? How does architecture give form to an energy-intensive society? Might it give form to something else, to other forms of life? These are the questions I am interested in.
"Carbon form is present in the dining room as much as in urban zoning, as both effect and cause to another effect at another scale." - Stanley Cho
SC It’s not so simple as a cause-and-effect relationship. I think we’re trying to show that in the exhibition as we attempt to fluidly traverse various scales. Carbon form is present in the dining room as much as in urban zoning, as both effect and cause to another effect at another scale.
"We realised that we’d have to develop a way of drawing that would be suited to this particular task. We know how to draw style and type, but how do you draw shared tendencies, dispositions, and attitudes towards space?" - Elisa Iturbe
FRF | VF Abstracting as a method seems particularly effective for the identification of the relationship between aesthetic, formal qualities of spatial designs, and political ideology. How could this potentially contribute to the re-writing of new architectural histories? Do you believe that formal abstraction as a means to uncover hidden political or economic frameworks could be applied or replicated in other circumstances or different scales? If yes, which ones?
EI In working to define carbon form, we felt the need to develop our own techniques of representation, in part because the instruments of classification typically used in architecture cannot fully encompass the idea of carbon form. For example, carbon form resists stylistic categories. Typological determination can be elusive as well. Although some building types are specific to carbon modernity, such as a skyscraper, others predate the adoption of fossil fuels and yet are instrumentalized within a carbon economy, ultimately becoming examples of carbon form. For example, the detached house as a type emerged long before the carbon age, but under a paradigm of dense and abundant energy, it has proliferated as the spatial building block of the suburban landscape. In this sense, typology is only one component within a larger conversation, and in that sense, cannot offer a systemic way to classify or identify carbon form. We realised that we’d have to develop a way of drawing that would be suited to this particular task. We know how to draw style and type, but how do you draw shared tendencies, dispositions, and attitudes towards space?
The drawings and paintings titled Spatial Concepts of Carbon Form developed out of this question. Abstraction became essential because it offered a representational device by which we could show the prevalence and persistence of those tendencies across projects that are very different. That said, I don’t believe it was abstraction alone that created the link between aesthetics, form, and power within the piece. The theoretical framework we were working in was already building a bridge between form and power. So yes, we used abstraction to empty the image of its content in order to reveal its form, and we believe that in revealing the form, we revealed some of its ideological content. But the process was very specific, and I’m not sure whether abstraction always has the capacity to uncover political and economic frameworks. Abstraction can also be used reductively, as a tool of concealment or oversimplification. In fact, abstraction is a huge part of carbon modernity. Abstractions such as private property are constantly creating barriers—both physical and conceptual—between humans and land, between society and ecosystems. In that light, we thought it was fitting to use abstraction to highlight carbon form’s abstract quality. Our use of abstraction, then, does not stem from an unflinching belief in abstraction’s liberatory potential, but rather a belief in the importance of developing specific modes of representation that have the capacity to reveal the nature of carbon form. It’s difficult to know whether this specific technique can be applicable in other contexts.
"Our use of abstraction stems from a belief in the importance of developing specific modes of representation that have the capacity to reveal the nature of carbon form." - Elisa Iturbe
AT Abstraction as a method is a starting point, not an end. Abstraction allowed us to compare and juxtapose different projects from different periods, see their formal connections, and argue for the persistence of carbon form from the nineteenth century onward. Let's take the example of the paintings series about circulation, it’s a series of projects where transportation routes become foundational to the conception of urban form in a new way. From Arturo Soria’s Ciudad Lineal to Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle and Kenzo Tange’s Plan for Tokyo, the abstracted drawing highlights the new spatial logic being imposed on the territories in question, one that prioritises the circulation of people and goods above all else. This, in itself, is a process revealing a political ideology.
"Abstraction allowed us to compare and juxtapose different projects from different periods, see their formal connections, and argue for the persistence of carbon form from the nineteenth century onward." - Alican Taylan
Nevertheless, I think it is not enough to stay at that level of analysis. Even though abstraction is helpful, in this case, to reveal the imposition of an ideology onto the land, I see it more as a method to start diving into the history of each of these projects. For example, I am currently working on Tony Garnier’s above-mentioned project and found a substantial gap in how architecture historians have written about it, missing a very apparent colonialist impetus. This gap came from Garnier referencing the writer Zola and his African utopia depicted in his penultimate novel. With that in mind, the environmental logic at play in Garnier’s proposal becomes more critical. Abstraction could not have led to finding this new history. Only historical research itself could, but abstraction and formal analysis were a strong starting point.
SC Abstraction in representation has developed over the course of human history and has altered the idea of form. It has rapidly evolved over the past 200 years alongside industrialization and carbon modernity. It is an essential concept if we want to reclaim the term “form” away from its current shallow usage within architecture, which essentially describes shapes. Abstraction is both dangerous and effective for the reasons you mention.
Within a consumer economy, the path of the carbon subject traces lines between home, work, and sites of consumption. Distant lands and people deliver energy, food, and commodities. This is the logic of carbon form. These drawings show this logic at work within settlement patterns of different densities: Miami, FL, San Diego, CA, and Hardin County, IA. Although each site has different spatial characteristics, these drawings nonetheless reveal a shared logic, one that has a distinct and replicable form. From “Form, Pattern, Rule: Elements of Territorial Carbon Form,” Outside Development and Alican Taylan, with Adare Brown, 2023.
FRF | VF How do you position this research within the wider context of a gradual transition to a post-carbon economy?
EI I have long been afraid that the “sustainable architecture” of our day continues to reify the tropes of carbon modernity, but just with slightly more efficient systems. My hope for this work is that it will offer a different way of thinking about how architecture and climate are related, providing new ways of defining and thinking about transition. So although the show looks to history, it is not meant to be only historical; it is theoretical as well, and it posits a new critical framework for thinking about design itself. I want to help others see carbon form because once you see it, once you are critical of it, you won’t design the same way. I believe this is a necessary ground that must be prepared in order to work on transition in a serious way. If our work can offer that, then it will have made a contribution to transition, and it will have an impact on design going forward, even if we are not prescribing design solutions of our own in the show.
Views of student work from Elisa Iturbe’s seminar To Un-Make and Re-Earth: Designs for Transition, taught at The Cooper Union in Fall 2022. Photography Tracie Williams.
FRF | VF The section To Unmake and Re-earth identifies what you call “architectural fragments”. How does scale influence carbon form?
SC To me, the “fragments” are a relatable means to engage with the overwhelming scale and ubiquity of carbon form. It confronts the patterns of the city, formed by this energy-intensive paradigm, such as cadastre tax maps and zoning, from the scale of a collective subject. It takes social practices beyond recycling or composting to thinking about sharing resources, local production, breaking down the abstracted mirage of endless resources distributed from the “unspecified elsewhere,” and disrupts the carbon form diagram.
EI The idea of working with architectural fragments came from two places. The first, is the recognition that the production of individual buildings is deeply imbricated in neoliberal real estate, wealth accumulation, gentrification, material extraction, etc. It’s difficult for architecture to be radical in that context. That said, one of the lessons of carbon form is that architecture is always doing the work of choreographing our movements and social relations, and it always has specific dispositions and affordances. The fragments are the work of my students to create a scenario where architectural interventions change the affordances of urban space, without assuming the construction of a building.
"Architecture is always doing the work of choreographing our movements and social relations, and it always has specific dispositions and affordances." - Elisa Iturbe
Second, if the goal is to leverage the affordances of form, then one must also ask what the architecture is allowing or disallowing. Our current configurations of building types and urban form predetermine how we live, often preventing alternative forms of life from emerging. So in that vein, I asked students to consider how architectural fragments might be a simple but strategic way to introduce new affordances into the city and change our relationship to the living ecosystems around us.
The fragments are small in scale, but they are rooted in a desire to decommodify resources and rewrite—even if just at a small scale—the relationship between production and consumption. I find that these goals are often missing from other architectural projects focused on the environment. I don’t think that these fragments will solve climate change on their own, but they might offer a different way of thinking about design, and perhaps we might even find a different way in which spatial concepts might proliferate that is not about scale. We seem to always assess the viability and success of social and environmental projects by asking whether they can scale. That’s fundamentally a capitalist way of thinking. The work on architectural fragments is less concerned with scale and more concerned with new models. The four projects were on different sites, for different communities and had different programs. And yet, all of them used the same theoretical framework. All of them were engaged in decommodification of resources, creating more direct access to one’s means of subsistence and reducing dependence on wage labour and global supply chains. In this sense, each project is an instance of a model that we’re developing, and each project shows that the model can be replicated on different sites, even if no individual instance can actually scale.
FRF | VF What are the major shortcomings of your five-year-long research and what impact do you wish to have with this work? To what extent do you believe your work will impact future design solutions—what you mention as a "counter-project"—and, possibly, trigger political action?
AT This exhibition was an excellent opportunity to lay down foundational questions about architectural form and its relationship with environmental studies. Against the dominant infographic mania that has taken hold of architecture schools worldwide when discussing climate change, we opened up new ways and mediums for presenting work about the environment in architectural discourse. For my own trajectory, the next step will be to integrate coloniality studies into the mix because our energy-intensive ways of living are indissociable from processes of colonisation that have defined modernity since the fourteenth century (or even earlier, some might argue). Of course, studying coloniality is a two-way phenomenon; alternatives will come from the colonised, who managed to live for hundreds of thousands of years without such destructivity. As Graeber and Wengrow point out, seeing the most significant majority of the past two hundred thousand years as empty of historical and urban development has been history’s mistake. Architects and architecture historians can participate in the uncovering of those pasts, for finding ideas to learn from.
"Against the dominant infographic mania that has taken hold of architecture schools worldwide when discussing climate change, we opened up new ways and mediums for presenting work about the environment in architectural discourse." - Alican Taylan
SC We never imagined that the show would immediately change the architectural profession. Capital and investment go toward more building and technologies to continually grow within our modes of production, consumption, and mobility. The exhibition is a critique of this paradigm that we are fully subsumed within, with no end in sight. But, I think the most potential for impact is through Elisa’s continued pedagogy, her courses on this topic.
"I’m interested in the formation of a new generation that thinks about space differently, that understands the agency of design differently, that sees their role in that transformation of society differently." - Elisa Iturbe
EI My students are a constant source of inspiration, and in many ways, this project was always for them. I’m interested in the formation of a new generation that thinks about space differently, that understands the agency of design differently, that sees their role in that transformation of society differently. In my mind, professional practice in its current form does not offer architects the opportunity to put radical ideas into action. It’s too constrained by the demands of profit. In that sense, the role of the carbon form project is not to prescribe what the counter-project should be, but rather to say that the counter-project will not come unless we fundamentally change how we think about space. As I wrote in Log 47, decarbonization is not just a technical puzzle. It is a theoretical, historical, spatial, and formal question that has the capacity to transform architecture in unknown and exciting ways.
Bio
Elisa Iturbe is an Assistant Professor at The Cooper Union. Her research and writing are currently focused on the relationship between energy, power, and form. Iturbe also teaches courses on fossil capitalism and carbon modernity at the Yale School of Architecture and at Cornell AAP. Her writings have been published in AA Files, Log, Perspecta, New York Review of Architecture, and Antagonismos. She guest-edited Log 47, titled Overcoming Carbon Form and co-wrote a book with Peter Eisenman titled Lateness. She is co-founder of Outside Development, a design and research practice.
Stanley Cho is co-founder of Outside Development, a design and research practice. Cho studied at UCLA Design Media Arts and the Yale School of Architecture. His works have been shown at international film festivals such as Chicago and Oberhausen. He has project-managed and designed various public facilities for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.
Alican Taylan is a Ph.D. student in Architecture History at Cornell University. His research is currently centered on environmental history and early modern architecture. Recently, he was a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute's graduate architecture and urban design department and has worked in the offices of Peter Eisenman, Shigeru Ban, and Thomas Leeser. He contributed to the 2018 Turkish pavilion at the Venice Biennale, co-curated the first alumni-run exhibition at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture, Aesthetics of Prosthetics (2019), and collaborated with Blane De St. Croix on the exhibition design of How to Move a Landscape (2020) at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts.
Valerio Franzone is an architect licensed in Italy and the UK with a focus on the relationships among architecture, humanity, and nature. He holds a Ph.D. from the “Villard d’Honnecourt” International Doctorate in Architecture (IUAV, Venice). A founding partner of 2A+P and 2A+P Architettura, he later established Valerio Franzone Architetto. His projects have been awarded in international competitions, and presented at exhibitions such as the International Architecture Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia. His projects and texts are published in magazines including Domus, Abitare, Volume, KoozArch, and Il Giornale dell'Architettura.com.
Francesca Romana Forlini is an architect, Ph.D, editor, writer and educator whose research is located at the intersection of feminism, cultural sociology and architectural history and theory. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York Institute of Technology and Parsons The New School in New York. She worked as chief editor at KoozArch, where she is currently a contributor. She is a Fulbrighter ed alumna of Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the RCA.
Notes
1 For a comprehensive discussion on the topic, see Langdon Winner’s article “Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology,” in Science, Technology, & Human Values , Summer, 1993, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 362-378
