Architect, researcher and author Kiel Moe has been meditating on the problem with linear systems on a planetary scale. Dismissing the possibility of an autonomous architecture, Moe suggests that nonlinear approaches could bust through the normative gridlock of extractive practices in the way that we build and design.

This conversation is part of KoozArch's issue "Polyglot".

FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ As Polyglot is a quest to grow the vocabulary we need to expand the diverse potentials of spatial practice, could I ask you to start expanding on what you mean when you use the terms construction, ecology and terrestrial architecture?

KIEL MOE Normally, when architects think about construction, they're thinking about the assembly of a structure on a site and how that's done formally or technically. But when I use the term construction, I'm thinking about the whole process — all the terrestrial activities that go on to make building happen: all the extraction, all the labour — it's absolutely a terrestrial proposition at this point. When I say construction ecology, it is literally the ecosystem of relations that is involved with construction as a terrestrial activity. As we're building individual buildings, as we're collectively building larger buildings and urban agglomerations that we call cities, we end up modifying the whole surface of the planet at some point — and we have to understand what that ecology is. It's not enough anymore to think about the construction and assembly of a building as an independent, autonomous object. The world doesn't grant that kind of autonomy; it never did.

KOOZ Let’s focus a little bit more on this idea of ecology and the way that it challenges both modern descriptions of architecture and the progressive abstraction of the practice of building. As you define it, the term opens the possibility of thinking about buildings — we're really thinking more about it in terms of systems and terrestrial connections.

KM I think ecology is the best pedagogy we have to get around this conundrum that we’re in. We've had centuries of architectural pedagogies and practices that are focused on closed, discrete objects. How do you get around that? Ecology helps us to crack open that presumption and starts thinking about much more open social systems, thermodynamic systems, and environmental systems that constitute what architecture is in the end. I think that's necessary today, because ultimately we have for so long celebrated abstraction. Architects love abstract geometries and they definitely want to abstract out all the unpleasant forms of extraction and labour I associate with modernist building production — all the stories that were never told. To get around that parochial focus on abstraction, you need other vocabularies, methods, frames of reference, and practices. The language and even the diagrammatic methodology of ecosystem science helps us do that, as but one possible example that helps my particular circumstance and view of building. It helps me describe, much more literally, what building actually is from a terrestrial point of view.

KOOZ That feeds into the notion of metabolic processes. What does that mean in terms of distancing architecture from linear concepts and shifting to thinking about closed loop systems?

KM This is very important to understand in response to that question: building is not linear, it's also not circular. I know there's a lot of discussion about circular economies, but a circular economy is still a linear economy, a line that returns on itself. But building and urbanisation are absolutely nonlinear. That's the major intellectual shift that needs to occur. Building is nonlinear, and that's its greatest potential ecological attribute: architecture's capacity to feed back and reinforce its terrestrial systems can be enacted in all kinds of ways. It doesn't have to be the direct recycling of a timber beam or a window, like it is in the circular economy.

In that regard, taking buildings apart doesn't really help a construction ecology, when you look at it from a large-scale perspective. It is just another part of the taking-making-breaking paradigm of modern building. By contrast, we need to develop — and it's both a very practical thing, but also maybe the most theoretical issue — a nonlinear perspective of building design. Historically, from Alberti onwards, the focus has been on linear perspective; we're constantly drawing the edges of objects, typically in relation to human subjects. Yet the orthographic and perspectival expertise of architects does not adequately describe what architecture is and does on the thin surface of this planet. To start to think about a non-linear description of building is a really intense theoretical project as well as a really intense technical and pragmatic project. But again, ecology helps me think that through. Ecologists developed means of describing, diagramming, and even quantifying non-linear systems, so that's one reason I return to ecology again and again.

KOOZ I’m glad that you’re interested in the will and necessity of moving beyond the Cartesian grid. What does it mean to think through nonlinear frames of organisation? What frameworks might we then adopt?

KM It's hard when you're caged in a Cartesian framework — when that's been all of your training and that's what everybody talks about, it's hard to see around that Cartesian corner. But a Cartesian framework can only describe static objects. So, whether it's salient ecological, energetic, political matters of concern — these are not static phenomena, these are dynamic phenomena. Cartesian thinking and equipment can't describe these phenomena. Literally, the mathematics can't describe the flow in these systems, and the drawings certainly can’t describe it… It's absolutely the wrong set of equipment, the wrong frames of reference, the wrong set of coordinates and coordination systems to describe some of the most interesting and consequential parts of building as a terrestrial phenomenon. In some cases, you might use what's known as Eulerian coordination, but the Lagrangian approach is very useful. Basically, that's where you're tracking things through their flow field, and where the matter of building is flowing through the world. It's a pretty radical transformation. You start to design differently. I still think it's deeply architectural; in fact maybe it’s more architectural because we're finally taking on some of these terrestrial phenomena through these other forms of coordination and organization. If we want to move architecture beyond what I describe as an art and science of extraction, then you need a Lagrangian framework. You need to keep track of how things are moving through the world and the labour that's involved with them, and how to understand the reciprocity between that construction ecology and the constructed building. In a Lagrangian framework, the whole flow system is the focus — not any singular object or event along the way.

KOOZ In this sense, I'm thinking of the tools that we deploy as architects. We write, we speak — and we draw. We draw using tools — many of which, like AutoCAD and AutoDesk, are definitely tied to Cartesian frameworks for designing and thinking about built form. How does one move beyond that? How can one create the tools to operate and think through a Lagrangian framework? Could one enact that?

KM Firstly, you have to get beyond the assumptions, the norms of our training. Right now, if something can't be designed on a laptop and end up as a PDF, it doesn't seem to count in architecture. For some reason, that's what architects seem to do these days. And architects do talk, but maybe they talk too much, and maybe they're drawing too much, or at least drawing too much of the wrong thing. Getting beyond the limitations of that write/speak/draw modality is really important.

I think getting out into the field, being connected to land-based systems of design and land-based descriptions of buildings is essential. You have to change your format and setting. You need to figure out what your ‘frontline’ is — and then actually get out there and work on it. Architecture seems unjustifiably convinced that the design studio is its frontline. Opposed to the present image of the architect as a very abstract and aloof neoliberal worker producing PDFs, you could instead be out there in the world, talking to other people, understanding something about the land, the construction ecology that you're working on, and so on. When you do, you start talking about very different things, and doing other things. You quickly realise that you need to draw far less, but what you do need to draw matters much more. So in some ways, architects could rely less on the software that we've been trained to use, and all the algorithms they embed. You mentioned AutoCAD; Rhino is very similar, and certainly by the time you're in Revit, you're completely constrained. It's no longer even a Cartesian framework; it's a thoroughly proprietary framework. Getting out of those algorithms and getting into the world more literally is, I think, a big part of getting beyond that. You might be able to devise a kind of Lagrangian design framework for sitting at your laptop, but that seems to kind of defeat a lot of the purpose of it. So I would just encourage people to get out there, engage with land and relations much more directly.

KOOZ This brings me to another point. Architecture is obviously part of the market, but moving beyond the discipline, we need to start discussing such shifts with those who hold the power to change the way that construction ecologies are structured. What does it mean to think through and hack the system from an economic or political relationship to architecture?

KM This question proves the point that we have a narrow conception of what architecture is. Architecture need not be part of the market. It could otherwise be construed primarily as part of a terrestrial ecology. I don’t think architects need to be so docile, with self-imposed assumptions about policy, codes; the way power is construed in this question. We've been trained to draw and model objects — almost always as new constructions — as opposed to seeing policy and code as part of architecture's purview and domain. For some practices, that is their front line: the policy is their front line, the building code is their front line, and that's what they're working on as architects. I think that's very valid. In almost all of the schools, though, I see the fetishization of a very old-school understanding of design, locked up in the model of the Beaux Arts studio with its masters and pupils. We could have a lot more architects working on policy or encouraging students to design different types of material practices. It's important to recognize that all of that is architecture, and I think that there is greater revelation in acting on, or reacting to, architecture’s more pathological habits (like traditional design studios).

We could talk about getting beyond architecture, but I think maybe it's about expanding our understanding of what the system or boundary of architecture really is. Again, that's why I emphasise the term terrestrial architecture, because we're directing all these material flows, all these energetic and economic flows. If we understood where we could intervene in those complex, nonlinear systems, then we could start to multiply our effects and efforts. But if we're just training people to draw one-off buildings again and again, we'll never get there. We'll continue to be pretty irrelevant — culturally, legally, professionally and so on. So I think it's really important to see all of those forms of practices as architecture and to act and behave accordingly. There's just so much more out there that we need to be doing, that we've been neglecting for decades, if not longer. Let’s cultivate a much bigger definition of what architecture is and what it could be doing in this century.

KOOZ How does one position oneself to actually operate — in trying to shift towards a non-extractive and nonlinear perspective — within those bigger systems?

KM We have to be willing to accept that perhaps the training we were provided is not adequate, right? We might need to augment that in some way. In my case, I'm presently finishing a degree in forest ecology, because I want to complete my understanding of what a timber building is. I've done years of work just to be able to better define what a forest is and understand what its ecology is and how forests relate to timber building. I did that with the goal of making what I think is maybe the only possible approach to non-extractive building, which is to work with a forest that I live with every day, and figuring out how to augment that harvest material in a certain way — but in a way that's going to make the forest stronger, help its diversity, help its carbon storage, all of those important things that a forest is doing. Then I can make a building out of that timber by-product of that care to make a structure that's also heated and cooled with other by-products. That's just a goal of mine: to figure out what a truly non-extractive building would be. So I want to get down to a nonlinear building that would be in that context, that is functional and makes people healthy, and at the same time, makes the forest healthy. Again, if we want to fulfil the ambition of expanding what architecture is, then we probably need to expand its epistemology and go beyond what we were given in terms of references, theories, and received practices.

KOOZ Especially because today, a lot of building standards are based on the interior envelope, right? This idea of net zero energy consumption only works if measured within an interior environment or within the operational framework of the building, without understanding the terrestrial framework. But also what does it mean to insert that building within a context? What is its effect on the urban heat island, or air quality? There's certainly a lot of space for pushing where the discipline and where policy should go.

KM I'm still waiting to see more studios (in schools and practice) designing policy, rigorously going after that and describing what the effects of that would be. Instead, I see a lot of design studios that are effectively re-enacting how modernist buildings were designed, and not thinking about more radical practices. It is a form of docility training. So I totally agree, and it takes a different level of imagination and creativity, but also a different level of courage and compassion to take on those terrestrial and policy topics and go after them seriously. Again, that's why I call them frontline projects. You have to be out there, really pushing on something — even at personal risk — to be able to do it properly.

KOOZ And I have one last question, which refers to your volume on the Seagram building. You evidently write a lot, you put out several publications. What power does the book or the written word hold for you and your practice?

KM Well, don't take this the wrong way, but I would say the capital B book — as an object — doesn't really matter to me. I do a book because I'm trying to figure something out; I'm working out a bigger project. The books are usually several years in the making, from conceptualising, doing the research, the writing and drawings, and the publication stage. I'm committed to the thinking part of it, and a book is one of the formats that I think through — but if other people can read it, if they have some connection to it, and it helps them advance some part of their discourse or practice, that's fantastic. But for me, the point is the doing, the input; not the output per se. I enjoy talking about my books and sharing them, but 95% of it is about getting in there and figuring out what those topics are, what's the framework that should be. I'm still just trying to figure out, as you said, just what architecture is and could be — every book is a different attempt at asking that kind of question.

KOOZ How much do you weigh the words that you put in the process — how careful are you to the kind of linguistic choices through which you articulate your perspectives?

KM I do think words matter. The words we use develop the sentences that we make, and the sentences make the stories we tell each other. So I think that the words really matter. That said, I'm also a designer and a builder — and now I'm a nascent forest ecologist; I'm not only making books. I have friends who are poets who labour over every single word, every line break — and I think that's beautiful. But I also know my own limits. I don't even consider myself a writer. I'm thinking through building and thinking through by doing work in a forest. If I can report on that then, then that's great. Some knowledge can be shared through words. But cognition is always environmentally situated.

KOOZ Have your studies on forest ecologies added to or defined your vocabulary in any way?

KM The way I see it, there's no forest and there's no timber building; I can no longer see the edges of those things. There's only the relations between those things. I think there are certain concepts and terms that become much more legible when you engage another discipline, like forest ecology. So yes, in terms of language, the translation of some of those concepts is really important. The cognitive transfer, however, is not one way. I'm also bringing architectural building knowledge and construction ecology into the forest and the domain of timber products, helping those fields in turn to understand what a building is, and could be, given a different forest-building relation. In the same way that we might have general assumptions about a forest, people also have general assumptions about what architects do. I think getting in there, shaking some hands, talking to people and altering what they think about buildings is just as important as me learning about forest ecology and bringing in that knowledge to my world.

KOOZ Kiel, thank you for being so precise and eloquent with your thoughts and answers. It’s been such a pleasure.

Bio

Kiel Moe, FAIA, FAAR, is a practising architect, researcher, and builder. In recognition of his design and research endeavours, he was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Helsinki, the Gorham P. Stevens Rome Prize in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome, the Architecture League of New York Prize, and the American Institute of Architects National Young Architect Award. He has published several books on architecture including Empire, State & Building; Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial; Insulating Modernism: Isolated and Non-Isolated Thermodynamics in Architecture; and Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 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.