Climate Crisis: The Latest Architecture and News

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is one of those rare movies that not only gets better with time but also presents a new layer of meaning with each viewing. Recently I’ve come to believe that it’s the most important movie about environmentalism ever made, not only because of its warning about nuclear annihilation, which is obvious, but because of its sly critique of the idea of professionalism and the nature of work.

Catalonia in Venice - air/aria/aire, part of the Collateral Event of the Biennale Architettura 2021, is an exhibition curated by architect Olga Subirós, commissioned by the Institut Ramon Llull, with the participation of 300.000 Km/s, an urbanism studio in macro data-based strategic planning. Reflecting on the central theme of the Biennale “How will we live together?” the project investigates the role of architecture and urbanism within the context of the climate emergency and the public health crisis.

How does architecture contribute to the current climate crisis? 

We invited our readers to weigh in on this issue and were overwhelmed by the number of responses that we got. After reading through and compiling the replies from industry professionals, architectural students, and architecture aficionados, we were struck by a common theme: there are few resources when it comes to researching how materials and products used in construction are sourced and produced. 

The World Health Organisation (WHO) supports that even if vaccines are found, COVID-19 may never go away. ‘Post-virus’ recovery mechanisms suddenly become out-of-place and obsolete. If we wait for the coronavirus crisis to be over to tackle climate change, then many of us may be swimming in deep waters. Coordinated and immediate actions, coupled with planetary-scale cooperation, to tackle both crises in parallel is now needed. For cities, this means adopting mechanisms that enable both economic recovery and sustainable transitions.

Moving away from its early exclusive focus on natural disasters, resilient architecture and design tackles the much tougher challenge of helping ecosystems regenerate.

Thirty years ago, as a high school student at the Cranbrook boarding school in suburban Detroit, I wrote a research-based investigative report on the environmental crisis for the student newspaper. I had been encouraged to do so by a faculty adviser, David Watson, who lived a double life as a radical environmentalist writing under the pseudonym George Bradford for the anarchist tabloid Fifth Estate. His diatribe How Deep Is Deep Ecology? questioned a recurring bit of cant from the radical environmental movement: Leaders of groups like Earth First! frequently disparaged the value of human life in favor of protecting nature.

In a predominately urban world that constantly has to deal with complex problems such as waste generation, water scarcity, natural disasters, air pollution, and even the spread of disease, it is impossible to ignore the impact of human activity on the environment. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and it is urgent that we find ways to slow down the process, at the very least. Toward this end, our production, consumption, and construction habits will have to change, or climate change and environmental degradation will continue to diminish the quality and duration of our lives and that of future generations.

Although they seem intangible and distant, these various energy inefficiencies and waste issues are much closer than we can imagine, present in the buildings we use on a daily basis. As architects, this problem is further amplified as we deal daily with design decisions and material specifications. In other words, our decisions really do have a global impact. How can we use design to create a healthier future for our world?

Until the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis was perhaps the fundamental design problem of our Anthropocene era. The threat of climate change has forced us as designers to reevaluate how we realize designs at all scales. Eco-friendly interior finishes, net-zero energy skyscrapers, and strategies to prevent the rising sea levels from pushing residents in coastal cities more inland are just some of the innovative solutions that have come from the increased urgency to mitigate the effects of the climate on our world.

This article was originally published on Washington Post, courtesy of Common Edge.

Hundred-year floods. Record-breaking Antarctic heat. Wildfires and drought. The stories appear with numbing regularity. And though the details differ, they all point to the same grim conclusion. We’re failing to address climate change. With carbon emissions continuing to rise, what were once dismissed as worst-case scenarios now look like the best we can hope for.

The global climate crisis is one that requires discussion in many areas of life, from planning for containment to the prevention of consequences. One of the main factors in this debate involves our means of energy production that, historically, were responsible for severe damage to the environment. This was due to the lack of concern to seek renewable and sustainable sources to generate electricity, and also the lack of technology. In general, traditional methods of electrical energy are ones that produce waste, release atmospheric and water pollutants, and use non-renewable resources. 

Architecture enjoys a close connection with moving picture, perhaps because of the limitless imagination it allows. Our mind can be taken far away to utopian worlds where we live different realities with our eyes and skin; movies can carry us to new and distant places, where we face new unusual realities.

However, besides carrying us to distant places, movies can also be a vehicle of social criticism. This is not news, as it has been done for almost as long as cinema has existed. The evolution of this role is relative to the topic of critique that has developed over time, as have our habits and ways of living. In this sense, one of the most emerging problematic of nowadays is climate change.from architecture to arts and, clearly, the movies.

Iñaki Alday is the current dean of the School of Architecture of Tulane (New Orleans). Founder of Alday Jover arquitectura y paisaje, he also offers advice to the United Nations as an expert on the urban planning of rivers and deltas. In this context, he is a noted co-founder of the ‘Yamuna River Project’, a university research project for the recovery of the Yamuna River in New Delhi - one of the most polluted in the world.

Below, we talk with Iñaki Alday about innovations in cities related to the climate emergency, with questions that approach the urgency of research and how universities should prepare students to face the global challenge.

Goldman Sachs has released a report on the effects of climate change on cities across the world. The study explored the major changes that will transform the planet and highlighted several metropolises that will be at risk of flooding.

Log 47 reconceives architecture’s role in climate change away from sustainability and solutionism and toward its formal complicity and potential agency in addressing the crisis. In this excerpt from her introductory essay, guest editor Elisa Iturbe defines carbon form as a necessary new way of understanding architecture and urbanism in order to develop a new disciplinary paradigm.

Until now, most environmental discourse in architecture has focused on carbon as a by-product of building and construction, making it seem that at the ecological brink, the most pressing concern is energy efficiency. This stance compartmentalizes the discipline and dislocates the origin of the climate crisis from the dominant political, economic, and spatial organizations that are its cause. In response to this dislocation, Log: 47 Overcoming Carbon Form reconsiders the link between architecture and climate by exploring the reciprocity between energy and built form. To do so, energy must be understood beyond its technical capacity, viewed instead as a political and cultural force with inevitable spatial repercussions.