Théorie et critique du projet BA6 (Malterre-Barthes)

Stop Building!
A Moratorium on New Construction- The Case of Lausanne.
Spring 2023 Design Studio
Mondays and Tuesdays
9:00-18:00
Location: TBD

Instructors:
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
charlotte.malterrebarthes@epfl.ch
Kathlyn Kao
kathlyn.kao@epfl.ch

 

Teaching Format:
Depending on enrollment, students will work in groups of two/three after the first week. Each desk crit will require the attendance of at least (2) student groups for peer-to-peer feedback. Desk crits will happen on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. All group attendance is required for episode reviews, guest lectures, mid-term and final reviews. Note that some of the lectures may be online.

Course Description:
"I don't think so honey, construction. What are you doing? We have enough buildings for the rest of humanity, this is actually true, there is enough space for every person in this world to be housed."[1] Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, "I Don't Think So Honey: Construction!," in Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, ed. Bowen Yang (New York: Big Money Players, 2021).

The construction sector is one of the main drivers of raw material extraction and global warming, and as direct or indirect consequences, generates relentless environmental and social destruction. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is unequivocal: " We are not on track to achieve a climate resilient, sustainable world."[2] However, long term, the industry is expected to grow steadily, only slowed by rising energy prices and commodity shortages. Despite vehemently claiming agendas of 'net- zero' and 'sustainable construction,' the sector is trapped in a cul-de-sac trope of 'clean capitalism,' showing more abilities in developing PR strategies rather than real alternative models.[3] So, if we admit the identity-shattering posit that construction can never be sustainable, how to respond to housing needs? This studio intends to face the music.

Confronting what Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter defines as a "planetarily-ecologically extended, increasingly techno-automated, thereby job-destroying, postindustrial, yet no less fossil fuel-driven, thereby climate-destabilizing free-market capitalist economic system, in its now extreme neoliberal transnational technocratic configuration," a moratorium on new construction is deployed as a disruptive legal device to enter in dissidence.[4] Coming from a place of hope, profoundly opposed to the paralyzing' Darwinian/Malthusian' ... apocalyptic shadow' cast over any action, the studio seeks to establish a critical space to interrogate the role of architecture as an ideologically charged and materially destructive discipline, trafficking in maximal value systems of labor, materials, and cultures. We argue that, because design disciplines are complicit in environmental degradation, social injustice, and climate crisis, it is necessary to correct course and harness our organizing and creative abilities to challenge the current modus operandi of space production and global construction.

This approach requires a deeper understanding of the political economy of space production, interrogating norms and standards, material supply chains, and labor realities in full awareness of real estate mechanisms and the housing inequalities they generate. Numerous means and approaches are available, from calculating the embodied carbon of the existing housing stock to articulating design-for-disassembly and maintenance protocols to reworking preservation laws beyond taste and aesthetics, setting up disengagement strategies and decay designs, designing anti-vacancy and redistribution methods, proposing collective and cooperative living, property reform and rent-control procedures, to drafting radical policy-making on housing access, maintenance, and renovation, and so on. We hope to unleash the full force of design to rework completely our built and unbuilt environment, in a reparative, non-extractive manner.
Beyond the provocation around the suspension of new building activity, the studio seeks to articulate a radical thinking framework to work out alternatives and pave the way toward an insurgent design practice.

Footnotes
[1] Bowen Yang Matt Rogers, "I Don't Think So Honey: Construction!," in Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, ed. Bowen Yang (New York: Big Money Players, 2021).
[2] Hoesung  Lee, "Keynote Address by the Ipcc Chair Hoesung Lee at the Opening of the First Technical Dialogue of the Global Stocktake," in First Technical Dialogue of the Global Stocktake (Bonn: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022).
[3] See Silke Mooldijk Thomas Day, Sybrig Smit, Eduardo Posada, Frederic Hans, Harry Fearnehough, Aki Kachi, and Takeshi Kuramochi Carsten Warnecke, Niklas Hähne., Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor 2022 (Cologne: New Climate Institute, Carbon Market Watch, 2022).
[4] Sylvia Wynter and and Katherine McKittrick, "Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future : Conversations " in Sylvia Wynter : On Being Human as Praxis(Durham [North Carolina]: Duke University Press, 2015), 22.

Site
Lausanne grows some 2% annually. While this number should be considered with caution, it is representative of the increasing population trend. How can we accommodate such growth in a sustainable and radical way without new construction?

Every group's task will be to access and gather information (existing plans, GIS data, urban codes, etc.) as we sharpen our tools to provoke unsolicited projects on shaky grounds.

Scales
This studio is based on a conception of urban design as a multidimensional trans-scalar discipline. Not only political, economic, social, cultural, and geo-tectonic forces affect and shape the built environment at the global scale, at the territorial and landscape scale, at the neighborhood and urban scale, down to the architectural and material scale, and to the body, but space and its arrangements have a reciprocating effect on these forces, humans, and non-humans acting upon them. We will design within these gradations, positing that each constituent scale is distinct and can be considered on its own, yet the piece as a whole is only complete with each scale, resulting in the sum of all the small scales producing a large-scale total. We will also think around temporal scales to challenge "impatient capital" as it dictates architectural, urban, and landscape projects for immediacy, exploring seemingly contradictory notions of ephemeral and impermanent, durable, and longevity as frameworks for operation.

Goals/ Learning Outcomes

The studio's goal is to articulate questions about design's role in inventing futures liberated from the debilitating inert structures we find ourselves entrenched in, facing the climate emergency, to start articulating an understanding of practices that go beyond building. We will attempt to deploy the skills and organizing abilities of designers to think about new constructions of emancipated practices rather than just building new. We shall develop abilities to think critically about the status quo while developing other ways of engaging with the built and the unbuilt environment, pushing forward forms of spatial practice. For that, we will develop literacy in policy, economy, technology, intersectional activism, care, preservation, etc. borrowing from other disciplines, and learning to doubt, while staying hopeful as we help planning disciplines to pivot toward resource stewardship.