Trade Publication Article

Architecture criticism against the climate clock

Till, Jeremy

2023

Overview

Till discusses the need for architecture media to address ecological questions to help end the profession's extractivist practices. In the face of crisis, there might be a revived role for architects to play. Climate breakdown is not a straightforward emergency; it is not an issue that can be fixed through technical means alone. It is, in the formulation of US author and druid John Michael Greer, not a problem but a predicament that must be faced, with no expectation of a complete solution. While all new buildings must, of course, reduce carbon by every means possible, the profession needs to go much further than these technocratic standards. A more interventionist architecture media would call out any project that ignores climate breakdown as a central issue or plays with greenwash, and contextualize and put architecture in dialogue with external forces, in a direct challenge to the editors' 1947 eschewal of politics. Architecture media must celebrate an expanded field of architecture, beyond the building alone and into the multiple ways that spatial intelligence and agency might be deployed in the service of climate justice, and open up far beyond the Eurocentric canon, learning from the knowledges and actions of the Global South.

• Publisher: Emap Limited
• Subject: Architects / Architecture / Breakdown / Climate change / Climate justice / Media / Profession / Spatial discrimination learning