URBAN TALK
Friday, 19.01.2024, 4.00 p.m. | IfA Forum, Ground Floor TU Berlin
Tatjana Schneider, Christina Serifi (MOULD) - Architecture is Climate
Architecture is Climate explores how climate breakdown challenges architecture‘s role. Historically, it treated climate as a problem solved through technical and sustainability means. However, the term ‘sustainability‘ itself is problematic, suggesting various fixes could sustain current structures, values, and lifestyles.
What if the question shifts from what architecture can do for climate breakdown to what climate breakdown does to architecture? MOULD argues that Architecture IS Climate, shifting from an external to an entangled relationship, where climate breakdown accompanies a breakdown in architecture.
Over the past two years, MOULD explored diverse global practices, suggesting ways to address climate breakdown. This collective effort, embodying hope and resistance within “spaces of slippage“ (Andy Merrifield) creates new relationships countering extractive actions. Architecture is intrinsically linked to the causes, conditions, and consequences of climate breakdown, providing opportunities for alternative configurations that nurture different forces. The urgent call for reinvention in understanding, practicing, and teaching architecture requires engagement with activism, politics, and education. By adopting a relational, subjective, and interconnected approach, architecture can be globally relevant and locally supportive, extending beyond human concerns. In this way, it holds the potential to be inclusive, caring, curious, and brave.
The lecture is organized by Christian Haid and Juliana Canedo and is part of the urban design studio “Productive Soils”
Bio:
MOULD is a research collective working at the intersection of spatial practice and climate breakdown. They are a group of architects and academics based at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Central Saint Martins (UAL), Goldsmiths (University of London), and The University of Sheffield. Their current research project Architecture is Climate grew out of a research grant Architecture after Architecture: Spatial Practice in the Face of the Climate Emergency, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). For more information you can visit mould.earth and architectureisclimate.net.
Click here to download the poster.