Climate Change and Architecture
Climate Change and Architecture
Framing
This debate concerns how architecture should respond to climate change and the new climatic regime. Latour's theory of Gaia demands architectural response that includes nonhumans and recognizes the limits of modern purification.
Positions
Position A: Technological Fix
Architecture responds to climate change through technical solutions: green building, renewable energy, sustainable materials. This extends modern faith in technological progress.
Position B: Cosmopolitical Response (Latour)
Latour argues climate change demands cosmopolitical design — diplomatic composition of common world among heterogeneous actors. Gaia is not a backdrop but an active participant requiring architectural diplomacy. Key texts: source-notes/yaneva-latour-for-architects
Position C: The Ocean as Historical Agent (Treadwell/Teaiwa)
From the South Pacific, climate change is registered not as a design problem for architecture but as the ocean's assumption of historical agency: "The ocean in Teaiwa's image is not only the recipient of history, but also its instigator and participant." The ocean "itself… will pour across the reefs and beaches of Pacific islands, removing traces of past and present occupation"; "the islands of Kiribati and Tuvalu may not exist in thirty years' time. 'The ocean has the edge.'" Where Latour composes a common world among actors, this position registers the actor that dissolves the world — the sea as "an implacable leveler" whose washing-away "rendered all equivalent" (the tsunamis) — and asks what remains of dwelling, territory and the interior when the medium of habitation is the agent of erasure. Key texts: source-notes/treadwell-2018-oceanic-interiorities.
Key Texts
- source-notes/yaneva-latour-for-architects — Latour's Gaia theory
- source-notes/morgan-kant-for-architects — Kantian sustainability
- source-notes/treadwell-2018-oceanic-interiorities — the ocean as "instigator and participant" of history; sea-level rise and the disappearing island states (Position C)
Current State
Two established positions (technological fix vs. cosmopolitical composition) have been joined by an oceanic-Pacific position (via Treadwell 2018, presenting Teaiwa and Hau'ofa) that shifts the register from architectural response to climatic loss — the debate is ongoing and the positions are not yet in direct dialogue.
Position D: The Hypernatural Upgrade of the Technological Fix (Brownell)
Brownell reframes the technological-fix position from within the Reader's interior cluster: the fix's problem is not technology but its object — industrial fabrication "carried out in a highly resource-intensive, inefficient, and polluting manner" and the mechanized ideal of "ultimate separation between a synthetic interior environment and the natural world beyond." The hypernatural response keeps the technology but changes the partner: "the rapid convergence of technology and the natural sciences" — living facades of algae, phytoremediation walls, passive thermobimetal shading, crystal-grown blocks — such that "we might collaborate with nature – rather than merely exploit it." The position's own caveat is its limit: "a comprehensive accounting of environmental, social, and economic effects has yet to be conducted." It sits between Position A (technical solutions retained, now biological) and Position B (nonhumans as partners — but here recruited, not diplomatically composed). Key texts: "Living" rooms (Brownell 2018)
