Short abstract:

This paper reports in-depth qualitative research into the skills and competencies of architects and architectural professional associations. It provides insight in how architects learn and how they wish to reconfigure their practices and create an epistemic culture to address climate change.

Long abstract:

Architecture is at the forefront of our transition to a net-zero carbon built environment. The challenge of climate change requires us to reconfigure architectural practices. This paper outlines the strategies and tactics used by architects in Aotearoa New Zealand to enable an epistemic culture - to develop and enhance their zero carbon skills and competencies. By drawing upon insights from Kemmis’ ‘ecologies of practice’, we highlight the creation of practice architectures (assemblages that enable and constrain practices) of zero carbon design. To do this we examine the contestation between orthodox and heterodox architectural practice traditions. In seeking to understand the creation of practice architectures for zero carbon design, we examine the distributed architectural practices that are made, re-made and unmade with reference to ‘practice archetypes’ that refer to emergent work practices that stipulate what expertise, skills and competencies are required to undertake the design of zero carbon buildings. By outlining the creation and contestation of practice architectures that seek to enable zero carbon skills and competencies within design, we demonstrate how ‘practices of learning’ can transform existing architectural practices and enable an epistemic culture for a workforce that has a key role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Short abstract:

As the architectural landscape embraces new tools capable of synthesising diverse datasets, the evolving significances of data and its stages of institutionalisation offer critical insights for architects in considering the technological dimension of design action within data-rich environments.

Long abstract:

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in incorporating data into architectural design, particularly to tackle complex urban challenges. The development of facts and technologies on data towards urban applications is an ongoing process which emphasises the interconnected network between data production, its sources, its registering devices and the actions needed for its synthetical application.

At the intersection between architecture making and data practices, potential outcomes lie with developing synthetical tools capable of producing complex assemblages of data. Therefore, exploring how data can transform design processes becomes a key investigative node for architects to reflect on potential shifts in their competence, their role, their prosthesis and the environments of project production.

Urban laboratories and research centres contribute to this transformative process by crafting meaning, associations and advanced tools around data. Here, experimental conditions and readings become part of architectural practices when specific inscription devices are adopted to collect data and describe specific phenomena.

Data becomes a powerful nonhuman actor to the design process: it represents the mediated trace of the phenomena it describes, allowing for it to be registered and read. The process of collection, analysis, synthesis is not neutral, quite contrarily carries on and modifies a very social and technical network of interactions. Data practices for architectural projects are not only showing the multiplicity of actors of its network of production, but they are also reshaping meanings, materialities, inscription devices and technologies operated by architects to design.

Short abstract:

How do architects materially and discursively present 'sustainable materials of the future'? This paper explores how considering the agency of non-humans changes the everyday practices of architects who have experimented with, conceptualised, and exhibited materials made from fungal mycelium.

Long abstract:

The challenge facing many architects today is to reassess their practice in light of the current crises, particularly the environmental crisis for which architecture bears some responsibility and upon which the future of the discipline depends. To achieve this, architects are actively rediscovering old techniques or experimenting with new ones to develop more environmentally friendly architecture. The architects I collaborate with during my doctoral thesis are among those experimenting with fungal building biomaterials, which are made from mushroom mycelium. In their daily practice, my interlocutors temporarily exchange their designer's hat for that of a craftsman. By doing so, they are obliged to take into account the agency of non-humans, whether animate or not, with whom they work. They must constantly witness the extent to which matter is neither passive nor inert.

This paper explores the practices of caring and the expression of affects in sociomaterial assemblages within laboratory and architecture studio settings, as well as in front of institutional actors. It addresses the significance of (bio)materials in architecture as both 'matters of concern' (Latour 2006) and 'matters of care' (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Drawing on ethnographic observations of a group of architects who aim to go beyond the exploitability of a resource (Fiévé & Guillot, 2021) and even beyond the concept of resources, this paper presents their material experiments as exhibited at a major architectural exhibition, the Venice Architecture Biennale. This allowed them to present both materially and discursively what I have called ‘materials-not-quite-there-yet’.

Short abstract:

This paper examines the practices, subjectivities, and collectives that have coalesced around glass in the United States. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork with architects, I argue that the question of building has become entangled with the question of dwelling with animals.

Long abstract:

This paper examines the material practices, architectural subjectivities, and public collectives that have coalesced around glass in the United States. Conservation biologists have recently identified bird-window collisions as a global ecological crisis (Sutherland et al. 2023). Whereas glass buildings promised modernist ideals of transparency to architects throughout the 20th century (Eskilson 2018), many bird species (e.g., warblers, thrushes, and vireos) register this construction material otherwise, misperceiving their reflective surfaces as continuations of plein air. As a result, up to 1 billion birds fly into buildings every year (Loss et al. 2014). The “snarge” (Kroll 2018) they leave behind—at the Chicago Convention Center (Uteuova 2023), for instance—marks the point where species collide, to retweet Haraway (2008). It also marks an emergent point of contact among architects, ornithologists, lawmakers, activists, and homeowners concerned with the welfare of birds. In connection with the Bird-Safe Buildings Act in 2019, this network of environmental advocates has pushed for laws that mandates “bird-friendly glass” on new constructions in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. By drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork with architects who design this glass, I will analyze an emergent multispecies assemblage, a “more-than-human sociality” (Tsing 2013), held together by glass technologies. I will argue that the question of building in the “new climatic regime” (Laotur 2017) has become entangled with the question of dwelling with animals, in particular grasping nonhuman phenomenology (Despret 2021).

Short abstract:

Architectural interventions to retrofit heritage buildings are now being prioritised as a means of retaining carbon sequestration and revitalising urban centres. We map the entanglements of ecological and local concerns that are shaping the future of smaller urban centres.

Long abstract:

The challenges of transitioning to carbon neutrality and climate resilience, tied to concerns about globalisation and mass standardisation, have led to greater interest in reusing buildings and their materials. This is particularly relevant for Ireland with its high rate of vacancy and dereliction in non-metropolitan towns and villages. When working with heritage structures such as 18th and 19th century terraced buildings, this implies rethinking how design can repurpose for contemporary use older structures that have been steadily modified over time in response to economic shifts, novel functionalities, and divergent aesthetic considerations. The ‘thingly’ nature of buildings is apparent when considering the adaptive reuse of these heritage buildings, including their meandering plots and outbuildings, with a panoply of local communities, material supplies, specialist trades, architects and planners, heritage authorities, and shifting financial incentives from national government.

This paper reports on architectural research covering the costs and barriers to adaptive reuse of buildings by including Whole Life Carbon analysis, while also connecting to strategic initiatives to reinvigorate rural villages and towns. It therefore extends the discussion on end-of-life and upcycling in life-cycle analysis to expand into wholesale reuse of existing buildings. We map these entanglements between standardised frameworks for low carbon development with case studies on town heritage buildings in Ireland that were originally constructed with local materials and craftmanship, tracing how these structures are becoming repurposed through renewed interest in smaller urban places and their heritage as a means of responding at a local scale to geo-ecological crises.

Short abstract:

The paper examines recent efforts to develop decision-support systems based on key performance indicators for assessing, monitoring and anticipating the implications of urban densification measures.

Long abstract:

Cities are under pressure to decarbonise, counteract biodiversity loss, and provide adequate housing and liveable built environments at the same time - which is particularly challenging as the building sector is responsible for a huge share in greenhouse gas emissions, waste production, depletion of materials, and consumption of energy and resources. Against this background, calls to prioritise conversion, infill development and building extension over new builds have gained prominence in urban planning in recent years, often referring to models and concepts such as the 15-minute city, the compact city, or dreifache Innenentwicklung presenting densification as the way to make cities prosperous, liveable and sustainable. While these concepts are almost universally accepted, evidence regarding impacts is sparse and patchy. This paper examines recent efforts to develop decision-support systems based on key performance indicators (KPIs) for assessing, monitoring and anticipating the implications of densification measures. These models, metrics and KPIs can be understood as inscription devices that will affect both the actors using them and the objects they refer to as well as the arenas where they are enacted. Drawing from valuation studies, critical political geography, work on epistemic infrastructures and governmentality studies, it investigates what is considered worth measuring, what is made visible, what is being valued and by whom, and whether the models allow for reflection on interrelations, trade-offs and tensions between KPIs. In particular, it attends to the question whether and how aspects of affordability, equity, social segregation, displacements, inclusion and exclusion are incorporated into these metrics and models.

Short abstract:

This paper looks at building information modelling (BIM) technology within the post-extractive building economy. It seeks to problematise BIM in its conception of buildings as spatial databases of clean “stuff” in the context of the emergent practices of circular construction and reuse.

Long abstract:

Much of the digital realm is rooted in the logic of abundance. Unlike the material world that is increasingly defined by the limits of growth, design software operates by a virtually endless supply of matter—things can be both generated and disposed at an instant. This principle is epitomised by the digital tools used in architectural design, most notably building information modelling (BIM). First conceptualised in the mid-1970s, nowadays the technology has become a widely adopted protocol for negotiating digital design processes and the material realities that underpin them.

Echoing Wendy Hui Chun’s critique of software as ideology, the paper seeks to frame the history of BIM software as a product of the imagination of 20th century industrial logic, and by extent—mass standardisation, precision manufacturing, and just-in-time production. It seeks to question BIM software's operating logic (constituted by clean, parametrically defined model parts and “off the shelf” availability) in context of the emergent practices urban mining and reuse of building materials, components, and construction waste that entail uncertainty, irregularity, and scarcity.

Through unpacking case studies and speculative research, the paper calls for a radical expansion of architecture’s capability of technical imagination in efforts of bridging the divide between circular material processes and their digital representations. It argues that architectural software needs to be retooled to embrace “dirty” forms of building information. In doing so, the paper identifies an opportunity for the discipline of architecture to reconfigure its position within the broader construction economy against the prevailing realities of corporate market consolidation.

Short abstract:

Long-term storage infrastructures are often the subject of an architectural treatment that must ensure the conservation of the entities stored and deal with compound risks in the new climatic regime. How does this search for balance transform architects' practices and affect the building itself?

Long abstract:

This proposal, which is linked to a broader research program on long-term storage infrastructures (LESLIE), explores architectural and urban planning practices in the context of long-term storage infrastructures such as museum reserves, data centers, CO2 storage, radioactive waste burial and seed banks. These infrastructures deal with a temporal paradox: they are designed to store tangible and intangible entities over the long term, in a multi-century perspective, but simultaneously face changing environments (melting permafrost, flooding, etc.). We argue that they could be considered as places of experimentation for architecture and construction, as it is necessary to conceive new materials, new conservation systems and a different architectural treatment, requiring external and internal innovation. Indeed, infrastructures are destabilized by compound risks, sometimes quicker than their architects anticipated: water infiltration, moisture or even building decay.

We will draw on several case studies in the field of seed banks (such as the Millennium Seed Bank (Kew Gardens), Svalbard Global Seed Vault (Norway), the Juliet Rice Wichman Botanical Research Center in Hawaii), museum reserves (the Louvre conservation center in Liévin (France), the Mucem resource conservation center (Marseille, France), or CO2 capture (as in Hellisheidi, Iceland). Based on interviews with engineering and design offices, technicians and users who are responsible for maintenance, we will explore the practices that enable us to identify the new uncertainties facing these infrastructures, and the solutions they have found or are in the process of finding.

Short abstract:

Using academic research and development of a material flow simulation for urban planning as a case study, I examine how the two objectives of assetizing building materials and regulating carbon emissions produced by the construction industry are being jointly pursued through data practices.

Long abstract:

Proponents of digital urban planning simulations believe that understanding the material flows in and out of the city—as buildings are constructed and demolished—will stimulate sustainable urban planning and green economic growth. Researchers studying material flows and the waste economy expect that monitoring the locations and quantities of different building materials will contribute to the circular economy: through this monitoring, so the idea, one can build an accounting system that allows the assetization of buildings beyond their value on the housing market. This trend is emphasized by the discursive redefinition of buildings as “material banks”.

Studying academic research and development of a material flow simulation for urban planning, I examine how the two parallel promises of spurring economic growth and regulating carbon emissions produced by the construction industry are being connected through data practices. Concretely, I look into the proposed transition from submitting images of architectural plans to building inspection, to machine-readable materials data in the shape of XML files—and the promise of integrating materials’ life cycle data into these.

I explore what enmeshing these two mechanisms—accounting for material flows for the circular reuse of building materials and monitoring CO2 emissions produced during the life cycles of building materials—enacts. I hope to unveil hidden articulations of climate action in planning research practices by examining how mechanisms to regulate CO2 emissions are being smuggled into public construction files amongst promises of data driven assetization.