The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
‘To say that architecture, in its extractivist mode, is complicit with the forces of climate breakdown, is not to apportion blame; it is to state a fact,’ writes Jeremy Till in a recent essay for the AR. ‘That the architecture media has for too long ignored this contribution to the crisis brings them, too, into the net of failed responsibilities.’
On 12 June 2023, the climate action group Architects Declare published an open letter to the UK’s design media, inviting titles around the country into dialogue about the role of architecture and design criticism in the climate emergency. The Architectural Review wholeheartedly supports the letter’s ambition to impress on architects, editors and journalists the urgency of the planetary crisis, and to establish better journalistic standards for reporting on the climate catastrophe.
This Reading List features AR texts (and a podcast) from the recent past which have, in various ways, and under the banner of different issue themes, shared those ambitions. Climate justice and social justice are inextricably linked, and require an intersectional editorial approach. Whether thinking the climate catastrophe through the lens of Labour, Energy, or Plants, these pieces place decarbonisation at the centre of any argument about the built environment.
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Architecture criticism against the climate clock, AR April 2023, Jeremy Till
‘The masking of the real crisis, and the ignoring of the intersection of climate justice with social justice, continues today’
Back to the future: Norman Foster at the Centre Pompidou, AR online, Eleanor Beaumont
‘Proposals for a post-carbon future are noticeably thin on the ground, while relics of fossil capitalism abound’
Letter to the AR: Norman Foster on his ‘futurespective’, AR online, Norman Foster
‘Your review dismisses much in the exhibition that is relevant for a viable future’
Revisit: Straw Bale House in London, UK by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, AR June 2023, Martha Dillon
‘Notably, the famous straw bales and their novel rainscreen protection remain in good condition’
Retrospective: Salima Naji, AR October 2022, Nadya Rouizem
‘Beyond the preservation of ancient heritage, Salima Naji campaigns for updating ancestral construction techniques to showcase the lessons of the vernacular’
Green Labour: Material Reform, and The Value of a Whale, AR February 2023, George Kafka
‘It is critical to understand architects as workers in solidarity with other actors in the expanded conception of the building: those who work on building sites, in fields and factories, who maintain existing buildings, or who might dismantle and reuse building materials’
AR Ecologies: greenwashing, AR online, Sabrina Syed (host), Smith Mordak, Paulo Tavares, Suzanne Simard
‘Forests are cosmological non-human networks that live and think’
Lead image: In the cold winter of Chongqing, China, trees transplanted two years earlier are blanketed in plastic sheets to keep in the warmth and moisture they need to thrive. Propped up by wooden structures made from the bones of their predecessors, the trees are taken from their homes without the sprawling network of roots they need to stand up tall. This photograph is taken from Yan Wang Preston’s series Forest, (20 0- 7), in which she tracks uprooted trees as they adapt to their new urban environment.
