The academic and adaptive reuse advocate is the first to join the judging panel
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and assistant professor at EPFL, where she leads the RIOT design and research laboratory.
As an assistant professor of urban design at Harvard University from 2020, Malterre-Barthes started A Global Moratorium on New Construction, an initiative that interrogates current development protocols and provocatively argues for the suspension of all new building activity.
Malterre-Barthes’ interests relate to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanisation, material extraction, climate emergency and social justice. She holds a PhD from ETH Zurich on the political economy of food systems and its influence on architecture and urban design, and is a founding member of two activist networks dedicated to equality in architecture.
Enter the AR New into Old awards today: deadline 7 March
Malterre-Barthes’ work has been a regular touchstone for writers in The Architectural Review and she has written twice for the magazine. With Zosia Dzierżawska in the 125th anniversary issue, Malterre-Barthes wrote a graphic novel imagining a future under the Global Moratorium on New Construction; and in the 2023 Demolition issue, she composed a demolition postcard that called for ‘not a single square metre of already installed matter to be demolished’. Malterre-Barthes has also joined the AR in conversation on the AR Ecologies podcast.
A diagram by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes featured in the February 2024 Repair issue. A simple pitched-roof structure highlights the web of materials and products that constitute a typical modern building, making repair more challenging
Credit: Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
As the need for sustainable alternatives to building anew becomes increasingly urgent, the AR New into Old awards celebrate the creative ways buildings are adapted and remodelled to welcome new contemporary uses. Launched in 2017, the awards recognise the imaginative appropriation of existing structures, from innovative insertions to ambitious adaptations, that offer buildings a new lease of life.
For more information and to enter the AR New into Old awards, please click here.
Deadline: 7 March 2025
