Is architecture just making things worse?

You’ve probably heard more than you’d care to by now about “Abundance,” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which argues that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” Even New York mayor-in-waiting Zohran Mamdani, the focus of last week’s Punch List and hardly a YIMBY standard-bearer, conceded on a recent episode of Pod Save America that he’s sympathetic to many of the book’s recommendations, especially the idea that the left needs to reclaim from conservatives “the language of quality of life” as “a bedrock concern.” Whether this was primarily a feint by Mamdani toward the political center in the last stretch of the primary campaign—that’s how I read it, anyway—it was also a reflection of the book’s ubiquity in Democratic circles in recent weeks.

I won’t add to the abundant pile of “Abundance” reviews. Instead, let’s zoom over to the other extreme of current thinking on the left and consider “A Moratorium on New Construction,” by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (Sternberg Press). It is the perfect inverse of “Abundance.”

(And let’s stop here briefly to hail the authors of both books for doing something truly revolutionary these days: publishing a non-fiction volume without a subtitle.)

Malterre-Barthes writes in the very first line that “to build is also to destroy.” She calls for an “indefinite pause” on the construction of new architecture, in order “to assess, mitigate, correct, and repair the harm generated in the construction of the present world, granting respite today while plotting the course for a different tomorrow.”

“A moratorium,” she argues, “halts the damage while taking stock.”

One of the reasons I wanted to write about the book for Punch List is that its themes echo the comments, or the anxieties and preoccupations, of some of my own students at the Yale School of Architecture, and those I meet on reviews at other schools. Suffice to say that generally speaking they are not, as Pod Save America co-host Jon Lovett suggested Mamdani might be, “‘Abundance’-pilled.”

More and more, they are less and less compelled to build—or, at least, to build new.

Deeply aware of what Malterre-Barthes calls the “polycrisis”—the doom loop of threats posed by climate change, rising economic inequality, creeping authoritarianism, and attacks on science and other forms of expertise—they wonder, reasonably enough, whether it makes sense to pursue an architecture career in anything resembling the traditional manner. Malterre-Barthes, who teaches at the EPFL in Lausanne, has noticed something similar, writing that “in many schools, students interrogate the profession’s purpose…and the destructive outcomes of an industry operating without scrutiny.”

So what’s a young architect, or a student or teacher of architecture, to do? The answer in many architecture schools, beyond familiar efforts to promote net-zero or carbon-positive designs, has been a growing focus on various categories of practice that fall under the wide umbrella of adaptive reuse, which is to say strategies to reimagine, reconstitute, or extend existing buildings. (Of course some of these projects, in the real world, require enough new construction material to throw their ecological bona fides into doubt.) There is also a lot of interest in temporary architecture and in building materials that can be cultivated or easily replenished, from mycelium to coconut husks to mass timber; in learning from Indigenous design traditions; and in using, as the inheritors of the Roman empire did, some version of spolia, or construction debris, as the stuff of new architecture.

(For my part, after seeing the Basilica of San Salvatore in the Italian city of Spoleto last summer, pieced elegantly together from spolia and other sources in the 8^th century, I’ve become mildly obsessed with the under-examined work of Lombard architects, who took the reassembly of building rubble to sublime heights.)

Malterre-Barthes has little patience for many of those approaches. “There is no sustainable architecture, no architecture free from extraction,” she writes. There are only “gradients of harm.” Net-zero pledges? “Cheap talk with low integrity.” Nor is reuse necessarily the answer: “Recycling still relies on extraction.” In general, “the building sector’s awakening to the intrinsically harmful nature of its activities comes late and without enthusiasm.”

Instead she finds hope in what she calls “reluctant architecture,” a cousin of the slow-food movement, and relatedly in strategies to delay, obstruct, or otherwise frustrate the construction of new buildings. There are sentences in the book that would make a YIMBY’s head explode: “While colleagues often bemoan the red tape in construction processes and the authorities’ slowness and delivering building permits, one could also envision such bureaucracy as a blessing in disguise. In law-abiding places, as long as the files collect dust in the building department of municipality offices, the trees on site are alive and oil remains in the ground.”

“A Moratorium” might best be understood as the result of the migration of progressive theories of degrowth, which emerged in the 1970s and have been gaining traction on the left and in the arts in recent years, into schools of architecture. Whatever its political leanings, the architectural academy has long been organized with precious few exceptions around an additive theory of city-making, which is to say that its one article of faith has been that more architecture, typically of course in the form of new buildings, is better. (Start with the basic metaphor of the blueprint: to be an architect in the timeworn sense is to produce diagrams for adding things to the world, for helping it grow.) There was bound to be a clash at some point between these very different sensibilities. Think of this book as the transcript of that clash.

Among its strongest sections is an entertaining history of moratoria—a sort of timeline of pauses, from “A Call to Establish an Office to Prevent Construction,” published in the Swiss architecture magazine archithese in 1973, to the Federal Building Moratorium, signed into law by Bill Clinton two decades later, during a sharp downturn in the real-estate market. Also compelling is the chapter on extraction, which traces the materials used to build a typical single-family house back to their mineral and chemical origins; it’s a reminder that there is still a useful book to be written applying to architecture the model of Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which tracks four very different meals from soil to plate.

“A Moratorium” argues urgently that a building pause is needed, and ASAP, in order to buy time to develop a “post-extractive” architecture. But it doesn’t meaningfully engage with the real-world implications of such a ban, which would instantly throw many millions of people around the world out of work—not just architects and engineers but electricians, plumbers, janitors, stone masons, building inspectors, urban planners, paint manufacturers, and on and on.

Nor does it offer many details about how the moratorium would be created or maintained. Who exactly would put this ban on new buildings into place? Some benevolent expert band of former architects who have seen the light? Governments, builders, clients, or some other group? Would a political or economic revolution as well as an architectural one be required to set it in motion? (Malterre-Barthes suggests only “overthrowing existing cultural narratives.”) Who would decide when it starts and how long it lasts?

The book doesn’t have much time for such questions. It’s meant to be a provocation, or what its publisher calls a “leap of faith”—and I find it timely and compelling as such. Still, at the very least, a polemic like this one, packaged as a cudgel against the status quo, should be perfectly clear about its politics. To have any kind of impact beyond the symbolic, a building moratorium would have to be adopted, and enforced, at scale. And doing anything at scale is, necessarily, a political project. It would after all take a supremely effective campaign to begin even to slow the headlong pace of construction across the world. According to one recent report, “global floor area is expected to double by 2060, the equivalent of building out New York City every month for the next 40 years.”

This is not to say that “A Moratorium,” part of Sternberg’s Critical Spatial Practice series, isn’t interested in politics. But it is more a summary of other people’s politics, assembled like a footnoted collage, than an assertion of its own. The most generous possible reading of the book is that—like some of the architecture Malterre-Barthes admires, or maybe like that cathedral in Spoleto—it’s a creative amalgam, an exercise in taking the existing arguments of writers and architects (David Harvey, Rahul Mehrotra, Audre Lorde, Donna Haraway, Keller Easterling, Lacaton & Vassal, et al.) and piling them up into a new rhetorical edifice.

Still, if her eagerness to credit the work of others is a laudable impulse, she indulges it so fully that the book comes to seem not so much collectively written as not really written at all. It seems to recede from you as you try to read it.

In the end, the book’s biggest blind spot is the extent to which it underestimates the creative savvy of the powers that be, especially their nimble ability to co-opt even the most radical ideas in support of their own agendas. Malterre-Barthes cites a 2023 ruling from Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Curtis A. Kin that took the city of Beverly Hills to task for failing to meet state mandates for the construction of new housing. The decision, she writes, “blocks the city’s authorities from issuing any building permits except for new affordable housing, and will be lifted once the city has reached the three-thousand units that it is required to provide.”

She calls such judicial action “promising,” with the capacity “to halt damage, gain time, and message outside of the logic of production to create conditions for other possibilities.” Malterre-Barthes is wrong, though, that the decision put a moratorium on “any building permits except for new affordable housing.” In fact, according to the Los Angeles Times, it called for a ban on residential additions, remodels, and other adaptive-reuse projects while exempting new ground-up residential development, affordable or otherwise, which is to say it privileged just the kind of architecture “A Moratorium” argues is most damaging.

The more pressing question is this: Whom does a ruling like this serve? Having worked deep within the L.A. housing-policy mines myself for a few years, with the philosophical black lung to show for it, I can answer that one directly. Above all, limits on residential construction of any kind tend to protect the fortunate members of Beverly Hills’s wealthy, home-owning class, who benefit in all kinds of ways from freezing the existing low-density housing stock in place.

In Southern California and places like it, sophisticated land-use attorneys, journalists, homeowner associations, and slow-growth advocacy groups across the political spectrum have become experts in cloaking efforts to uphold the status quo in the rhetoric of advancing affordable housing and other progressive policies. In doing so, they tie a failed system up in knots while continuing to benefit from it.

Most of the time, this is how moratoria of all varieties work in practice: They favor entrenched interests. Malterre-Barthes never succeeds in making clear why one banning new architecture would be any different.

NEWS AND NOTES

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a roll-back of some parts of the landmark California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, shouting out Ezra Klein and “Abundance” as he did so.

Christopher Knight on Zumthor’s LACMA: “L.A.’s encyclopedic museum, with a global permanent collection simply installed geographically as straightforward chronology, is dead, and the Geffen Galleries prevent it from ever coming back.”

I’ll be writing the New York Times fall architecture preview once again this year, on the heels of reports in 2023 and 2024, which means I’m on the hunt for buildings, exhibitions, books, etc., set to make their debuts between September of this year and spring of next. Send them my way, because there is no moratorium on deadlines! [email protected]

Punch List is published weekly. (It’s going out early this week ahead of the July 4 holiday.) Subscribe free here, or sign up for a paid subscription, with bonus material, here. Up next: Autocratic architecture in Viktor Orbán’s Budapest.

Email: [email protected]