Climate researchers have recently proven that there has never been such a rapid increase in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere as is happening now. In fact, the CO2 concentration is currently as high as it was around three million years ago. It is also completely beyond dispute that humans are causing global warming. The climate crisis urges us to rethink scale in architecture. While environmentalism has led to the use of sustainable, recyclable materials in design, we now think about the ecological footprint of architecture operating across infrastructural networks of extraction and trade on the scale of territories, forests, seas and even the entire planet. The Anthropocene has made us think of the Earth itself as an architectural construct. This seminar will bring together members of the School of Architecture, faculty and students, each considering another aspect of the interconnection of architecture and the climate crisis. Collectively we will explore not only how the climate crisis is forcing us to think about architecture in a more responsible way, but also what architecture itself is and how new approaches to architectural design and spatial and environmental analysis can have a positive impact on halting global warming.

Presentations by Cooking Sections (Alon Schwabe & Daniel Pascual), Second Sea (Adrian Lahoud, Sam Jacoby, Benjamin Mehigan), David Burns, Sonia Levy, Ines Weizman and others.