Stories about Sustainability - Stop Building!

Stories about Sustainability presents ideas inspired by architecture, materials and history from around the world.

To pause new construction—even if momentarily, creates a radical thinking framework for alternatives to the current regime of space production and its suspect growth imperative. Engaging with unsettling questions, Stop Building: A Moratorium on New Construction envisions a massive value shift for existing buildings, infrastructure, materials, unbuilt land, earth, and the labor that holds our world together. From housing redistribution to reinviting value generation, from anti-extractive measures to profound structural changes, from curricula reforms to purging the exploitative culture of the office, from respecting soil to embracing repair, reuse, and dismantling, an entire rewiring of design processes and construction lays ahead.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (DPLG, Ph.D. ETHZ) is Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-Lausanne (EPFL). Most recently Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Malterre-Barthes conducts research on urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization, material extraction, climate emergency, and ecological/social justice.

George Massoud is an architect, educator and cultural worker. He co-directs Studio Abroad and Material Cultures, both design and research practices based in London. He is also founding member of POA, a community platform. Together with Merve Anil, he runs Diploma Unit 13 which investigates how space and architecture mediate between politics, our material environments and identities. He is interested in how we can build a future rooted in mutual interdependence with the various ecologies that shape our built environment.