The UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 is an invitation for architects from around the world to meet in Copenhagen July 2 – 6 to explore and communicate how architecture influences all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For more than two years, the Science Track and its international Scientific Committee have been analyzing the various ways in which architecture responds to the SDGs. The work has resulted in the formulation of six science panels: design for Climate Adaptation, design for Rethinking Resources, design for Resilient Communities, design for Health, design for Inclusivity, and design for Partnerships for Change. An international call for papers was sent out in 2022 and 296 of more than 750 submissions have been invited to present at the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 in Copenhagen. ArchDaily is collaborating with the UIA to share articles pertaining to the six themes to prepare for the opening of the Congress.
In this first feature, we met with the Head of the Scientific Committee Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Professor and Head of the CITA (Centre for IT and Architecture), Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Design and Conservation who is also co-chairing the panel design for Rethinking Resources with Carlo Ratti, Professor and Director of the Senseable Lab, MIT, Founding Partner of CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati.
Read on to discover the conversation.
Related Article
The UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 Copenhagen Science Track Announces the 6 Themes of Its AgendaYou and Carlo Ratti are co-chairing Panel 2: Design for Rethinking Resources of the UIA World Congress 2023 CPH Science Track. What are the most urgent considerations to address for architecture and the built environment when developing practice and research on design for rethinking resources, and how has this been reflected in your work with the panel?
MRT: I think we are all aware that architecture and the built environment are notoriously resource intense. At a global level, current building practice stands for 40% of all materials and 50% of energy consumed. This is also understandable, as the built environment is where we live and work, our cities, and our infrastructures. But this also creates a site for impact.
‘Design for Rethinking Resources’ asks how more ethical practices of resource deployment can replace the inherent wastefulness of current industrial fabrication. It asks how, as we grow more aware of the limits of our planetary boundaries, we can shift from an exploitative to a restorative and regenerative design ideology. And it asks how such an ideology can play out, who it engages with, and how it can change what we think architecture can be. If we can rethink the way we employ resources, the types, the quantities, their locality, and the material practices themselves whether subtractive or additive, we have a real opportunity to change the way we as a society choose to deploy our shared resource.
A key point in ‘Design for Rethinking Resources’ is to understand resources not only as a quantitative problem. There is a tendency to think of over-extraction as a problem of depletion. But over-extraction brings with it deep social and ecological crises as practices of illegal mining or the felling of protected forests, have deep impacts on the communities and ecologies in which they take part. As such, resource deployment and design are fundamentally ethical decisions. These are challenging questions and we are excited to discuss this at the UIA2023 world congress.
It is widely acknowledged that our unsustainable use of limited planetary resources is central to the climate crisis. In your view, how can architects take on the responsibility of being part of these destructive practices and strengthen architecture’s role as a mitigator rather than an exacerbator of climate ignorance?
MRT: Architecture is such an inspiring place for instigating change. It is a place of cultural speculation, a critical tradition, deeply creative and fundamentally technological, with agency both towards the social and the ecological.
If sustainability theory teaches us anything it is that we are an embedded part of the environment that surrounds us. This is such a challenging starting point. The modernist divide between self and nature can no longer maintain an illusory idea of a passive world beyond and away, somehow at our disposal. It ignites new agency into how architecture can be conceived, what our methods must be, and how our technologies must act. I believe that we are finding our way into a new way of placing sustainability in our practice, not as a desired outcome, or technological solution but as a place of ideation.
Working with the SDGs challenges us to expand our understanding of what sustainability can be. I think the most important part of the SDGs is not its ability to diligently map out all the areas of effort or point at their interconnectivity, but to articulate the balances between our ecological ceiling and the diverse social needs that our multifarious societies mean.
In ‘Design for Rethinking Resources’ we look at these questions through the particular question of resource and fabrication. It does so in an intentionally broad manner executed over six sub-panels asking how sustainability challenges the foundations of our material practices and how they can change with it. We do this across the six-panel sessions: Post Extractive Visions, Localising Resource, Heritage to High Tech, Fabrication Futures, Restarting from Renewables, and The Value of Waste. Here, we will discuss how rethinking waste through circular design paradigms can challenge our ideas of ‘end of life’ and engineer new materials with bespoke lifespans that actively engage and correspond to building performance. How computational design processes can aid the management of recycled resource stocking, support processes of de-fabrication, and optimize the strategic deployment of resources. And how we can challenge our assumptions of how materials are sourced probing how bio-based and synthetically grown materials can lead to new methods of resource production.
Accessibility and affordability of materials, as well as durability and cultural connotations, are hugely influential on what industry, clients, and consumers find acceptable and desirable. What kinds of future envisionings do you have for new materials and production practices?
MRT: I think the idea of the ‘normative’ building culture and how it is different from context to context is so interesting. Value is a function of this ideation of the normative and what you are calling the desirable. In my context, in the building culture of Northern Europe, bio-based materials such as timber, straw, or hemp have become radical cutting-edge materials. New research is being done into traditional techniques of fire safety when combined with clay or being able to use CT scans to map the embedded material heterogeneity to performance criteria. This newfound interest pushes us to question the correlations between heritage and high technology, their value, and their function in an industrialized building context.
The circular design also embeds these contradictions. Waste is of course de facto that which has no valuable. But with circular design we find novel ways of cascading materials through different use scenarios to most fully exhaust the extracted, avoiding waste and its detrimental impact on the environment. But how does an architecture of decomposition and re-composition look, what does it mean to the quality and aesthetic of architecture and the spaces we live in and how can an architecture of waste enact a new societal value proposition?
I think we can also be productively aware of neighborship. These inquiries are going on across many different fields of production. There are interesting and creative models for transforming our understanding of the desirable and the valuable in parallel fields such as fashion and textiles that are equally working towards ethical production.
In which ways do you find that engaging with the 17 UN SDGs can contribute to architectural research and practices? How do we grow and support a continued understanding of and commitment to architecture’s active role in creating the urgently needed sustainable transformation of our societies?
MRT: As an architect, I think that the SDGs have a decidedly weak understanding of the agency of architecture and the wider built environment in our societies. In my role as both Head of the Science Track and co-chair of the ‘Design for Rethinking Resources’ panel, my first realization was that architecture is all but forgotten in the SDGs. It witnesses a lack of understanding of what it means to design, shape our built environment, and strategize resources.
This is the opposite when we look through the eyes of resources. In our work on the ‘Design for Rethinking Resources’ panel, Carlo Ratti and I started with an analysis. By reading through all the SDGs, targets, and indicators we see that the issue resource is foundational in nearly all the goals. The deep interdependencies between resources and society, environment, and ecology shape the embedded balances that the SDGs seek to straddle. How does resource challenge issues of inclusivity if women have no right to own land, how do silvicultural practices of felling trees impact the biodiversity of our forests, what are the real socio-environmental consequences of pollution, how can we produce with less or cleaner energy, what are the real material footprints when we take into account globalization? A resource is the cornerstone of many of these balances.
What are the most exciting developments and promising movements you have identified in the papers submitted to Panel 2: Design for Rethinking Resources?
MRT: Many of our practices, in both research and practice, can become siloed in their outlook on what both resources and technologies of fabrication are. I think the opportunity of the UIA World Congress 2023 CPH is its wide and diversified outlook. In total, the Science Track has accepted 296 papers out of which 50 papers submitted from 18 different countries across the planet address Rethinking Resources. I have very much enjoyed the breadth of papers that we have received and the diversity of geographies and knowledge traditions from which they arise.
In architecture, the theorizing of material practice has informed much of modernism. Here, materials are understood as fully decontextualized, isolated from their socio-ecological belonging. Extending material thinking to resource thinking is to challenge this abstraction and instead enrich it with the social, ecological, and environmental dimensions and connectivity that are site and locality embed.
The papers reflect this. The focus on the locality of resources, their origins, and the traditions of practice by which they are refined, detailed, and assembled into architecture gives a very wide solution space by which to navigate. Equally, I think the balance between what is oriented towards heritage and that which is futurist is highly inspiring creating new dimensions to what can otherwise become a quite positivist field.
What are you hoping the congress delegates will take with them from the UIA World Congress 2023 CPH and what legacy from the event would you hope to see?
MRT: The focus of the Science Track is of course synergy and learning from each other. But more than that I really hope it is also the start of a new community.
‘Design for Rethinking Resources’ is deliberately broad in scope bringing together different research communities to discuss sustainability from the question of resources. In doing so our aim is to build a new community that can bridge different perspectives and perhaps gain new ones. As I mentioned before I think there are two central axes to this inquiry – one focussed on locals of extraction stretching from the local to the global and the other focussed on practices of fabrication moving from heritage to high tech. By re-composing the field in this way, I think we can ask new questions. For instance, what happens when we think of waste as a local resource? Can novel methods of digital fabrication offer new ways of understanding renewables? Can rethinking resource challenges the way we conceive architecture, its design traditions, its axiom of permanence and durability, and the clear-cut hand-over between design, building, and inhabiting instead propose a more entangled, less stable, and more sensitive design practice?
Stay tuned to the collaboration with UIA World Congress of Architecture 2023 and to our coverage of Copenhagen, the UNESCO World Capital of Architecture for 2023.
