This newsletter for the week of July 7 delves into the long-awaited (for me, at least) A Moratorium on New Construction by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. It is a provocative book that will most likely be greeted by disdain and dismissiveness by practicing architects who want to keep designing buildings. For them, I dug Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture out of the archive. In between are the usual headlines and new releases. Happy reading!
Book of the Week:
A Moratorium on New Construction, by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (Buy from The MIT Press [US distributor for Sternberg Press] / from Amazon / from Bookshop)
Released last month in the US, A Moratorium on New Construction is the latest book by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, an architect, urban designer, and assistant professor at EPFL in Switzerland; the book is also the 14th title in the Critical Spatial Practices series edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen. It comes about a decade after the publication of Malterre-Barthes’s first two books, both of which she edited with Marc Angélil, came out of ETHZ MAS Urban Design studios, and were done in collaboration with Something Fantastic and CLUSTER: Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (Ruby Press, 2016) and Cairo Desert Cities (Ruby Press, 2017). Connecting the dots between a pair of books about the architecture and urban development of the Egyptian capital and a provocative call for a pause on global construction to address climate change and other issues might not be obvious at first, but, for reasons I’ll try to explain, I think the first begat the last. Without Malterre-Barthes’s time spent studying Cairo’s housing and urbanism, we might not have her book-length argument that finds a cure to numerous global crises in the halting of new construction projects.
A couple years after the publication of Cairo Desert Cities, I attended the 6th Holcim Forum for Sustainable Construction, “Re-materializing Construction,” which took place over a few days in Cairo. Technically, the workshops, keynotes, and other activities happened at the New Cairo campus of the American University in Cairo, located about twenty miles east of AUC’s old facilities at Tahrir Square. New Cairo was created in 2000, making it notably one of the first of the the country’s now roughly four-dozen “desert cities,” but today it is overshadowed by the New Administrative Capital, which is currently taking shape another twenty miles or so east of New Cairo, almost equidistant between the Nile and the Suez Canal. On day one of the Holcim Forum, Khaled Abbas, Egypt’s Deputy Minister of Housing, gave a presentation on the country’s desert cities—a sharp contrast with the opening keynotes by Norman Foster, Christine Binswanger (Herzog & de Meuron), Anne Lacaton, and Francis Kéré, all of whom focused on relatively small-scale, sustainable buildings. Though inadvertent, the message was clear: green buildings, like a bespoke warehouse in rammed earth, are meaningless when desert cities in concrete and glass are rising out of the desert. It is a matter of scale, in other words, and something bigger needs to be done to address energy-intensive overbuilding, a phenomenon hardly limited to the desert environs of Cairo.
On its surface, the phrase “a moratorium on new construction” posits that the carbon pollution from extracting minerals, manufacturing products, and building buildings is so great it needs to stop. We have enough buildings, it seems to say, so we need to find ways to reuse buildings or rebuild with the materials from buildings no longer fit to stand. That’s a naive assumption, of course, because, if Malterre-Barthes’s experience in Cairo illuminated anything, it’s that there are myriad negatives beyond carbon emissions when it comes to new construction. To name just a few, families are displaced, aquifers are drained, nature is destroyed, habitats are made less diverse, marginalized people are oppressed, toxins are unearthed, and the rich are made richer while the poor are made poorer. These effects are not part of every new building project—brownfield sites, for instance, involve environmental remediation that usually improves conditions—but they are especially pronounced in the deserts around Cairo, where the downsides of new construction are more considerable than the upsides. I came away from the Holcim Forum with a strong embrace on adaptive reuse, and I have a hard time believing Malterre-Barthes’s even more intensive experiences before that didn’t cause a shift in her thinking about architecture.
Regardless of my speculation on its impetus, and although it was published just last month, A Moratorium on New Construction comes out of efforts that have been ongoing for around four or five years. Malterre-Barthes’s website describes it as part of “an on-going a research/pedagogy project on construction materials and extraction” at Harvard GSD; the project consisted of numerous roundtables that are mentioned within the book and therefore clearly influenced its contents. One supporter mentioned is B+, the collaborative architecture practice that is behind HouseEurope!, an initiative that is aiming to create new EU laws “to make renovation and transformation more easy, affordable and social.” HouseEurope! finds architects entering politics, a realm where they are probably outnumbered by lawyers 999 to 1, but also a realm where they should be focusing their efforts. For even though Malterre-Barthes’s book commendably touches on the reasons why construction should be paused, whom it would impact, and how it might play out in academia and the profession, the prospects of a moratorium taking hold—whether one sees it practically or as just a mental exercise—requires a combination of top-down and bottom-up efforts.
If there is a great number of architects today embracing such a moratorium, it is future architects, those in architecture school. Most practicing architects would probably see a moratorium as “professional suicide,” as Malterre-Barthes words it in a chapter refuting it as such. (The only practicing architect who springs to mind as being strongly aligned with the book’s non-extractive approach is Søren Pihlmann, whose approach is gaining followers.) But many students today want alternatives to the architectural status quo, as much for social causes and political frustration as for environmental concerns. Malterre-Barthes actually led “Stop Building” studios at GSD and EPFL, though readers of A Moratorium on New Construction do not see any of the students’ output. The only illustrations in the book, in fact, are Lara Almercegui’s Rubble Mountain photographs prefacing Malterre-Barthes’s text.
If architects see a pause—even a brief one—as professional suicide, maybe they should look to other fields for inspiration or guidance. Artists have always been quicker to confront social, environmental, and political issues than architects, and some artists working today provide commentary on architecture and the waste associated with construction. For instance, Tolia Astakhishvili took over a palazzetto in Venice for to love and devour, and closer to home she contributed to The Gatherers at MoMA PS1. There is no paint on canvas or carved stone or any other traditional artistic creations in her works, just the detritus of contemporary life restaged for provocation and the seeds of a wider reorientation of artistic practice. Like her, any architects who take an actual or hypothetical moratorium on new construction seriously need to see it creatively and as life-affirming, not as stifling or suicidal.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States; a curated list)
Circular Materials: Innovation and Reuse in Design and Architecture, by X (Buy from gestalten / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Circular Materials offers a compelling look at how reclaimed, recycled, and regenerative resources are reshaping architecture, design, and fashion in the movement for a more sustainable future.”
Pavilions for Giving: Alternative Practice for Pro Bono Architecture, by Jin-Ho Park (Buy from Images Publishing Group / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In Pavilions for Giving, Dr Jin-Ho Park explores how the role of the modern architect continues to evolve and emphasizes the growing importance of giving back to the community. This book presents six meaningful pro bono projects designed and constructed for local communities in Korea.”
The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016, by Mark Wasiuta (Buy from Columbia University Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “As the title suggests, The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016 both records the possibilities of the archival exhibition as a mode, method, and problem of architecture, and is itself a record of a decade-long curatorial project that sought to reframe the documents, authors, environments produced by and producing architecture.” (Originally announced in June, this book is being released this week.)
Designing the American Century: The Public Landscapes of Clarke and Rapuano, 1915–1965, by Thomas J. Campanella (Buy from Princeton University Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Designing the American Century recovers the forgotten legacy of Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano, whose parks and parkways, highways and housing estates helped modernize—for better or worse—the American metropolis.”
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
Christopher Hawthorne, in his new Punch List Architecture Newsletter, also reviews Charlotte Malterre-Barthes’s A Moratorium on New Construction. Reading Hawthorne’s review after I wrote mine, he finds the book “timely and compelling” as a provocation, but says it practically “doesn’t meaningfully engage with the real-world implications of such a ban.”
Any architecture books in the top 10 of Publishers Weekly’s Fall 2025 Fiction & Nonfiction Preview: Art, Architecture & Photography? Nope. But the longlist does include Albert Kahn’s Daylight: An Architect Reconsidered, Architectural Fantasies: Artist-Built Environments, and Olle Lundberg: An Architecture of Craft.
In a conversation series presented by William Stout Architectural Books and the Eames Institute, Trent Still interviews Danish architect Dorte Mandrup “about the books that shaped her, not just as an architect, but as a thinker, traveler, and cultural participant.”
Between July 4 and September 28, the facade of Hong Kong’s M+ will be the canvas for a slideshow of photographs by Greg Girard, including some of Kowloon Walled City that were published in the incredible City of Darkness: Life In Kowloon Walled City.
From the Archives:
Portions of the Book of the Week touch on alternatives to traditional architectural practice that a moratorium to new construction would engender. Such considerations are not new, as evidenced by Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, by Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, published by Routledge in 2011. I reviewed it on my blog soon after it was published, and here is what I wrote:
Architecture may be defined as the “art or practice of designing and constructing buildings,” but it is one that is increasingly substandard or incomplete, as architects apply their training and efforts on entities other than buildings—installations, networks, images, etc.—and those not fitting the traditional definition of “architect” shape space in numerous ways. Today's expansion of architecture beyond traditional definitions is the impetus of this catalog of “other ways of doing architecture.” The authors word their book carefully, putting “architecture” in the subtitle and offering up the alternative phrase “spatial agency” as a way of getting at the root of the arena and players—space and agents of change, rather than buildings and architects. They actually devote the introduction to tracing how they arrived at this wording and therefore defining spatial agency and the reasons for the book. Three essays follow the introduction to respectively describe the motivations, sites, and operations of spatial agency—all geared towards effecting positive change for people (often those underserved)—and the “lexicon of enacted examples” that makes up the bulk of the book.
The encyclopedic catalog of the “other ways of doing architecture” is presented alphabetically with links (if applicable), dates of activity, a description of what they do, one or more bibliographic references, and at least one photo; most entries are individuals or groups, but some are concepts, such as “guerrilla gardening.” It is a format that is echoed at spatialagency.net, which includes more examples than the book could hold. Entries are cross referenced via underlined text, both in relevant listings and in the introductory essays. In the latter case, one may opt to read the book by flipping back-and-forth, learning about each referenced entry as the theoretical essays are absorbed. This is not a bad approach, as these essays are important for understanding the why, where, and how of spatial agency, not just the what. Ultimately this is a valuable book for those interested in pursuing alternatives to traditional architecture, those searching for ideas about how to make positive change when other means are not available, and for those gauging the state of architecture today.
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Thank you for the review. I'm a student so I can only afford one at the moment, which one would you recommend me to get first? Spatial Agency or A Moratorium on New Construction?
I just bought the Rapuano book. Full of plans, drawings, photographs, as well as images of promotional material and ephemera, my particular fetish. Thanks for showing it.