Mitigate!
The most recent report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is focused on mitigation. To an extent much greater than before, the report accepts that major disruptions to climate patterns are inevitable, and focuses on how to mitigate their damaging social impacts. It makes for pretty depressing reading, perhaps especially for architects and others in the building industry - the design of the built environment is essential to these goals, but is also struggling to transition to a practice model appropriate to the climate emergency. As one of the writers of the report noted in an interview, “each gram of greenhouse gas emissions is a mistake in design… architects should really look at this report carefully and rethink the way they work.” Of course, many architects are doing just that, and this panel will focus on what the field can do, and the challenges we collectively face. How, in other words, to reimagine the built environment towards an equitable, climate responsive future?


Reading the IPCC Report with Daniel Barber, Elisa Iturbe, and Elise Hunchuck

Join us in the offices of Snohetta, at 80 Pine Street at

7pm, Thursday June 9

Are you joining us for our event at 7pm on June 9? *
Everyone who comes to the office must be fully vaccinated. If you are coming in person, are you fully vaccinated? *
Name *
Have you read chapter 9, "buildings" from the most recent report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?
Clear selection
E-mail Address *
We add all e-mail addresses collected to our mailing list - thereby signing registrants up for our weekly newsletter, SKYLINE, distributed through newyork.substack.com. You may leave the mailing list at any time.
Subscription?
We cover the cost of our event when attendees start new subscriptions. We are also apparently the only publication Kate Wagner looks forward to receiving in the mail. Support the work, subscribe, and add some joy to your mailbox, too.
Clear selection
Details

Panelists:

DANIEL BARBER's research and teaching are organized around two major trajectories: the first involves an archivally-rich revisionist history of architectural modernism, demonstrating the significance of environmental concerns to historical developments in the field. The second involves providing a theoretical framework for architects and others to engage the climate crisis.

Barber's latest book Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (forthcoming April 2020) explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Barber looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing also on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he argues that the images and diagrams produced helped to conceptualize climate knowledge. Barber describe how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design, and aim to reconcile the cultural dynamism of contemporary architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions: a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.


ELISA ITURBE is co-founder of Outside Development, a design and research practice that considers race, class, labor, climate, and capitalism alongside form, proportion, and the production of urban fabric. The work is currently focused on the spatial impact and architectural possibilities that arise from community land ownership, specifically as they relate to de-industrialization, self-sustaining community systems, and climate mitigation.

At Cooper, Elisa teaches analysis, design, and an environmental course titled The City & Carbon Modernity, which explores the spatial expression of our dominant energy paradigm in both urban and architectural form. Recently, she guest-edited Log 47, titled Overcoming Carbon Form, and co-wrote a book with Peter Eisenman titled Lateness. She has also published in Perspecta 53, Log 39, New York Review of Architecture, DeArq and has several forthcoming publications on the topic of carbon modernity.

Elisa received a dual-masters from the Yale School of the Environment and the Yale School of Architecture, where she also teaches and serves as the coordinator of the dual-degree program.


Elise Misao Hunchuck is the editor and festival curator for transmediale, the festival for digital art and culture in Berlin, an editorial board member for the journal SCAPEGOAT: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy, a visiting tutor for ADS7 at the Royal College of Art, School of Architecture in London and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. A transdisciplinary researcher, editor, writer, and educator trained in landscape architecture, philosophy, and geography, her practice research practice—with sites in Canada, Japan, China, Europe, and Ukraine—employs cartographic, photographic and text-based methods to document, explore, and archive co-constitutive relationships between plant, animals, and minerals.

Her writing has been featured in The Funambulist, The Avery Review, and Flash Art. Her editorial work has been published with Sternberg Press, Archive Books, and Edinburgh University Press. Most recently, she co-edited Electric Brine (2021) alongside Jennifer Teets and Margarida Mendes. Forthcoming titles (2021–22) include works with Jovis Verlag, Routledge, Duke University Press, MIT Press, and the Minnesota University Press series Art after Nature.


Reading:

Link to the report:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-3/

Chapter 9, "Buildings":

https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6wg3/pdf/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FinalDraft_Chapter09.pdf

Subscribe link:

nyra.nyc/subscribe

Submit
Clear form
Never submit passwords through Google Forms.
This form was created inside of New York Review of Architecture. Report Abuse
Google Forms