Broken Models

It was no coincidence that it was a stressful Election Day and that it had dropped from 75 to 45 degrees overnight and that Kiel Moe delivered a lecture on how architectural practice and education “remains a shared form of climate change denial.” At least, none of this struck me as a coincidence. The lecture marked the last piece of programming in the “Model Behavior” exhibition curated by the Anyone Corporation, which closed on November 18. As Moe flexed his vocabulary and led the audience through an epic philosophical reading list, he presented five topics—Hylomorphism, Abstraction, Enabling Stability, Fuel-Centricity and Pedagogy–which together constitute architecture’s “elicit and illicit” practice toward our “broken world.” The talk turned on the subject of extraterrestrial space—that unseen territory from which all the atrophied material and energy exuded by, say, the Seagram Building (the subject of Moe’s 2017 book, Unless) comes. Confessing to having “no interest in architectural solutions to the climate crisis,” Moe favorably cited the political theorist and historian Andreas Malm, who has advocated for the strategic sabotage of oil pipelines. Moe called on the architects in the room to “blow up your pipeline, blow up your pedagogy, question how you work, abandon accreditation.” But my favorite—“give up your tenure”—was perhaps the hardest thing for this set to contemplate.