Sufficient, Not Efficient

​​“Maintaining the status quo is itself a massive project,” said Daniel Barber in his conversation with Elisa Iturbe and Elise Misao Hunchuck last Thursday evening, in front of about fifty attendees who piled into the offices of Snøhetta to learn about the implications the recent Assessment Report 6, prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Hunchuck saw in the report the opportunity for architects “to move away from disciplinary exceptionalism [and] think about how we can be complementary to others,” such as scientists and economists. And where are we all to move? Per the report, from efficiency toward sufficiency. “Improvements in efficiency in the global north have been overwhelmed by an expansion in the spatial capacity of the built environment,” Barber said, adding that “many of our buildings are much more efficient, but they are also much larger.” In short, we need to stop trying to do more with less and simply do a whole lot less. Iturbe suggested that in order to reach that point, we would need to revise “our ideas about space, about the city…