team: 

MOULD (Sarah Bovelett, Anthony Powis, Tatjana Schneider, Christina Serifi, Jeremy Till, Becca Voelcker)

Architecture is Climate is a project that reimagines the future of architecture through exploring its entanglement with climate breakdown. The website is divided into three sections: FOUNDATIONS sets the background themes and issues; PRACTICES gathers inspiring examples across multiple disciplines; FUTURES prompts paths forward. All three parts are interlinked, to understand the connections between pasts, presents, and futures.

project summary &  operationalising the notion of the future

Climate breakdown fundamentally alters architecture as we know it: as discipline, practice, field, and education. The systemic changes required to avoid complete ecological collapse should be accompanied by reimagined forms of architecture. This website therefore moves beyond architecture as defined solely by buildings (because that continues the status quo), and instead presents paths to other ways of doing architecture beyond the current norms. FOUNDATIONS interprets the roots of climate breakdown in relation to architecture and collects theoretical and historical resources that have addressed them. It is only through understanding these foundations that architecture can meaningfully engage with climate. PRACTICES gathers a multitude of spatial and non-spatial examples that present powerful counterweights to the roots of climate breakdown, suggesting ways of doing otherwise. FUTURES prompts how other social and spatial practices might be imagined and enacted.

Methods to project future(s) (max 150 words):

methods to project future(s)

FUTURES proposes ways of thinking and acting in order to achieve climate justice. The homepage is a cloud of prompts; click on the ones that seem relevant to your own work, and find a short explanation, links to relevant practices and in some cases things to do. Taken together, they support making choices for viable futures in the face of climate breakdown.

Neither a definitive list nor a set of instructions, the prompts are catalysts for rethinking relationships such as those between labour and economy, resources and policy, or infrastructures and culture. They can be used when you are stuck with a text, a project, a context, or any other dilemma, to direct your thinking in another way. They work best when they are not used in isolation. Use two. Use three. Use a bundle of them. This will help you to look at your project from a different perspective. Sometimes the prompts come with an exercise (which grounds the prompt in a specific activity). Each is linked to relevant PRACTICES to give pointers of how such futures might be enacted, and to give confidence that you are not alone.

entanglements of justice in future(s) & design

FOUNDATIONS interprets the historical and current connections between architecture and the roots of climate breakdown. The section introduces the sites of climate breakdown and the issues which produce and reproduce it, alongside various theoretical and practical positions that have addressed and continue to address the causes. Engagement with climate can only be meaningful through an understanding of these foundations.

Climate breakdown is not a natural phenomenon, but a product of capitalism and the modes of thinking with which it approaches and appropriates nature. Architecture often only addresses the symptoms of climate breakdown, through various forms of adaptation and mitigation. This solutionist approach leaves the underlying roots of climate breakdown both unexamined and undisturbed, allowing the crises to perpetuate. FOUNDATIONS explores these roots, first by identifying a range of issues—exploiting, accumulating, etc.—in order to ground them as modern capitalist ways of thinking and acting. The sites—land, culture, work, etc.—are the various contexts in which climate breakdown is played out, all of which have spatial implications. Alongside these are a set of positions from which to reconfigure social and spatial relations to nurture climate justice. A library of books and other forms of writing gathers key points of inspiration which have informed Architecture is Climate.

references

• MOULD, Architecture Is Climate (dpr-barcelona, 2025)

• Powis, A., and others, (2023), ‘Remembering the Future’, in Biennale Architettura 2023 The Laboratory of the Future: Catalogue of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition pp. 170–73; 

• MOULD, (2023). ‘Architecture Is Climate’, E-Flux Architecture, Chronograms of Architecture.