Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity by Elisa Iturbe

“There have been three paradigms of energy capture throughout human history – foraging, agriculture, and carbon-intensive fossil fuels.1 At each transition from one paradigm to the next, the productive capacity of human society was transformed, restructuring the existing social order and engendering a corresponding spatial and architectural paradigm. The shift from a nomadic to an agricultural society gave rise to towns, villages, and cities. The shift from an agricultural to an industrial society driven by fossil fuels gave rise to factory towns, global trade networks, suburbs, and megacities. This most recent of these spatial paradigms, which I call carbon form, is the focus of this issue. The aim here is twofold. First to identify our current energy paradigm as a driver of urban and architectural form. When the adoption of fossil fuels established a new horizon of possibility for production, society reorganized itself around the availability of abundant energy. This reorganization became immediately legible in space as new architectural typologies and urban growth patterns emerged. The second is to implicate architectural and urban form in the creation and unfolding of the anthropogenic climate crisis in a way that looks beyond the immediate quantification of a carbon footprint. Our current built environment, designed under the premise of abundant energy, has created spatial configurations that enmesh the cultural, economic, and political aspects of social life within an energy-intensive network of space and form. As a result, we cannot think of the built environment as passively receiving energy from the grid but rather as actively giving form to energy-intensive ways of life, from individual consumption to the larger dynamics of global capitalism. This, more than the day-to-day energy use of buildings and cities, is the more significant obstacle to meaningful change in the face of a worsening ecological disaster. Regardless of increases in energy efficiency and reductions in the carbon emissions of individual buildings, the built environment as we know it will be fundamentally unable to supplant the current energy paradigm or to address the climate crisis as long as its core is constituted by carbon form. Any proposal for the future must first deal with overcoming this cultural and architectural legacy. To do so, it is necessary to recognize the spatial expression of carbon energy – carbon form – as a site of intervention, which in turn reveals that architecture has a significant role in defining the outcome of this increasingly uncertain phase of human and planetary history.”

-Elisa Iturbe, 2019