Teaching Not To

Abstract

Two design studios were successively taught in two schools of architecture: one at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the other at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, based on “A Global Moratorium on New Construction,” an initiative that interrogates construction protocols and advocates for a pause in building new structures. This essay is an account of the studios’ methodology, some of their outputs, and what a radical questioning of architecture’s baseline mandate entails, from death threats to empowerment.

Keywords:

• dissent
• curriculum repair
• urban design
• architecture
• pedagogy

Thanks and Acknowledgements

My gratitude to the students who took the classes described in the following article; you have taught me more than I have taught you.

Thank you to Alia Bader, Kathlyn Kao, Summer Islam, and Nagy Makhlouf for their assistance in teaching and to Rahul Mehrotra for his constant support.

Many thanks to all who believe in the right to teach “not to” in architecture school and the discussion on A Moratorium on New Construction: Cynthia Deng and Elif Erez, Noboru Kawagishi, Omar Nagati and Beth Stryker, Sarah Nichols, and Ilze Wolff (first roundtable, April 2021); Menna Agha, Sarah Barth, Leon Beck, Silvia Gioberti, and Kerstin Müller (second roundtable, June 2021); Connor Cook, Rhiarna Dhaliwal, Elisa Giuliano, Luke Jones, Artem Nikitin, Davide Tagliabue (V—A—C Zattere), and Sofia Pia Belenky—Space Caviar (third roundtable, July 2021); Manuel Ehlers, Saskia Hebert, Tobias Hönig and Andrijana Ivanda, Sabine Oberhuber, Deane Simpson, and Ramona Pop (fourth roundtable, August 2021); as well as Arno Brandlhuber, Olaf Grawert, Angelika Hinterbrandner, Roberta Jurčić, and Gregor Zorzi for supporting this experiment.

Thanks to the guests’ juries at both studios: Rahul Mehrotra, Jerold Kayden, Malkit Shoshan, Mpho Matsipa, Marija Maric, Kathrin Dörfler, Stephen Gray, Menna Agha, Marc Frochaux, Catherine Seiler, Camille Claessens-Vallet, Elise Hunchunk Misao, Marc Angélil, Ariane Widmer Pham, Matej Draslar, and Marie-Louise Richards.

Notes

1 Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, “A Moratorium on New Construction,” Courses, 2022, Harvard Graduate School of Design, https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/course/a-moratorium-on-new-construction-spring-2022/.

2 “I Don’t Think So Honey: Construction!’, in Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, ed. Bowen Yang (New York: Big Money Players, 2021).

3 Hoesung Lee, “Keynote Address by the IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee at the Opening of the First Technical Dialogue of the Global Stocktake,” in First Technical Dialogue of the Global Stocktake (Bonn: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022).

4 See Thomas Day, Silke Mooldijk, Sybrig Smit, Eduardo Posada, Frederic Hans, Harry Fearnehough, Aki Kachi,, and Takeshi Kuramochi Carsten Warnecke, Niklas Höhne. “Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor 2022.” (Cologne: New Climate Institute, Carbon Market Watch, 2022).

5 Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2015), 22.

6 Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, “Stop Building! A Moratorium on New Construction—The Case of Lausanne,” Courses, EPFL, 2023. https://riot.today/spring-2023-a-moratorium-on-new-construction-stop-building/.

7 Malterre-Barthes, “A Moratorium on New Construction.”

8 Some portions of the text on GSD students’ projects has been previously published in an different version on the website of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and have been reworked.

9 Soraya Kishwari, “A New Tourist Train in Mexico Will Destroy Indigenous Land and Livelihoods,” TIME, 2023, https://time.com/6245748/maya-train-tulum-yucatan-indigenous-people-land/.

10 See Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham: Duke University Press, October 11, 2023).

11 Keller Easterling, Subtraction, eds. Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).

12 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction : An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 23.

13 See Jesko Fezer, “No to Design,” in Social Movements in the (Post-)Neoliberal City, ed. Margit Mayer, Civic City Cahier 1 (London: Bedford, 2010).

14 Douglas Spencer, “Introduction,” in Marisa Cortright, “Can This Be? Surely This Cannot Be?”: Architectural Workers Organizing in Europe (Prague: VI PER Gallery, 2021), 12.

15 See Nishat ​Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture. (Abingdon Oxon, England: Routledge, 2011), Introduction.

16 E.g., Professors Franz Graf (EPFL), Silke Langeberg (ETHZ), Luise Rellensmann (Hochschule Munich), and the several education programs offered across architecture school specifically dedicated to architecture preservation (i.e. Milan, Leuven, Chaillot).

17 Peter Swinnen, Peter Swinnen. I Prefer Not To….: ETH, Zürich (Köln: König, Walther Köln, 2023).

18 Donna J. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 13.

19 Menna Agha, in Pivoting Practices. A Global Moratorium on New Construction, ed. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and Roberta Jurcic (Zurich: Swiss Institute of Technology, 2021).

20 Cynthia Deng, Elif Erez “Care Agency: A 10-Year Choreography of Architectural Repair,” Harvard Graduate School of Design, June 2021.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and assistant professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology—EPFL where she leads the laboratory RIOT. Most recently assistant professor at Harvard University, Malterre-Barthes’ interests are related to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization, material extraction, climate emergency, and social justice. In 2020, she started the initiative “A Global Moratorium on New Construction,” interrogating current development protocols. A founding member of the Parity Group and of the Parity Front, activist networks dedicated to equality in architecture, Malterre-Barthes holds a PhD (ETH Zurich) in the political economy of commodities and the built environment.