On Architecture and Greenwashing: The Political Economy of Space (Hatje Cantz 2024) takes a critical look at real sustainability in architecture and its embedded political economies. The book has been compiled by Meriem Chabani, Marc Angélil, Cary Siress, Jennifer Newsom, Tom Carruthers, and Architecture Climate Action Network.
As an industry that relies on extracted materials and an intense use of resources, isn’t construction unsustainable by design? The pressure is increasing for the sector to diligently address the harm caused by the built environment, begging the question of whether real sustainability in architecture and planning is possible. As institutionalized and commodified greenwashing hollows out the term, how do architects and designers position their work beyond the inadequacy of a flattening universalistic understanding of sustainability? What forms of practice allow for accountable and revolutionized construction modes? How can we critically engage with technology as an ambivalent tool in the service of green capitalism?
The first volume of a forthcoming series by RIOT—Research and Innovation On Territory, a laboratory within the Institute of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), On Architecture and Greenwashing presents a cross-section of positions on architecture and its political economies and explores ways to correct course in the face of a climate crisis of unprecedented magnitude—beyond greenwashing.
– On Architecture and Greenwashing: The Political Economy of Space (Hatje Cantz, 2024), book description
The text is in English. The book is illustrated with some black-and-white photographs and drawings.
