Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth
The Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2019
For the last two centuries, the engine of architectural production and the basis of societies around the world has been the pursuit of economic growth. The desire for infinite growth has forced aside common and ecological goals measuring acts of culture and community as mere bumps in GDP. Yet the limits to this paradigm have become abundantly clear. As equity, wellbeing and non-monetary measures of prosperity falter, rising sea temperatures, extreme weather and other indicators of climate breakdown converge on the conclusion that the days of growth’s predominance are running out.
Architecture is no exception. The promise of a meaningful life’s work harnessing the transformative power of design to mix beauty and social justice is deeply felt. Yet for many, our daily practice looks very different to the work we aspired to. The majority of urban practitioners are not the agents of social change they might have been, but cogs in a vast value-producing machine whose hunger for expansion is never abated. Homes have become vehicles of capital speculation, galleries have become billboards for attracting investment, streets have become the infrastructure of consumption, universities export enlightenment for profit.
In our bones we know that infinite economic growth is impossible. We know that money cannot buy happiness. We know that change is coming. Yet our professions continue to toil at the coalface of economic expansion cultivating consumption in pursuit of a prize that is never enough.
ENOUGH responds to an era of climate emergency and social inequality by proposing alternatives to the unsustainable and unfair paradigm of growth. The festival explores the architecture of Degrowth, an economy of shared plenty in which human and ecological flourishing matter most. It is time to call time on too much for the few and too little for the many. Join us as we propose a vision of Enough for all.
Series Titles
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The Intentional Estates Agency [IEA] adopts and modifies the mechanisms of desire and commodity logic of a real estate agency to engage issues of degrowth. It offers a brochure of sixteen portfolios of degrowth options that draw from a catalog of historical, contemporary and speculative intentional communities and social experiments from around the world. Rather than an emphasis on cost, location or square footage, these portfolios foreground, for example, communal metrics, platforms for collective sharing, and resource management. Designed as an interactive questionnaire, the brochure prompts participants to discover a portfolio that might be suitable for them as a means to ... -
Message in a Bottle is an assemblage of interlocking plastic bottles that are intended for water, medical supplies and then used as building elements to create a shelter in the event of a natural catastrophe. Each bottle includes a “micro-message” – a story of how to reuse plastic bottles, making evident their effect on the global plastisphere — visible to viewers with the help of optic lens. The installation is designed as an interactive playspace, where bottles can be used as building blocks containing secret messages. Message in a Bottle fosters a dialogue on topics relating to recycling of industrial products ... -
RESHOW is an empirical comment on a very specific topic: Waste from exhibitions. -
What might urban development look like in a de-growth economy? Is it possible to develop housing without encouraging speculation? How could communities and local businesses reclaim their cities? Karakusevic Carson Architects presents the Camley Street Community Land Trust (CSCLT), a possible model for a future based on a more equitable and sustainable form of urban production. Based on a live concept project in Camden, North London, the CSCLT is an ambitious, multi-actor project for a neighbourhood bringing together truly affordable housing, food production, logistics and light industry. In contrast to the inationary model of large speculative development enabled by ows ... -
The utility room is a functional space, designed to hide away everyday utilitarian services and appliances. Today, the ‘utility room’ is a luxury. As city living becomes ever more cramped, ever more expensive, the worry of ‘where will the washing machine go’ is perhaps the last one on your mind – if it is even on your mind. Ask yourself though, where will it go? The kitchen? The cupboard? The corridor? The bedroom? The living room? I bet you can’t wait for your clothes to smell of that delicious casserole you made on Monday night after having nowhere to hang them ... -
Rising seas and economic volatility affect a city’s residents differently, exaggerating existing social inequality. How do we cooperate or compete in the face of risk? Bartertown is a board game that tests how cities and people can survive, and even thrive, in a crisis. It imagines a world without money to test how social networks can be re-shaped by an economy of favors and resource-sharing. Players conduct activities and adapt to oods, res, or a new romance—all while negotiating for a couch to sleep on or the chance to build ood-protection infrastructures. -
In the wake of Senegal’s independence in 1960 a flurry of radical educational projects sprung up combining postcolonial and pan-African thinking to construct a new future for the continent. ‘The School of Mutants’ picks up on the complex history of these utopian projects, taking its name from Université des Mutants, the institution set up in 1979 by the poet, cultural theorist and first president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor. This afrofuturist archive blurs history and science fiction to construct a post-growth African future. -
We’ve been dealing with the duality of holiday and weekdays, mostly with the question, that why the society have to highlight some days in the year. The most of our common holidays are connected to a natural event or, some kind of changing in the year, that are mostly forgotten, and only the tradition and the feast remains. So we started to think about if we can also create new feasts and holidays today. The Spring Wind House was an experimental try for this, where we wanted to celebrate the arrival of the spring wind, and the spring itself. This ... -
ARPA is an artefact reflecting on the progressive transformation of labour and the socio-economic consequences linked to the introduction of automation in production processes. Despite all reservations, automation might be considered to substantially contribute to the construction of a socio-economically sustainable paradise, freeing humanity from the fatigue of labour through an ecosystem of machines. ARPA is shaped as an instrument of propaganda, a device as part of a larger communication strategy staged in the city of Oslo, informing the public about a forthcoming technological revolution. The collision between the two media involved – still images and scrolling video-texts – unveils ... -
Ormsundveien Økogrend is a proposal for a housing project on and around Bekkelagstunet, a former military camp by Ormøya in Oslo. Our aim is to establish a sustainable and socially inclusive living environment. A preliminary report on the project by Eriksen Skajaa Arkitekter / Fragment (funded by the The Norwegian State Housing Bank) addresses matters ranging from low-tech upgrades of existing building stock and self- build schemes, to urban farming and communal living. We believe that an important step towards a climate conscious future is the realization of successful examples of how we can live in ways that are not based on ... -
Composting is a regenerative practice that provides the opportunity for a multitude of life to thrive. Not only does it feed damaged soils, but also depleted imaginations, as new futures emerge from the scraps of the old. Outside the Library, a bioreactor is producing compost from neighbourhood waste. The bioreactor is using the Johnson-Su method of composting which produces a rich, fungi dominated compost which will later be used to give new life to the worn out soils and places. On the shelf, a handbook describes how composting can be a transformative practice to regenerate spaces and can become a degrowth ritual ... -
Can compost heat the city? Can moss purify our air? Can food waste power our lights? The publication and compost-heated bench outside The Library make the case for a plant-powered infrastructure of degrowth. A snap shot into the LJ Works project in London. LJ Works is a lightweight workspace, kitchen incubator, cafe and London’s first building powered by food waste. Initiated by local residents as a community garden, the project is a pioneering example for long-term neighborhood stewardship of land fueled by circular social, economic and ecological systems. -
The project ‘An Inventory of Experience’ is an on-going correspondence between the contributors and several architects from Belgium and abroad, investigating the impact of a new building on its urban and collective context. The correspondence is conducted under the pseudonym of L. Peretz and poses a simple question: how do you deal with the question of context, and specifically those contextual elements that resist explication? In addition, Peretz proposes a so-called ‘inventory of experience’, to be included alongside the more technical inventories and surveys which are usually included in project briefs and their accompanying spreadsheets of endless data. Parallel to ... -
‘Landscape Healing’ is a cinematic documentary film following the largest act of rewilding in Norway, by BAFTA-nominated film director Richard John Seymour and produced by 3RW arkitekter. A multidisciplinary group of people has been quietly conducting a project that could set a precedent for humanity’s next great challenge: the rewilding of our planet back to a sustainable level. After decades of efficiency adjustments, in the early 2000s most of the Norwegian Defence Estates Agency’s sites were left abandoned yet unsuitable for public use. The film follows the process of healing these wounded landscapes, the restoration of these huge areas of land across Norway ... -
Material circulation encompasses architectural production and de-production when considered within geological time. Architecture is a fleeting construct—a temporary, unstable container of increasingly-valued minerals that is always in a state of settling. You say to brick, “what do you want, brick?” Brick says to you,”I want to be mud.” Aggregates, especially with the rise of modern concrete, have become our second most-used resource. While sand, gravel, and small rocks account for up to 75% of concrete’s composition, sand alone accounts for over 85% of global mining activity. As a finite resource, aggregates on the market wield consequences from land-reclamation driven conflicts to ... -
A New Theory of Love — A table left in the middle of a dinner. The tablecloth wrinkled with scattered toy blocks. Fragments of a facade can be seen — interrupted, cut open and penetrated. Lampposts dot the surface — reminders of a street now emptied of cars. At the edge, a stairway is inhabited anew: a bathtub hangs from a landing, sofas are built onto a flight of steps, a television flickers. Underneath, a re- furbished entrance frays the threshold to an apartment. — Who has inhabited this common infrastructure ? What has happened to the stairway as we know ... -
Under Construction imagines a city that is constantly being rebuilt using the same stock of materials. Reuse of building materials is not just a problem of logistics and material flows. It is as much a cultural and architectural problem. One of the most persistent architectural conventions is to consider abstract space before objects and materials. Building elements and furnishings should be subservient to a larger whole. This approach is aligned with a view on the world that is inherited from industrialism, in which any materials could be sourced anew and moulded into shape indefinitely. Reuse, as a conceptual approach to ... -
Tools for playground is a toolkit to let people interact and modify space through “play” and on the creation of game dynamics. Playing is also a revolutionary act as in this dimension we can get rid of pre-constituted systems. With playful architectures we can relieve the constraints of form/function. Tools for Playground’s goal is to temporarily transform space into a playful dimension, favoring the interaction with the context and between people of any age, sex and nationality. These tools want to play with rules, leaving players free to arbitrarily invent their own. With few indications and simple tools, we can create objectives, parallel universes ... -
Charter of Dubai – A Manifesto of Critical Urban Transformation Enough: The Architecture of DegrowthThe man-made peninsula Palm Jumeirah on the coast of Dubai is a project of superlatives and an exemplary model for the gated communities and resorts that have developed worldwide in property bubbles. The development may be spectacular, but cannot conceal the fact that the former marketing success story is faced with serious problems. How can an isolated anti-urban exclave be opened up and integrated? Can issues concerning networking, the public sphere and affordable housing, as well as climate change adaptation, biodiversity and the supply of energy be resolved through targeted tactical interventions? The Charter of Dubai is a manifesto of ... -
Using public space free from the conventional framework of compliant consumption, skaters have always endured a contested relationship with the city, often driven from public spaces either by law or through the exclusionary design of rails, benches and kerbs. In 2013, one of the most successful skating spots in the UK, the Southbank Undercroft in London also came under threat as part plans to build commercial restaurants and retail developments in their place. A grassroots campaign bringing together skaters, public space activists and architects among many others, successfully defeated the proposals and saved the undercroft. At the Oslo Triennale, Chris ... -
A research study of vernacular architecture and settlement form in Newfoundland, Canada. Produced as part of the studio “Between Land and Water” at University of Waterloo School of Architecture, by Prof Lola Sheppard. -
Our research proposes an alternative model for an urban communal villa, where tenants are completely freed from work and domestic labour. In an almost dystopian scenario, we propose that rent from an oversized billboard would be the tenants’ only source of income. The profit generated by the ads would not be reinvested in capital accumulation, but rather used to pay off the initial investment and sustain the household. The project raises different questions such as “what would we do if we no longer had to pursue an income?” or “can we preserve our ethical integrity while fighting within and against ... -
An atlas of Canadian Ruralism including land use, infrastructure, community, structures, architecture, and important radical rural visions. Produced as part of the the studio “The New Ruralism” at University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, by Prof Mason White. -
Cities are full of spatial constructs that fuel, frame and glorify the growth agenda. Factories, shopping malls, motorways, tower blocks, petrol stations, speculative housings – all are products of, but also perpetuators of, the narrative of constant growth. These forms and the practices they host are unsustainable, yet we patiently wait for their industries to fade (or crash) into obsoletion before we begin to ponder their possible spatial transformation. Globalisation has been highly effective in de-visualising the effects of unsustainable practices – production is screened from consumption, labour is concealed from play – and this has hindered our ability to ... -
Images from previous works. -
How to Build a Community, and Map to Treherbert Skyline. -
The projects highlight the challenges of progressive ideas within society. A temporary installation welcomes the visitors at the entrance of the Sverre Fehn Pavillion and also invites the audience to visit a public art project at Tåsenløkka in Oslo. The two parts are linked conceptually as both circle around concepts like social conditioning, urban planning and architecture. The public project articulates the fence that separates a public park and a municipal kindergarten. It zigzags through manicured bushes and landscaping, inspiring the children to explore. The result is an equal trade of land, without changing the total size of each property. -
GISTO is a studio based in Milan working on design, architecture and craftsmanship. -
How does language change our understanding of the natural world, and our own role within it? How can the introduction of new terms into public discourse – depense, degrowth – alter our realities? Visual Ecolophonic is an informal research project by INDA & Animali Domestici through encounters with with Sami reindeer herders, cultural associations, and artists, in northern Finland, which considers how the Northern Sami language embraces the ecosophic, or ecophilosophical, complexity of nature in a way that other languages do not. The project considers how architects may embrace a more complex vocabulary and understanding of the ecologies in which ... -
Today’s economic system is socially and environmentally fatal. What would you hope to gain and be afraid to lose if economic growth stopped? The future is a consequence of what we do today. The discipline of Future Studies shows that human actions are guided by myths and metaphors, and that these are often unconscious. If we don’t bring these myths and metaphors up to the surface, and “un-learn” them, change is often hard to achieve and the future ends up being a replica of today. A radically different future can only come about if we start doing things differently and challenge what we take ... -
Giraffes, Telegraphs, and Hero of Alexandria – Urban Design by Narration Enough: The Architecture of DegrowthIn this book, stories portray the production of our built environment, guided by three characters: Giraffes, Telegraphs, and Hero of Alexandria. Having developed its long neck to reach the leaves of high trees, the giraffe represents the vernacular approach to architecture, in which construction follows forces of nature. The telegraph, in contrast, embodies the modernist paradigm, in which technology reigns supreme and forces nature to adapt. Inspired by Hero of Alexandria, we subscribe to a third paradigm – using technology to optimize nature and, inversely, nature to assimilate technology.The book is a collection of 13 architecture and urban research projects ... -
The rising indifference toward the plight of the urban poor shown by local authorities calls for strategic consideration from architects in a manner more sympathetic to social justice. In a context of scarcity of natural resources and economic degrowth, we believe that our profession can still make a difference through modest design projects. This was our aim in Monte Xisto. -
The Manual contains a wide array of landscape and urban strategies combined with technological solutions that should be taken into account by all decision makers, designers and citizens that will face the development of Oslo and also of others cities. It aims to do a complex teamwork among several actors, adding a new common ground of discussion towards a shared goal. “Foresturbia” has positive social effects. It involves the users in a new way engaging them and suggesting them that they are the first who should act to make the world a better place instead of selling them pre-made solutions: ... -
A project in which diamond dust is scattered over the gallery floors beneath the diamond vault ceilings of the architectural museum in Oslo, a former bank. The tiny diamonds will be spread by visitors, sticking to their soles, dispersing the dust throughout the building, streets and town, investigating ideas of economic inequality, de-luxuriation and commodification of capital. A musical composition will be composed which will appear as a hummed performance by the curators. It is a scattered score that needs to be assembled by the audience, consciously or sub-consciously. The resulting music will be installed in the spaces where the diamond ... -
The Taylorist tools of our modern homes, from the lawnmower to the microwave, are engineered for solo users. These tools complement our growth-oriented consumerist culture and gendered performance of the nuclear family. Honey I’m Home! questions domestic rituals by altering the props which support them. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), for example, is a fictional, provocative prototype for collectivising domestic labour. As an alternative to the capitalist assumption that housework is most efficient when performed individually, the GDP is a device best used by three people. -
In today’s world where time is a valued commodity and the motto ”live everyday like it’s your last” is stuck to your ever faster outdated refrigerator’s door, the forest stands for values of stark contrast. Consider the pine. It takes an average pine 120 years to become useful as timber. Timber that is used to build the houses around you. By accepting one of our prepared seed bags, you are encouraged to experience the amount of time and effort that is required to produce one single pine tree, but also the vast amount of positive side effects tied to its growing. ... -
Almost overnight, we have moved from a culture of ownership to a culture of rent. We subscribe for access to unlimited amounts of online shared content and have access to people’s homes, cars and even their time all at the click of a button. Where will the shared economy end? What is the limit to a subscription based lifestyle? We believe that the concept of sharing requires re-interrogation. The need to own something has long been driven by economic and consumerist incentives, a desire which is potentially becoming obsolete. Yet the sharing economy is equally at risk of being exploited and ... -
Summary of n´UNDO´s theoretical basis. -
The story of Centralia teaches us the interrelatedness of cultural, social, and political agents and the long-lasting environmental impacts of resource extraction for the sake of economic growth. Seams of anthracite coal below Centralia extend far beyond the limits of the borough. The process of mining should be considered an act of underground urbanization, which impacts nature and the environment to a degree we are just now beginning to understand. Only a few boreholes remain as visual markers of the environmental tragedy. These hypodermic needles provided information to scientists about the environmental conditions of the coal veins. Today, most of ... -
How can our public outdoor spaces support degrowth? In the UK, The Countryside Right of Way Act (2000), campaigned for over a hundred years by The Ramblers, opened up vast swathes of private open countryside land to hikers travelling on foot. Scandinavian rights to land are older and more established, they shaped the outdoor culture of these countries. Hiking, foraging and exploring become ways of political manifestation in the face of rapid privatisation of land. The Age of Forage aims to raise awareness of the fruits of, and rights to, land. Foraging is a vehicle to remind us of the interdependencies between humans ... -
The Global Free Unit is a constellation for learning and research. It is born out of a desire to enable architecture students to address some of the most pressing global challenges we face: scarcity of resources, inequality, climate change, migration and social division, through research, live projects and collaborations. We, the Global Free Unit, are responding to an industry culture that is too often self referential, in thrall to mediated values reinforced by media and notions of fame. Instead, we are establishing a new path for education that offers a unique opportunity to redefine future practice by connecting education to actions and ... -
Burial Belt proposes repurposing denuded grazing land for natural burial. Burial funds the revegetation of the native environment, replacing high-emissions livestock farming with carbon-filtering forest. Beyond basic costs, individuals can invest as much as they like in this endeavor, potentially greening acres and offsetting life-long carbon vices. While those buried in this new cemetery will have no lasting monuments and will decompose into the soil, burial space is provided in perpetuity, providing a permanent covenant over the land. Eventually, burial sites connect to form a continuous green belt that encompasses the city fringe and constrains sprawl. -
DE(WORK) is an installation on the Degrowth of Work. Technological development and globalisation have created an apparent decoupling of economic growth from material resource extraction. This has only been made possible by the increased abstraction of labour, and the spatial distance between sites of production and consumption. The installation, (DE)WORK, exposes the interdependencies between processes of material extraction, productive labour, and growth within the globalised economy. It presents raw data on economic and financial, environmental, and political metrics driving complex processes of deforestation as an example of material extraction – in an abstract and continuous flow, manicured live by an ... -
Is degrowth an absolute term? As a multidisciplinary team our intention is to question how the concept of degrowth is understood in, and embodied across, the spatial practices of ecosystems in sub-Saharan Africa. Envisioned as an unconventional spatial experience allowing for multiple readings, the dynamic and interactive installation will offer the audience access to a collection of novel case studies. By challenging the reading of the South through the divisive lens of the colonial theodolite, the project presents a living atlas, a learning tool that subverts established modes of conceiving degrowth as an easily transported, translated, and imposed paradigm. -
Londonon, a collective of six individual architectural practices, traveled to Paris in February 2019, embarking on a field trip to celebrate, observe, investigate, catalogue and question humanity’s relationship with food. Our contribution to Oslo Architecture Triennale reflects on this trip, taking a detailed look at the remarkable impact that the lifecycle of food has on the shaping of our culture, geography and the urban grain of cities worldwide. We have used Paris as a paradigmatic case study of a city with a unique role in world gastronomy that has food ingrained at the very core of its being. The ambition ... -
Moving houses looks into an old democratic tradition; to detach a house from its foundation and move it to another location. This process was relatively common throughout the first half of the 20th century. In the 1950s, people on the most remote islands in Nordland received disbursements from the state to float their houses to central islands with better infrastructure, and many of the houses in Vålerenga in Oslo and the wooden town in Stavanger were originally located on the countryside. Timber frame houses were moved as a whole or in larger parts, while notched houses were completely taken apart. As ... -
Our own family network will be the starting point. We want to historically understand our housing past, but also poetically engage in a wider debate about the home of the future. We’ll not only use ourselves – three generations of a family network – as tools in this investigation, but also the book ‘Nye Hjem i Norge’, published in 1940 as a work of architectural guidance for the design and construction of new homes in Norway. The book offers a glimpse into the housing imagination of its time, while also prompting this question: If it were to be written today, ... -
This book is an accumulation of images of adobe and its ecosystem taken in The Autonomous Region of Castile and Leon, Spain. The images are chosen as representations of the material viewed at different scales in context. The images are ordered by scale. At each end of the spectrum are the microscopically magnified granular composition, and the satellite image of the region, respectively. Only a portion of the images are within the range of a human’s visual perception. In 2008, the global financial crisis made visible the forces and flaws of a society based on an infinite growth economy, as evidenced by ... -
Accattone #6 explores a renewed relationship with land, matter, ‘nature’ and localities against the backdrop of the new climatic regime. Situated at the intersection of architecture, representation and editorial-curatorial practices, the magazine is also permeated by a continuous research on methods and forms of practice. In particular, this issue addresses the use of film-making as a tool to foster and disseminate architectural positions; editorial devices and contents used by fellow little magazines; and the representation of nature in research, artistic and design practices. This issue is based on meetings and conversations that took place over the past year. Driven by ... -
In 2008, David Kohn Architects, engineersHRW and Max Fordham worked on the pitch for The Arts Space of the Future – a competition run by Arts Council England and RIBA London. The brief was an invitation to architects to respond to the challenge of creating arts spaces of the future; spaces which reflect changing lifestyles, expectations and forms of participation, new and developing arts practice, the need to address climate change and issues of sustainability and the move towards more flexible, publicly engaged buildings. In 2008, the team was an architect, structural engineer and an environmental engineer, and the input from the ... -
Nowadays tourism is one of the fastest growing economies that has even surpassed the automobile and food industries. As part of the leisure industry, mass tourism is fundamentally destroying aspects of indigenous culture and local specificities. Referencing Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – we aim to challenge the destructive notion of mass tourism and its traditional association with the idea of growth. In this view, we developed the concept of nanotourism, a constructed term describing a creative critique to the current environmental, social ... -
An ecotone is a hybrid zone between two ecosystems, such as a forest and grassland, or a lake and a field, where specific species and natural phenomena flourish. Ecotones of Making considers the ecotone as a way of producing hybridised ways of living, blending urban experiences with the practical knowledge of the rural. This collection of artefacts and tools is sourced and produced in the village of Gerswalde, east Germany. Here, new spaces for rural commoning and small-scale cultural production have emerged, from a communal housing project to a permaculture farm and risograph printing workshop, and are creating a replicable model for ... -
Current modes of real estate development assume a single formula for living, a suite of bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and leisure space that simply scales up or down depending on traditional appraisals of family size, wealth, and stage of life. This multiplication ignores the real variety of human living arrangements, relationships and economic inequality. Underused, overpriced and unsustainable; real estate products remain fundamentally incompatible with the diverse forms of city life. Alone Together: The Game invites you to explore new configurations of living space, negotiating privacy and sharing along the way. -
Bergen has a strong tradition of timber architecture. In the 1700s it was common for houses to be erected outside the city, disassembled, moved to the town and reassembled on a designated plot. Trenezia on the Store Lungegårdsvann in Bergen for BOB BBL reflects this traditional construction method, using offsite manufactured timber structures and modules to create a zero carbon community. Drawing on the craft of wood block printing we express how the beauty of traditional techniques can be combined with modern methods of production to develop a new vernacular. The 9 wood blocks illustrate how the project reinterprets traditional ... -
From the first fieldtrips for the design of a library in Burundi to involving over 150 workshop participants in the construction of a public building in Belgium, the stories compiled in this book tell how BC architects & studies engage in acts of building. BC believes that, in order to have a positive impact on our society, architects need to intervene beyond the narrow denition of the professional who designs and controls the execution of buildings. Hence, BC ventures into material production, contracting, knowledge transfer and community organization, which all inuence their design approach. The book is structured around a collection ... -
In commemoration with the book The Limits to Growth produced by the Club of Rome, this proposal displays original drawings and process sketches of the world model presented in the book along with similar architectural diagrams from the 1970’s until today. Made by Jay Forrester and his colleagues at MIT, these drawings: Visualize consequences of industrial production and population growth on a global scale, and thus demonstrate how the concept of de-growth was discussed in 1972. The drawings are visual representations of systems theory, which is a mode of thinking closely connected to postwar developments in computation. Systems theory became ... -
As a bar of soap, ARCHITECTURE is a communal resource for the Triennale visitors to clean themselves. It also stands in as a symbol for architecture; a coming together of materials in concrete form that facilitates social processes. As it is used, ARCHITECTURE loses its rigid form. Its fixed appearance erodes through use and it is molded by the hands that touch it; a record of the material sociability inherent in its structure and function. ARCHITECTURE pays attention to the material flows that sustain a collective hygiene, while thinking through architecture as a social entity that evolves beyond its original form. -
Soil, as the keeper of nutrients and the core building block of our existence, is currently being produced in the neighborhood of Grønland in Oslo, by local youth. By using local resources, they are making and selling the product. Oslo Living Lab uses the core of commercial growth, the excess of food and garbage, as a resource which stands outside of the established system, on the verge of laws and regulations. This project provides a theatrical exploration of a pragmatic degrowth transition. Death and Degrowth explores the world of this performative initiative as an important driver of transition towards a model of ... -
“How can architecture promote new ways of living together through community vitality, defense of common goods and participatory democracy? What spaces and building can architects design that foster social bonding among people of varying classes, generations and backgrounds?” The Anita May Rosenstein Campus encourages a new way of living for a multi-generational queer community by integrating social, cultural, and institutional programs. As the largest LGBTQ mixed-use facility in the world, the project is both a sanctuary of care and a civic institution— one that places architecture at the intersection between identity and infrastructure on a local and global scale. Tracing ...
