Exile's Letter

Many conventional economists argue that a healthy economy needs to grow at between 2–3%. This conveniently overlooks the fact that, if all countries did this, 3% annual growth would double the size of the global economy in twenty-three and a half years and quadruple it in forty-seven years. Crucial planetary limits have already been breached by our current economic paradigm, with more than 50% of the world’s animal biomass driven out of existence in the last fifty years. Do these economists...

Nikolaus Hirsch The notion of time seems to be very essential to Rotor's practice. Your work on material cyles provides a different understanding of what architecture is, or building in a broader sense. Your practice is not just about the tip of the iceberg of buildings that we can describe as architecture, but potentially tackling the whole of the built environment. How would you define your practice, the role you play within the field of architecture, and within the built environment at...

Nick Axel Your practice, Snøhetta, has for the past thirty years pioneered questions of sustainability and problematized ecological challenges facing the building industry. But your Harvard HouseZero project seems to be quite unique in your portfolio. How would you describe it? Kjetil Trædal Thorsen Our Harvard HouseZero project is part of our wider ambition of learning how to design architecture in such a way that it doesn't use energy. HouseZero is, first and foremost, a set of...

Architecture today is addicted to four basic products: steel, concrete, glass, and plastic. Each is a figure in the hyper-industrial world in which we live. We are living in the golden age of the Quadrivium Industrial Complex. Though imagined by Modern architecture, it was only in the end of the twentieth century that the Quadrivium became unquestioned universals, made so by great global corporations in alliance with the rise of neoliberal globalization. Cheap steel was produced first in...

Emergency exits frame and regulate contemporary life in the city—a life of excess, expenditure, and accumulation. Hidden, usually behind the elevator shaft, and shielded from both impact and view, capacity for urgent egress exhibits the material limitation on the height of buildings, on the perpetual growth of the corporate skyscraper, and on the seemingly endless expansive capacity of the global economy. The emergency exit as an architectural element developed most famously in response...

Nick Axel How would you describe your Living Room project? Sandi Hilal Living rooms are traditionally where the private home opens itself to the guest, the foreigner, the outsider. They function as a transitional space and a passage between the domestic and the public. In Arab culture, the living room is always ready to host; it is the most ornamented part of the house, never in disorder, and often has fruit, nuts, and black coffee ready to be offered at all times. It is highly...

In her book In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism , Isabelle Stengers calls into question the dominant perspective of growth, which “identified with progress … continues to impose itself as the only conceivable horizon.” 1 Stengers questions the proposition of further growth as a solution to all problems, as if “we must grit our teeth, accept that times are hard and mobilize for the economic growth outside of which there is no conceivable solution.” 2 As an alternative,...

Less and less do you need to force things, until you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone —Lao Tse 1 The purpose of architecture is not to build, but rather to improve people’s lives. Consequently, building should be just one option when intervening in the built environment, and the discipline itself should develop and put forward new methodologies for subtraction and renunciation. Thinking about what should be reduced, reused, or eliminated is...

Go, go, go, said the bird: Humankind Cannot bear very much reality —TS Eliot 1 It’s about 10am on a Saturday morning at Stansted airport and I’m about 300 bodies in to what must be a 1,000 person baggage-drop queue for a Ryanair flight to Palma de Mallorca. The sour taste of cheap burnt coffee is mixing with toothpaste, and fragments of the rolling ache of John Wieners’s lyrics are flashing before my eyes like a divine revelation in a sea of plastic wheelie cases, premature bikini...

February, 2019. The large, natural harbor in the innermost part of Prestfjorden, Vesterålen is throbbing with activity in the pitch black, Northern Norwegian winter night. Light is streaming out from open gates of the low-lying, steel-plate-clad industrial fish plants. Boats appear from the dark of fishing waters. The crews lift plastic tubs full of green Atlantic cod onto the pier. Electric forklifts drive the catch to the gutting belts, where gloved hands take care of all parts of the...

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Overgrowth. Excessive growth. Uncontrolled proliferation, even. Degrowth. Growth in reverse. Green Growth. Economic growth with a sustainable use of natural resources. The End of Growth. Often called for. Most recently demanded by fifteen-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg at the UN climate summit in Katowice. Next Growth. Economic growth should not just measure economic results. A company can also grow in societal, social, and ecological spheres. Growth. Growth always has a...

In the days of the wheel so much energetic expenditure was used in overcoming friction: a constant drag on progress and perpetuity. Caused by the need to push opposing surfaces of microscopic crystalline mountain ranges over each other, considerable energy was required to make things slip and roll. The frictional resistance of a wheel or bearing was a simple multiple of the weight that was carried. Great resources were expended as axles ground hotly and noisily against their bearings. In...

There exists a point at which anticipation is exhausted and naked absence is exposed. No matter what the guardians of neoliberal wisdom suggest, the absence of a facilitative environment is neither a biographical failure nor a sign of emancipation from material concerns. It is rather a crisis, a matter of urgency that must be solved in the present. Twenty-first-century Stockholm, like many other late-welfare-state cities where neoliberalism and social democracy mingle, is a city...

There is something provocative and at the same time revealing in the act of eliminating the kitchen from the house. The generalized social refusal that this action often provokes allows us to understand the deep affection and assumptions that this domestic space arouses. Ideologically speaking, the kitchen has had a main role in the historical definition of the idea of home and the family, and subsequently, in the creation of gender biased relationships within the domestic sphere. In that...

The Indians were many and would replenish every hour … they could not have been more than a stone’s throw away when more than four hundred Indians approached from water and land … charging against us from time to time, following us all night, to the point of not letting us make repairs at a certain moment, because they were ahead of us. Thus it went until dawn, when we found ourselves in the midst of many and very large populations, from where fresh Indians would emerge so that those who...

In Mumbai, a city permanently under construction and repair, bamboo scaffolding is ubiquitous. The city, with its concrete and brick architecture, is engulfed in humidity that possesses a violent capacity to invade the most solidly engineered materials. In these continually deteriorating conditions, it is common practice to erect scaffolding around a large building to continually plaster cracks and treat surfaces. Bamboo is everywhere. Yet in spite, or perhaps because of its ubiquity, bamboo...

The notion of “degrowth” can provoke a mixture of annoyance, confusion, and frustration. There is, of course, an ideological and theoretical imperative to lay full culpability for the state of the world (and our impoverished imaginations) at the door of a highly exploitative and cruel economic system that thrives on differential valuation, reward, and expulsion. But the long-standing debates around “degrowth” or anti-growth ring profoundly hollow in many geographies such as African...

The good citizens of Oslo have high expectations of their city. And in the same way as cities all over the world, Oslo often fails to deliver. Things are late. Broken. Confusing. Inconsistent and irritating. The city is, for example, quite literally full of holes. And as soon as one hole is filled in, someone digs another one in the never-ending quest to upgrade and improve something or other. In order to appease their citizens, the Oslo Municipality in 2012 launched an online interactive...

We will look back at these times from the future with total bafflement. There is abundant and ever-mounting evidence of the devastation our way of life will bring to both us and the planet—all far too familiar in their many interlinked dimensions to require rehearsing yet again. Yet we are still doing far too little to avoid what is forecast as certain disaster. Instead we are like rabbits paralyzed in the headlights of an oncoming car awaiting the demise of all we profess to hold dear with...

A strange mania governs the working class of all countries in which capitalist civilization rules, a mania that results in the individual and collective misery that prevails in modern society. This is the love of work, the furious mania for work, extending to the exhaustion of the individual and his descendants. The parsons, the political economists, and the moralists, instead of contending against this mental aberration, have canonized work. —Paul Lafargue, “The right to be lazy,” 1904...

The degrowth hypothesis posits that a radical, multiscalar reorganization of society is needed in order to achieve a drastic reduction in resource and energy consumption and therefore remain within the planetary boundaries. Moreover, advocates of this hypothesis suggest that such a shift is not only necessary but also desirable and possible. Degrowth started as an activist slogan in France in the early 2000s against consumerism and commodification, but has since evolved into both a subject...

Overgrowth is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Oslo Architecture Triennale within the context of its 2019 edition, curated by Interrobang, Phineas Harper, and Cecilie Sachs Olsen, featuring contributions by Ingerid Helsing Almaas, Peter Buchanan, Ana Maria Durán Calisto, Aileen Aseron Espíritu, Catharina Gabrielsson, Indy Johar, Ateya Khorakiwala, Penny Koutrolikou, Helena Mattsson, Joar Nango, Edgar Pieterse, David Pinder, Anna Puigjaner, Matthias Schuler,...