Critical Spatial Practice 14
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes: A Moratorium on New Construction, Critical Spatial Practice 14. Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen. Featuring artwork by Lara Almarcegui.
To build is to destroy, writes Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. From steel bolts to concrete blocks to wood flooring to polyester insulation panels, every single component of the built environment is the product of extractive processes. Driven by greedy economies, the global enterprise of space production expands, impacting climate, earth, water, humans, and non-humans everywhere. However, housing is both a human right and the mandate of design disciplines: How to navigate the need for housing versus the destructive practice of construction?
To pause new construction—even if momentarily, creates a radical thinking framework for alternatives to the current regime of space production and its suspect growth imperative. Engaging with unsettling questions, A Moratorium on New Construction envisions a massive value shift for our existing stock. From housing redistribution to reinviting value generation, from anti-extractive measures to profound structural changes, from curricula reforms to purging the exploitative culture of the office, an entire rewiring of design processes and construction lays ahead.
Somewhere between a thought experiment and a call for action, A Moratorium on New Construction is a leap of faith to envision a less extractive future, made of what we have: Not demolishing, not building new, but building less, building with what exists, inhabiting it differently, and caring for it.
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is Assistant Professor at EPFL in Lausanne, where she leads the laboratory RIOT. Her interests relate to material extraction, climate emergency, and social justice. While Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Harvard University, she started the initiative ‘A Global Moratorium on New Construction,’ interrogating current development protocols. Malterre-Barthes holds a Ph.D. (ETH Zurich) on the political economy of commodities and the built environment and is a founding member of the Parity Group (Meret Oppenheim Prize 2023) and the Parity Front, activist networks dedicated to equality in architecture.
Lara Almarcegui has built up an artistic practice around exploring the material aspects of land and urban space. For over twenty years, she has worked in different cities, identifying abandoned, unused, or forgotten sites and examining the contemporary transformation processes brought about by social, political, and economic change. In recent years, Almarcegui has turned her attention to construction sites, in particular the composite materials used in the construction of new buildings and the cyclical relationship between land and architecture.
Design by Zak Group / February 2025, English / 10.5 x 15 cm, 144 pages, 7 color and 18 b/w, softcover with dust jacket / ISBN 978-1-915609-00-7.
Previous volumes in the Critical Spatial Practice series:
Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen, eds., What Is Critical Spatial Practice? (artwork by Armin Linke) / Markus Miessen in Conversation with Chantal Mouffe, The Space of Agonism (artwork by Rabih Mroué) / Beatriz Colomina, Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (artwork by Dan Graham) / Keller Easterling, Subtraction (artwork by Metahaven) / Mark von Schlegell, Ickles, Etc. (artwork by Louise Lawler) / Eyal Weizman, The Roundabout Revolutions (artwork by Kyungsub Shin) / Felicity D. Scott, Disorientation. Bernard Rudofsky in the Empire of Signs (artwork by Martin Beck) / Jill Magid, The Proposal / Andrew Herscher, Displacements. Architecture and Refugee (artwork by Omer Fast) / Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, The Language of Secret Proof (artwork by Trevor Paglen) / Mark Wigley, Konrad Wachsmann’s Television. Post-architectural Transmissions / Nikolaus Hirsch, Jason Waite, Don´t Folllow the Wind / Dennis Pohl, Building Carbon Europe (artwork by Armin Linke) /
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