Taking More Than What’s There to Give

When it comes to conventional practice, to make architecture still means to rely on different types of extraction. Many designers and researchers are focused on defining and facilitating what would be non-extractive architecture, and as these concerns slowly infiltrate the mainstream, they beget the question of what are other forms of extraction that underpin architecture production. Energy is an essential part of this inquiry: the term “embodied energy” corresponds to a tallying up of all the energy consumed during a building or one of its component’s life cycle, from raw material extraction to disposal, and is often used as one of the ways to assess a building’s environmental impact. Revealed in this calculation is an understanding that the movement, transformation, and dissipation of energy sustain the production of architecture. Energy is the animating and underlying factor from the extraction of raw material all the way to the extraction of value, namely surplus value, through the mobilization of work at the building site, as well as in the architecture office.

Firmly grounded in these considerations, the exhibition explores the tight relationship between energy, work, and value in the production of architecture and the built environment. When energy is disclosed as the material ballast for value, the maximization of value expresses the maximization of energy consumption. Architecture production happens at the edge of overexertion, sometimes fully engaging with it, and thus Taking More Than What’s There to Give. 

The exhibition collects investigations, situated histories, and unanswered questions, as well as hopeful ways of doing otherwise. The Economies of Architecture panorama showcases research from around the planet involving relations between the consumption of energy, in all its forms, and the maximization of value. This panorama spans the mine, where architecture both depends on and supports raw material and energy extraction; the factory, where environmental impacts and dangerous work conditions go hand-in-hand; the infrastructural space, where all the energy flows are spatialized in the form of workers and materials; the building site, the crux of architecture production and principal site for surplus value extraction; the office, where the financialization of space directly impacts how architects work; and the inhabited building, where all of these conditions come together and the building is then consumed. Works by Fellows of the LINA European Architecture Platform are divided between Prague and Lisbon, where the exhibition happens simultaneously, tackling inhabited architecture as a consumer of energy; speculative cartographies of territorial dynamics of exhaustion in Europe; and networks of solidarity between workers in the building industry to tackle the climate crisis. Completing the exhibition, the video piece The Void of its Other explores the financial and political pressures and incentives that shape contemporary housing production in Rotterdam. 

Curated by Alina Paias.

Participants: Alfonse Chiu & Emma Kaufmann LaDuc, Alina Paias & Benjamin Schoonenberg, Angela Gigliotti, Belgian Architects United, Evelina Gambino & Jess Gough, Jean Souviron, Laura Pappalardo, Lesia Topolnyk, Liam Ross, Netherlands Angry Architects!, Paulien Bremmer, Serah Calitz, and Sergio Kopinski Ekerman.

Alina Paias is an architect, writer, and curator that investigates the technologies and forms of knowledge involved in architecture production by engaging with a broad range of philosophies. She was one of the curators for Nature of Hope, the 2024 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, and is a member of the Editorial Team for Footprint, the Delft Architecture Theory Journal.

The exhibition is part of the LINA European Architecture Platform programme. Co-organized with Lisbon Architecture Triennale.