Jim Robbins, “As Mass Timber Takes off, How Green Is This New Building Material?” Yale Environment 360, April 9, 2019, ➝. The lexicon of sustainability has a habit of sorting materials that enter architectural territory into two camps: “alternative”—possibly good?—or “standard”—bad, but well-understood. This sorting seems to embed a logic of replacement, of this for that, without considering the complex net of interactions and transformations that make anything into a discrete object with a designed purpose. I hope that poking fun at alternative and non-alternative materials helps us think about more than swapping out current practices for nominally adjusted ones.
See: Arnaud Vander Velpen et al., “Sand and Sustainability: 10 Strategic Recommendations to Avert a Crisis,” UN Environment Program Report (Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations, April 22, 2022), ➝. These considerations for concrete and carbon even arise in discussions regarding the cycles of war and rebuilding in Gaza. Natasha Aruri, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, and Brad Samuels, “Architecture, Planning, and International Law: On Domicide” (The Architectural League of New York , May 23, 2024).
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Stitching also brings to mind international tribal efforts to restore bison habitat across a huge swath of the Great Plains divided by the US-Canada border. Damage done to this ecosystem through genocidal Indian Wars-era policies, including targeted bison extermination, rail infrastructure, and unsustainable farming practices, are slowly receding in favor of land management grounded in Indigenous knowledge and stewardship. See: Dan Joling, “Alaska Prepares for Wood Bison Return after a Century,” CBC News, March 20, 2015, ➝.
This is not dissimilar to a cotton gin or a musket, the two bellwethers of industrial standardization as a result of their reliance on interchangeable parts.
Kristina Rapacki, “Interview with Kader Attia,” The Architectural Review (February 2024), 77.
People have been doing this forever and everywhere. Consider stitched gourds, kintsugi, and embroidered manuscripts, among many other practices of returning damaged objects to use. See also: Gaetano Speranza, ed., Objets Blessés: La Réparation En Afrique (Paris: Musée du Quai Branly, 2007). See: Kader Attia, Maria Hlavajova, and Wietske Maas, eds., Fragments of Repair (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2025, forthcoming).
Rapacki, “Interview with Kader Attia,” 78-79.
For super technical further reading, see: Jaime Castro, Luis E. Vallejo, and Nicolas Estrada, “Mechanical Analysis of the Dry Stone Walls Built by the Incas,” The European Physical Journal Conferences 140, no. 06012 (2017). For work deeply interested in approaching this practice from contemporary conditions within the architectural field, see: Brandon Clifford and Wes McGee, “Cyclopean Cannibalism: A Method for Recycling Rubble,” in ACADIA 2018: On Imprecision and Infidelity, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (Mexico City, October 18-20, 2018), 404-413.
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes describes the technologies that produce complete environments, like BIM software, as facilitating “an anti-contextual production of space.” Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, “The Devil Is in the Details: ‘Who Is It That the Earth Belongs To?’” in Non-Extractive Architecture: On Designing without Depletion, ed. Space Caviar, vol. 1 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021), 95.
For instance, I am thinking with Melanija Grozdanoska, “Ma maison cherche-t-elle à me tuer?” Centre Canadien d’Architecture (CCA), May 2024, ➝.
Elsa MH Mäki, “Building Backward: Archaeology of a Queer Built Future” (Cambridge, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2022), Harvard DASH, ➝.
For further reading, see: Tracy Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). See also: Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Tizziana Baldenebro, Lauren Leving, Joanna Joseph, eds., Sketches on Everlasting Plastics (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2024).
HANNAH, founded by Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic, collaborated with the Cornell Robotic Construction Laboratory to scan, digitally model, and cut tree fragments into an array that could function as a small building’s skin. Paula Pintos, “3D Printing and Robotic Construction: HANNAH Office on Their Experimental Prototype Ashen Cabin,” Arch Daily, July 7, 2021, ➝.
Pintos, “3D Printing and Robotic Construction.”
“Circularity Park, Oberglatt, Eberhard AG, 2021-2022,” ETH University research group projects (blog), 2022, ➝.
Katie MacDonald, Kyle Schumann, and Jonas Hauptman, “Digital Fabrication of Standardless Materials,” in ACADIA 2019: Ubiquity and Autonomy, Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (Austin, TX, October 21-26, 2019), 3.
MacDonald, Schumann, and Hauptman, “Digital Fabrication of Standardless Materials.”
MacDonald, Schumann, and Hauptman, “Digital Fabrication of Standardless Materials,” 3.
As Malterre-Barthes writes, “The production process of these high-technology machines drives extractivism perhaps as much as ‘classic’ construction materials do. But the material impact of data is rarely recognized or subjected to accountability, even though substantial infrastructures is required, such as electrical power, fiber networks, air-based cooling systems, and hard-drive disks, are all dependent on extractive processes.” Malterre-Barthes, “The Devil Is in the Details,” 95.
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi elaborated on the practice of citation in her International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address at Harvard GSD, March 7, 2023.
Felecia Davis, “Soft Systems: Crafting an Architecture” (lecture, Penn State University, State College, PA, November 6, 2023).
For an extremely literal take on this notion, see: Benedict Hobson, “Drones Can ‘Weave Structures in Space in Just a Few Minutes,’” Dezeen, March 4, 2015, ➝.
The often-referenced but rarely cited statistic that somewhere between two-thirds and eighty percent of existing buildings will remain in use in 2050 appears in reports by sustainability consultants and nonprofits like the UK’s Climate Change Council, 3Keel, the Canadian Climate Institute, as well as McKinsey & Company. I have not found an original source for statistics of this type; rather, they seem to be a newly formed common understanding for energy and construction policy recommendations since 2019. Gemma Holmes et al., “UK Housing: Fit for the Future?,”Committee on Climate Change (2019); Rob Kilgour et al., “Global Retrofit Index: An Assessment of the Performance of G20 Countries to Reduce Emissions from Buildings,” 3Keel (November 2023), ➝; Pierre Verrière, “The Future Passes through Old Buildings,” Canadian Climate Institute, May 25, 2020, ➝; Stephen J. Naimoli, “Decarbonizing the Built Environment Brief,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 30, 2020, ➝; Jose Luis Blanco et al., “Call for Action: Seizing the Decarbonization Opportunity in Construction,” McKinsey and Company (New York, NY, 2021); and so forth.
As the war in Ukraine is financed by development dollars, see reports: “The World Bank and Ukraine: Laying the Groundwork for Reconstruction in the Midst of War” and Frédéric Mousseau and Eve Devillers, “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land” (The Oakland Institute, 2023), or, as developer proposals for razed Palestinian lands pop up in the bombs’ wake, see: social media posts by Israeli developer Harei (or Harey) Zahav in November-December 2023 that pasted luxury residential architecture renderings over rubble in Gaza, Palestine, and a recent article on the developer’s West Bank projects: Hagar Shezaf, “The Fall and Rise of Israel’s First Ultra-Orthodox Settlement,” Haaretz, August 28, 2022. Wholesale residential demolition through bombing and road-making in Palestine and Ukraine, for instance, were thoroughly discussed at a virtual event hosted by the Architectural League in May 2024. Aruri, Rajagopal, and Samuels, “Architecture, Planning, and International Law.”
“Hair Matters (Formerly Clean Wave) Program,” Matters of Trust (blog), ➝.
Nango continues: “I’m trying to work with this attitude to incorporate the connection between context and the agency of the object. I’m trying to not separate them or pull them apart — that’s what the architects always do, for some reason. Like, very often designer architecture considers nomadism as something placeless, or something that’s traveling between airports or coffee shops. But for me, nomadism is the exact opposite.” Mimi Zeiger, “Joar Nango on Indigenous Architectures and Slippery Identities,” PIN-UP, ➝.
Felecia Davis, Textural Threshold Hair Salon: Dreadlock. See also: Kate Nelson, “How This Designer Is Using Black Hair to Inspire the Architecture World,” Architectural Digest, February 2, 2023, ➝.
Davis, “Soft Systems: Crafting an Architecture.”
Umar Riaz Muhammad et al., “Hair Detection, Segmentation, and Hairstyle Classification in the Wild,” Image and Vision Computing 71 (2018): 25–37; Davis, “Soft Systems: Crafting an Architecture.”
Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, “Buildings Made of Wool and Fungus? Meet the Textile Expert Who’s Making It Happen,” Washington Post Magazine, November 15, 2022, ➝.
Rapacki, “Interview with Kader Attia.”
Davis, “Soft Systems: Crafting an Architecture.”
Basma Ghalayini, ed., Palestine +100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba, trans. Raph Cormack et al. (Manchester, UK: Comma Press, 2019).
Traditional tattoo revitalization movements are ongoing from the Arctic to the Pacific and across the American continents. These practices, until recently banned by settler authorities (church or governmental), are deeply embedded in the material and architectural practices that compose the inherited knowledge of sovereign Indigenous nations. Please note that, while support is welcome for free cultural expression through these markings and the residencies that are helping Indigenous artists share them, these techniques and patterns should not be appropriated. Tattooing often happens in ceremony and is tied to kinship relations that are specific to each nation and their homelands. For further reading, see: Jana Angulalik, “Kakiniit: The Art of Inuit Tattooing,” Canadian Geographic, July 26, 2021, ➝.