Climax Change! - by Pedro Gadanho (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Climax Change! represents the much-needed overview of how climate change and the current environmental emergency will affect the practice of architecture, both in terms of its design philosophy and rising opportunities to innovate and radically transform the current tenet of architecture's aesthetic, ethical and professional drives.

Climax Change! offers an overview of how the current environmental emergency will impact the practice of architecture. At a crossroads in which the construction sector and built environment produce nearly 40% of greenhouse gases accountable for global warming, architects are just starting to acknowledge their complicity in an impending disaster.

In need of a paradigm shift similar to that of the Modern Movement, architecture desperately requires clear guidelines and targets so as to operate its inevitable transformation towards an ecologically-friendly design logic. From historical analyses of ecocide or the environmental avant-gardes, to topics such as decarbonization, degrowth, the Great Transition and the aspirations of Green New Deals, this book features ten essays around today's climate change debates, bringing them home to architectural thinking.

Review Quotes

"This collection of 10 essays explicitly ties contemporary climate change debates to current architectural thinking. Author Pedro Gadanho, an architect and former Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, argues that the profession requires clear guidelines for a wholesale transformation." --Architect Magazine

"How climate change and the current environmental emergency will affect the practice of architecture, both in terms of its design philosophy and rising opportunities to innovate and radically transform, "Climax Change!: How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency" is a clarion call for rethinking the role of architecture in an era of increasing climate change. While a highly recommended and unique contribution to professional and academic library Contemporary Architecture collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists." --Midwest Book Review

"Architects know they play an important role in addressing climate change, given that buildings account for roughly 40% of carbon emissions, but few of them will go so far as recommending a stop to new construction. Former MoMA curator Pedro Gadanho is doing just that, with this book of ten essays that expand upon an idea he first expressed in 2009: "We should stop building anew." This tactic is not the only one architects have at their disposal, but it articulates the extreme changes that need to take place in the coming years in dealing with our global climate emergency. Or as Gadanho puts it: "We need to revive the spirit that once drove the avant-gardes."" --World-Architects