Now more than ever, architects are endeavouring to design with sustainability in mind. Yet the world’s slow adoption of a climate-focused mindset signals a reluctance (or inability) to fully confront the realities of the warming planet. The COVID-19 pandemic heightens this tension, as the collective desire to return to “normal” clashes with escalating signs of environmental distress — record-breaking temperatures, haze-filled skies and devastating floods. This discord underscores a broader issue: the tendency of most new construction to perpetuate familiar comforts and the status quo. Andrés Jaque, the pioneering Spanish architect behind Office for Political Innovation (or Offpolinn, founded in 2003) understands this problem first-hand. By contrast, his work is about making space for the layers of living systems beyond the human.
Two of his firm’s recent projects immediately come to mind: In Molina de Segura (Murcia), where decades of suburbanization have led to the loss of ravine ecosystems known as “ramblas” — and gradually flattened the land’s natural contours and diminished its capacity for cooling and carbon sequestration — Rambla Climate-House restores the land it sits on and then some. Where there was little to nothing before, myrtles, oleanders and mastic trees now grow and insects and birds roam. The Reggio School in Madrid embodies this ethos, too, recognizing that as climate related challenges intensify, adaptive strategies — such as inviting flora and fauna to intervene on the architecture itself — will become essential, and not just for our own comfort as humans.
These interconnections across scales and among species define Jaque’s approach to everything. In his writing, his practice and his role as dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Jaque consistently challenges complacency, promoting an honest engagement with the evolving realities of climate change and the overlapping systems in which we live, from colonialism and its attendant extractivism to technocracy and anthropocentrism. To him, the future of architecture lies in embracing complexity: He is firm in his conviction that, for the crises we confront, “there are no shortcuts.”
As we speak, the northern hemisphere is experiencing yet another summer of record-setting temperatures. What role do architects and architecture play in addressing the climate crisis?
- Andrés Jaque
Architecture faces the challenge of redefining how we relate with reality. The climate crisis is not an isolated phenomenon; it happens at the intersection of multiple processes like carbonization, colonialism, racialization, patriarchy and extreme capitalism. Architecture’s role is not to patch things up and maintain business as usual. It has to redefine how we relate to reality and make clear that the planet is confronting the intersection of all these forms of extractivism.
If architecture has an evolving relationship with reality, how do you represent it?
I love reality and I want what I do to be real. The work we do with Offpolinn is not about purifying reality but celebrating its complexity and its diversity. When we do that, reality is shown in its entire richness. That richness — the complex entanglement between bodies, technologies and environments — is what people often find in projects like the Reggio School or the Plasencia Care Home.
The problem is that, most of the time, architecture is about purity, about repression, about removing things. So architecture can be a practised celebration of complexity, diversity and inclusiveness, or it can be a practice of repression, purification and depuration.
The former possibility implies optimism. Is optimism important in confronting the climate crisis? In a world that often feels pessimistic, your work feels like proof that things can change — that in itself is exciting and optimistic.
We’re living in a moment in which so many things are cracking. The thin layer of reality is cracking, allowing many other forms of culture and other ecologies to emerge. And in the cracks of this are posthumanism, queer culture, transness, radical forms of ecology, the circularity of the body with the landscape: transscalarities. There are all these forms of existence and coexistence that are emerging and that for me are incredibly exciting.
I don’t feel nostalgic for what is behind us. The damage of this crisis is unequally distributed, and that’s a serious issue, but what is growing in the cracks is a source of energy. When it comes to particular projects, in Molina de Segura (Murcia), for instance, overdevelopment produced an impoverished, fragile urbanism. It takes a house that operates differently, like the Rambla Climate-House, to allow a form of biodiversity that is unknown to emerge. And that house is not necessarily restituting what existed — it produces a new diverse mixture that I think is beautiful and exciting. Pushing against existing extractive paradigms can give rise to other paradigms (like mutual care and interspecies justice) and provide a vehicle and an opportunity to address questions of inequality and injustice. It’s not difficult to produce a sense of optimism and richness; you just have to open the gate and let reality happen.
Amid a growing distrust of institutions, to look at a building and feel a sense of trust in what it represents is a form of optimism, isn’t it? The Reggio School, for example, embodies this trust.
Yes, this is very important. Architecture, as a practice and as a discipline, faces the challenge of building trust on the notion of togetherness. The discourse of the aughts was that the city was a place where difference could be manifested and articulated. We now see that cities have become something very different: They became battlegrounds of gentrification, of exclusion. We can no longer take for granted that there’s a space where the plurality of societies and ecosystems can be brought together.
I consider architecture an experimental practice, and its ultimate mission is to multiply the realm of the possible. When hegemonic entities control a big part of the production of reality, expanding the realm of the possible and supporting the emergence of the yet-to-come is an act of dissidence. That’s a key feature of the times we live in.
Two years ago at ETH Zürich, Andreas Ruby asked you whether architecture is a good place to practise politics, and whether it would be more effective to go into politics instead.
Politics structure our collectiveness. If, in 20th-century avantgarde movements, the key discursive engine was materials and space, now it’s politics. We relate to each other through politics. If architecture (or any other discipline) wants to be relevant, it needs to be aware of this function. But the politics of architecture are not the same as those that are mobilized in political party discourse. They are connected, but they’re not the same. Architecture makes politics through materiality, through infrastructural design, through dimensions, through its ability to instigate or trigger relationships — or make them unlikely.
That’s why we decided to call our office the Office for Political Innovation: Any form of ecological or societal rearticulation is a political endeavour, and to be relevant in these processes, we need to operate politically.
Schools and houses are formative for those that inhabit them and are, in a sense, at the forefront of politics. How important are these institutions — if we may call them that — for confronting the climate crisis?
Houses and schools participate in the making of existence and reality in a very intense way, as you’ve implied. They connect what happens at the scale of the human body with what happens at the scale of the planet. Both schools and houses are what I call trans-scalar constructions. For instance, schools mediate the way humans relate to other humans, to their broader environment, the air, the soil, the insects and pollen. They produce and mobilize knowledge. Architecture can intervene in that process and create an environment that allows bodies to understand their interdependence with other more-than-human forms of life. This is at the core of what the Reggio School is about. And that’s something that would be impossible without the architecture.
Houses do something similar. They’re a node of connections and dependencies. If you remove the walls and the ceilings, you end up with a knob of pipes and wires and signals…and the exchange of food, waste, organic and fecal material. The most important phenomena in architecture, the realities it mobilizes, are difficult for humans to sense. Houses provide an opportunity to intervene in these planetary networks that are defining how bodies are together with other bodies and how they become part of ecosystems. The impact of the final layer that you give to that is minor; it matters less whether it looks minimalistic or baroque. I don’t really care about style.
I would say that what is true relationally about houses and schools is also true about hospitals, libraries and other types of buildings. The challenge is that the architectural commission has become increasingly reductive, and new, progressive ideas are heavily repressed. In the past, architecture embraced experimentation and critical discourse, but it hardly does now. I see this as a reflection on the power of architecture. Architecture has a huge capacity to reconstruct societies, and this is often challenged by forces that want societies to remain as they are.
Architects often aim to make their solutions and prototypes replicable to achieve broader impact. Given your approach, you might be skeptical of some versions of this idea. How do you envision scaling the impact, especially with projects like schools and houses?
I believe in a kind of experimental approach to architecture. By that I mean that there’s uncertainty. And architecture is always complex. Each time there’s a jump in scale, inevitably there’s a collective management of unexpected events. When architecture transitions across scales, it mobilizes and makes the complexity of societies manifest. This requires a kind of infrastructure for political discussion, a collective space of dissidence and difference — what Bruno Latour calls “the parliament.” And that is where I think architecture is very relevant: It has the capacity to provide this kind of infrastructure for things to grow or shrink or be replicated. I would claim that scaling up and scaling down is how architecture intervenes in the making of a society. Architecture is not about space; it’s not about the provision of boxes that society inhabits or steps into. It is about how things relate to each other and how architecture intervenes in those relationships.
We’ve put this into practice with Offpolinn in many projects. For instance, in the Tupper Home project, we thought of a system that could replicate itself, but as we explain it, it was not just something that would be a material device that could be repeated and industrially produced and massively consumed. It was the construction of a whole network. Or for instance, in the Rolling House for the Rolling Society, we tested what it means for a model of coexistence (sharing homes) to expand. And that was actually the making of a society itself.
Is it important to build lasting relationships with the people and communities — or societies — you work with?
Often, the role of the architect is designing buildings, overseeing the construction, and then the buildings are given to the users and they take it over. But it’s a bit naive to think this way. For Offpolinn, there’s no such thing as a moment that marks the division between design and use; it’s a continuum. Our installation at the Barcelona Pavilion in 2012, Phantom: Mies as Rendered Society, is an attempt to show this. Architecture intervenes on existing networks of associations; these then become something else and ultimately have a life of their own.
We don’t do many buildings; we build relationships, and that means that we need to dedicate time. The way we work often means a lifetime commitment to those that inhabit and use the building. And not all of those that inhabit it and are part of it are humans. They are also landscapes, ecosystems, insects, earth.
What is at stake in complicating the stories we tell ourselves about buildings and about the world more broadly?
I’ve dedicated so much time to listening that, in a sense, I’ve developed an architectural practice out of it. I started out by placing a recording device and asking people to tell me what they did the day before, from the moment they woke up to when they went to sleep. I probably have close to a thousand hours of recorded interviews at this point. So for me, I’m already working when I’m helping others or listening to others unfold this complexity. I refuse to work through simplification. And I would say simplification is anti-architecture.
By listening, you start connecting with the world of others, and how they share it with still others. It becomes a planetary construction full of specificity and difference and conflict and lack of consistency. To me, that’s architecture. When you listen to people, they start telling you how they put things together, how they sleep, or miss, or grieve someone, what they eat, but also what is their political affiliation, and how they imagine and observe things around them.
There’s a trans-scalar component in the way we speak and narrate things. You can move from an appreciation of the planet to something tiny; you can make reference to humanity’s time scale and, in the same sentence, reduce it to an event that happened to you. The world can be presented, disputed and reconstructed by the way we speak about it. If I had to say what the ultimate format of representation of architectural complexity is, I would say it’s narrative, or the observation and narration of reality — and reality containing also literature, imagination and projection of the yet-to-come.
As dean of GSAPP at Columbia University, how do you see the school’s role in preparing students to address the yet-to-come as it relates to the climate crisis?
GSAPP anticipates that any question of climate requires transdisciplinarity and recognizes that confronting the future is a process that demands political and critical thinking. There’s no way to address something as complex as the climate crisis without the convening of and collaboration between all the disciplines of the built environment and beyond. At the school, there are people reinventing materials and patenting them (like Lola Ben- Alon), people looking at the histories of climate (Felicity Scott), people experimenting with what it means to do an architecture of decarbonization, and people in real estate (Kate Ascher) looking at solutions across scales, from invention and prototyping to big impact — with the aim of transforming things with enough time to address these crises.
The future of the world depends on understanding that the climate crisis is not an isolated phenomenon but has historical implications and intersects many realities. This brings about the question of how we create impact without simplification — how we produce a shift in the way we understand and construct the world without going back to the modern system of segregation of realities and solution-making. So how do we address the urgency through complexity? We cannot avoid the fact that there’s no way to keep business as usual; there are no shortcuts here.
In his teaching, writing and radical built works, Madrid and New York–based architect Andrés Jaque emphasizes the rich complexities of overlapping systems of life — and urges optimism for the yet-to-come.