“A Global Moratorium on New Construction” is an initiative that argues for the necessity of a drastic change to construction protocols: the suspension of new building activity. Articulated around a series of roundtables and events, the intent is to place architects and planners, but also industry actors, policy makers and citizens face to face with the role of construction in generating ongoing and untenable ecological and social injustice and to seek ways to take action.
An initiative by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes in collaboration with bplus.xyz (Arno Brandlhuber, Olaf Grawert, Jonas Janke, Roberta Jurčić, Jolene Lee) and Angelika Hinterbrandner.
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Menna Agha is an architect and researcher, she is a 2019/2020 spatial justice fellow and was visiting assistant professor at the University of Oregon. Currently, she is coordinating a spatial justice agenda at the Flemish Architecture Institute. Menna holds a PhD from the University of Antwerp, and a MA from Köln international school of design. She is third-generation displaced Egyptian Nubian which ushers her research interests in race, gender, space, territory. She is conducting research on spatial injustice in the case of disposition, with a particular focus on gender aspects through the platform Project Unsettled.(Roundtable 02)
Sarah Barth is an architect and founder of the Atelier für Architektologie. After finishing her studies, she worked amongst others for Diener & Diener architects in Basel, at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta ETHZ) in Zurich and at the Laboratoire Bâle EPFL in Lausanne. She is a founding member of Countdown 2030, a collective calling for a new architecture in times of climate crisis and member of the foundation board of Architektur Dialoge, Plattform für Baukultur. (Roundtable 02)
Leon Beck is an architect and designer, working on spatially located and process-related issues in between the two- and the three-dimensional. He co-founded the AGN, sustainability working group at the Architecture Department of ETH Zurich, aiming to further develop questions of the environmental sphere in teaching and research through collaborations within ETH and beyond.(Roundtable 02)
Arno Brandlhuber is an architect and urban planner based in Berlin. In 2006 he founded the collaborative practice brandlhuber+, which is currently being remodelled into b+. He holds a chair for architecture and design at the ETH Zurich and is co-curator of 2038, the German Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. (Roundtable 01)
c/o now is a Berlin architectural practice taking care of imagining and realizing objects, architecture, and urbanity, as well as the editorial, discursive revision of related issues. c/o now is Andrijana Ivanda, Duy An Tran, Tobias Hönig, Markus Rampl, and Paul Reinhardt – and all contributors who collaborate in accomplishing a task: those who give assignments, those who advise, craftspeople, and workers. c/o now was and is involved in teaching at various institutions and teaching formats, including the Technical Universities in Berlin and Munich, the Academy of fine Arts in Nuremberg, the Dessau Institute of Architecture, and the University of Stuttgart. c/o now hold a guest professorship at the University of Art and Design Linz (Austria) (Roundtable 04)
Connor Cook is a researcher and designer from San Francisco, currently based in Amsterdam. Connor graduated from Harvard University, where he developed an interest in the entangled history of (digital) tools and the practice of architecture. After working in a traditional Japanese carpentry tools museum in Kobe and a small design studio in Tokyo (Schemata Architects), he engaged in developing alternative modes of transforming architectural practice: tool development, research, and policy, among others. He has worked on a Revit plugin for conducting realtime Life Cycle Analysis during the design process, and developed prototypes for improving the thermal insulation of gers in Mongolia. (Roundtable 03)
Cynthia Deng and Elif Erez are interdisciplinary designers, hailing from New Haven and Istanbul respectively. Their collective work spans installations, stories, workshops, and speculative infrastructures. They think and work through narratives, temporal multiplicities, and situated standpoints with a reparative lens prioritizing social and ecological care. They have been collaborating since 2017, when they were part of a team that was awarded the Harvard Mexican Cities Initiative fellowship for the project “Tracking Trash”. Most recently, they presented their pair thesis, “Care Agency: A 10-Year Choreography of Architectural Repair,” at the GSD. Cynthia is a dual degree candidate in the Master of Architecture and Master of Urban Planning programs. Elif is a dual degree candidate in the Master of Architecture and Master of Design Studies (Narratives) programs. Both earned their B.A. in Architecture from Yale University. Their speculations on waste, materials, care, and maintenance have been published in Log, Harvard Urban Review, and Disc Journal. (Roundtable 01)
Rhiarna Dhaliwal is a British-Indian Architectural designer, researcher and educator based in London- graduated from the Royal College of Art. She investigates global environmental and political systems that affect the future of landscapes and ecosystems, with a particular focus on how the built environment is entangled with pollutants and toxic substances that are released as a consequence of disruptive technology industries such as data infrastructure. Her practice utilises a multi-scalar perspective in order to map and narrate complex systems and territorial conditions whilst utilising design interventions to seek future modes of cohabitation between humans and non-humans. She is also a co-founder of the all-female design and research collective, Xcessive Aesthetics. (Roundtable 03)
Manuel Ehlers is Head of Sustainable Properties Triodos Bank, specialised in sustainable construction, where he has worked since 2016. Triodos Bank is a sustainable bank, which pursues the idea of using its customers’ money to finance positive change in society, in regard to the environment, social affairs, culture and sustainable buildings, focusing on post-growth, common good, non-speculative and democratic society of positive urban development.(Roundtable 04)
Silvia Gioberti is part of the team of the Guerilla Architects which is a multi-disciplinary artist collective based in Berlin. By focusing their work on spatial interventions and socio-critical art projects, they approach urban development by being „guerilla“. This means that great value is not necessarily only created by building on a grand scale. On the contrary, by working with existing structures, it often only requires minimally invasive interventions in order to give new meaning to former invisible spaces. (Roundtable 02)
Elisa Giuliano is an architect, and exhibition designer and contemporary dancer. Since 2018 she has been working on the research and performative project A Hat and a Bicycle, which was started during a fellowship at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. As a member of Open Design School Matera she was in charge of the research, exhibition design, and production for the I-DEA project and for Armin Linke’s exhibition Blind Sensorium. Among previous experiences she collaborated on exhibition and publications with the architectural studio Kuehn Malvezzi and with the interdisciplinary practice Studio Lukas Feireiss. (Roundtable 03)
Saskia Hebert is an architect. She runs the office subsolar* architektur & stadtforschung in Berlin together with Matthias Lohmann. She received her PhD in 2012 on the phenomenon of “lived space” and has been working for years in various university, interdisciplinary and participatory formats at the interface of research, teaching and practice in urban development. From 2015 to 2020 she held a professorship in the Transformation Design program at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts. (Roundtable 04)
Luke Jones is a founding partner at urban ecology practice Heat Island. He is a host of About Buildings + Cities, a podcast about architectural history, culture, theory and technology and a lecturer at the Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design in London. His current research focuses on timber supply chains and the history of architecture. (Roundtable 03)
Noboru Kawagishi is a Japanese architect from Ishikawa, Japan. He graduated from Niigata University, Japan and at ETH Zurich. After collaborating for many years with KCAP/Zurich (Switzerland), he now works with several other offices in Japan (MITSUBISHI JISHO SEKKEI INC). He is currently a doctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo. In 2009, he co-funded with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes the urban design and research practice OMNIBUS.(Roundtable 01)
Kerstin Müller studied architecture at the University of Stuttgart and at the École d‘Architecture de Lyon. Kerstin has been working as an architect since 2013 in the construction office in situ Basel and has accompanied several reuse projects. In 2020, she was elected co-president of the association Cirkla Switzerland. She is principal of the office Zirkular , specialized in material recycling and reuse in construction.(Roundtable 02)
Omar Nagati and Beth Stryker are the co-founders of CLUSTER (Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research) a platform for urban research, architecture, art, and design initiatives based in Downtown Cairo. CLUSTER has received critical recognition for its work, including a Curry Stone Design Prize (2017), and inclusion in the Egyptian National Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2016, 2018). Omar Nagati is a practicing architect and urban planner who currently lives in Cairo. Having studied at UBC, Vancouver and UC Berkeley, Nagati adopts an interdisciplinary approach to urban history and design and engages in a comparative analysis of the question of urban informality in developing countries. Beth Stryker is the Executive Director of ArteEast in New York. Stryker received her B.A from Columbia University, and her M.Arch from Princeton University. She has curated exhibitions and programs for the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival in Cairo, Beirut Art Center, Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, the AIA/Center for Architecture in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among other venues.(Roundtable 01)
Sarah Nichols is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Rice University. Her work focuses on building materials, particularly concrete, with the aim of reframing the context and impact of architectural practice. She is currently working on a history of concrete in Switzerland that untangles the systemic relations between the development and production of the material and its widespread architectural use. Sarah is the editor of Rematerializing Construction: 22 Propositions and, together with Marc Angélil, Reform! Essays on the Political Economy of Urban Form. Her essays have been published in gta papers, San Rocco, and Grey Room. Sarah holds a Doctor of Sciences from ETH Zurich, for which she was awarded the ETH medal, an Advanced Master of Architecture from the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. (Roundtable 01)
Artem Nikitinis an architect and researcher from Russia- Graduated from the St. Petersburg University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, the Smolny Institute and Strelka institute. His interests are the interrelations and interdependencies between urban practice and digital infrastructures, geospatial modelling and complex adaptive systems. (Roundtable 03)
Sabine Oberhuber is an economist, an architectural consultant and one of the early pioneers of the circular economy. She is Co-Founder of Turntoo, a Dutch service company focused on achieving a circular economy. She developed some of the first business models and circularity strategies and contributed to shaping the thinking around the circular economy transition. Together with Thomas Rau she published the book Material Matters, where they present their vision of a circular economic system. (Roundtable 04)
Deane Simpson is an architect and urbanist, teaching architecture, urbanism and urban planning at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he leads the masters program Urbanism and Societal Change. He is conducting research on contemporary urban and architectural conditions with a focus on socio-spatial transformation at the intersection of demographic change and processes of modernisation, globalisation, neo-liberalisation and welfare state transformation as well as a critical examination of contemporary sustainability discourses. (Roundtable 04)
Davide Tagliabue graduated in building engineering-architecture at Politecnico di Milano, he started to work as a carpenter with self-built ephemeral architectures before graduation. Since January 2018, he has been part of the Open Design School, an urban lab serving Matera European Capital of Culture 2019. Starting from 2020 he has been working professionally in contemporary art as a sculptor and land artist and he is the workshop leader at the V-A-C Zatterre residency in Venice. (Roundtable 03)
Ilze Wolff is an architect, working in Cape Town. She co-directs Wolff Architects with Heinrich Wolff, a practice that is concerned with developing an architecture of consequence. In 2007 she co-founded Open House Architecture, a research practice concerned with documenting architecture of Southern Africa. In 2013 she completed a Masters in Heritage and Public Culture at UCT. Ilze has lectured and taught widely including at IUAV, Venice, Goa, India, Lisbon, Portugal. The work of the practice has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark and the Chicago Architecture Biennale.(Roundtable 01)
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