A Moratorium on New Construction

by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes

A massive value shift for existing buildings, infrastructure, materials, unbuilt land, earth, and the labor that holds our world together.

To build is to destroy, writes Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. From steel bolts to concrete blocks to wood flooring to polyester insulation panels, every single component of the built environment is the product of extractive processes. Driven by greedy economies, the global enterprise of space production expands, impacting climate, earth, water, humans, and non-humans everywhere. However housing is both a human right and the mandate of design How to navigate the need for housing versus the destructive practice of construction?

To pause new construction—even if momentarily, creates a radical thinking framework for alternatives to the current regime of space production and its suspect growth imperative. Engaging with unsettling questions, A Moratorium on New Construction envisions a massive value shift for our existing stock. From housing redistribution to reinviting value generation, from anti-extractive measures to profound structural changes, from curricula reforms to purging the exploitative culture of the office, an entire rewiring of design processes and construction lays ahead. Somewhere between a thought experiment and a call for action, A Moratorium on New Construction is a leap of faith to envision a less extractive future, made of what we Not demolishing, not building new, but building less, building with what exists, inhabiting it differently, and caring for it.

Genres: Architecture

240 pages, Paperback

Published June 24, 2025

Reviews

[g]

prima. lastig een recensie over te schrijven

[Matej Buday · Rating 5 out of 5]

read it

[Myfanwyyy · Rating 5 out of 5]

book of the year ‽

[Wendy Wuyts · Rating 5 out of 5]

This booklet is a gem. It calls for new architecture practices. As someone who works with a lot of architects in practice and research, reads (apparently the same) feminist essays (as the author does) and has reflected a lot upon deconstruction in the emerging circular economy in construction, this book touched so many heartstrings.

This is one of the most grounded architecture texts that I have been reading in the past years.

[Audrey Kalman]

“Marxist geographer David Harvey identified that our built world mirrors the history of capital accumulation. Infrastructure, buildings, and cities are not merely outcomes of such accumulation but interconnected parts of a deliberate supply chain of space production. Modernity's push for endless building, under narratives of techno-economic development and promises of "a better life for all humanity," perpetuates global asymmetries and generates the current polycrisis, propelling us toward a further constructed future—in a literal sense-detrimental to humanity.” (73)

“The scientific counterpart to a moratorium on new construction has been spelled out by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which writes in its 2023 report: "Addressing the new needs for more residential buildings may not necessarily mean constructing new buildings, especially in the global North." This calls for an economic value shift from land to existing structures. A building's features, intangible qualities, and embodied carbon would be of higher worth than the land on which it stands.” (84)

Lacaton and Vassal (85)

“As so often, ecofeminist, queer, and Black scholars light the path backward and forward for other ways of world-making.” (88-89)

“Absence is resistance” (89)

“Donna Haraway refers to "the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture" as an ideology rooted in the project of European and settler-colonial expansion. This can be identified in the architecture and infrastructure of cities and settlements-but only by those who care to look.” (96)

“Halting extraction-shutting down the plantation and the mine—is needed to eliminate first the distance between construction and the violence stemming from capital-driven extraction processes and then to stop that violence altogether” (97-98)

“There is no silver bullet to fix the architecture office as we know” (154)

“But big calls to take down patriarchy and capitalism are grounded in everyday struggles. Reference sets are thus an excellent place to start depatriarchalizing, decolonizing, and decarbonizing curricula. By starting an honest deconstruction of the canon and acknowledging the shades of its figures, from Le Corbusier's early fascism to Adolf Loos's not-so-ornamental crimes or the colonialism of Fernand Pouillon-not to cancel their works but to contextualize them-their shortcomings as humans can be faced.” (164)

[Clayton · Rating 1 out of 5]

The degrowth movement is made possible only by the massive material abundance that it condemns. This book extols the virtues of primitive society but—because it operates from a radical/critical epistemology, the author doesn’t find it necessary to present actual data/evidence convincing the reader that her preferred world would be either better overall or more equitable. History proves that life in the low-growth, stagnant world that Malterre-Barthes prefers is bound to be nasty, brutish, and short. And even she will miss the Anthropocene era when it’s gone.

[notttttttth · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 estrellas pq me tuvo leyendo en detalle sobre arquitectura y diseño urbano sin aburrirme. salirse de las limitaciones y realmente imaginar cambios reales es posible, y siempre me va a interesar aprender sobre ello sea la área que sea. demasiado interesante todo. nada es neutral, cuestionarse todo.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

something for people who fall neither in the NIMBY or YIMBY camp. A lot of breadth, could have used more depth in a few sections.

[John Hill]

I reviewed it in my Substack newsletter: https://archidose.substack.com/p/an-a...