Climax Change!: How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency

by Pedro Gadanho

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.

256 pages, Hardcover

Published August 2, 2022

Reviews

[Jon Zellweger · Rating 3 out of 5]

This did not meet my expected hopes. There has to be some middle ground between a general survey, such as this, and a full-blown technical manual, so this left me lacking. Once I was no longer distracted by the embarrassment of misspellings and typos throughout the *entire* book (fire that copyeditor) , it was pleasing to note that there is traction in the broader design community for discussing degrowth and —more importantly, I think— the reduction of the reliance on environmental controls, aka design passively for your climate region and reacclimatize the population away from A/C (reference my previous read “Thermal Delight in Architecture”). The author’s underlying principles remained a bit ambiguous for the first half of the 10 essays. But by the end, it was clear that Gadanho maintained a fairly traditional, Modernist world view that puts faith in man’s ability to engineer/science/manage themselves out of the situation. There is no interrogation of traditional Western ontologies and an argument for moving toward a more inclusive world view that places human people within the array of all living persons, not just at the apex. The fatal irony —for all the focus on being a better steward and transitioning to a regenerative design & construction economy— is that this was a hardback book with some heavy weight, glossy paper and colored inks. The publishers (and author) should have taken a cue from, “Material Cultures, Material Reform” that was closer to a pamphlet with newsprint weight paper. As a book with content that will age rapidly, it will not be a useful reference tool beyond a couple of years (half the citations are website addresses, for instance), making it all the more important to ‘return to the earth’. While I should not fixate on its form, it’s kind of the point, am I right? Glad I read it, but the physical manifestation coupled with egregious grammatical errors were distracting and undermined the integrity many the good nuggets scattered throughout the book. But I think I’ll continue to find my best inspirations in written works outside of my professional field.