Udd24_T8_THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS_SPRING2022

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS: “WHO IS IT THAT THE EARTH BELONGS TO?” NON-EXTRACTIVE ARCHITECTURE VOL. 1 ON DESIGNING WITHOUT DEPLETION

CHARLOTTE MALTERRE-BARTHES ECOLOGIES OF THE ARTIFICIAL MEDIA archive MA-BA TRANSVERSAL WORKSHOP ETSAM-UPM

UDD 24 SORIANO SPRING TERM 2021-2022 P6-7-8 + MHAB

TEXTO

8

A post on Instagram for Lakewoods Creations, a small Dutch flooring company, features a couple laughing as they relax on a beautiful terrace built with exotic wood. Billed by the company as a “highly eco-friendly” resource that supports a “circular economy,” the timber is harvested from a region of the Amazon forest that was submerged under the Brokopondo Reservoir. This artificial lake was created by and for the Afobaka Dam, constructed across the Suriname River between 1961 and 1964. Through its tightly controlled narrative, the firm attempts to extract value from not only its wood but also the means of its sourcing -erasing the fact that its very availability is the product of a history of exploitative processes.

The Afobaka Dam was financed and constructed by the Pittsburgh-based Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) in order to provide electricity to its bauxite plants. These plants are necessary for the alumina produced by its daughter firm, the Suriname Aluminum Company (Suralco). According to the Brokopondo Agreement signed in 1956 between Suralco and the state, ninety percent of the electric power was reserved for the company.1 When it was built, the dam inundated roughly 160,000 hectares of biologically valuable tropical rainforest, while providing only 120 megawatts of capacity, making it a low-efficiency infrastructure.2 Forty villages occupied by the Saamakas, Maroon people of African descent who escaped from slavery in the eighteenth century, were sunk in the process. Without prior agreement or consultation, their land was submerged and thousands were displaced.3 Credited by some for having brought the sleepy Dutch colony into modernity, Alcoa stopped bauxite exploitation in 2015, as the region’s tracts dwindled and the global market for aluminum turned unfavorable -almost one hundred years after initiating extraction.4 In 2019, Alcoa negotiated its departure with the government, agreeing to clean up its former mining sites and to hand over ownership of the 120-megawatt Afobaka Dam to the state.5 On January 1, 2020, Suriname officially took control of this major infrastructure. Not only are the beautiful floorings from the sunken forest stolen, but their existence is also predicated on a history of extractivism, racial violence, pollution, and imperialism -a legacy likewise embedded in nearly every material employed in the construction industry.6 Whether using Lakewood Creations’s “sustainable” products or any other, every decision designers take in a project has an impact not only on the site of construction, but also on the site of extraction. Every element of the built environment is the product of extractive processes, from steel bolts to concrete blocks, wood flooring to drop ceilings. Far from being abstract and removed objects, construction commodities are embedded within economic and ideological systems of extracted energy, materials, and labor. At a staggering scale, capital accumulation and the corresponding brutal and exploitative processes at work in the transfer of raw materials to the built environment

2

have long been perceived as detached from the discipline, the education, and the practice of design and architecture.7 While claiming an objective approach toward its duties, architecture disengages from political commitments and turns a blind eye to the very source of its materialization.

Architecture has centered on “sustainable materiality,” focusing on the performance of architecture as a finished product. But a truly sustainable architecture would concern itself instead with the maintenance of what already exists. When building is absolutely necessary, it would be done with secondhand materials. Within contemporary architecture, however, such thinking remains niche, with the vast majority of firms opting for familiar materials and methods. To make things worse, the building only accounts for one part of a much larger picture. Even the design process relies on an ecosystem of connected objects -computers, phones, data centers, information networks, robots, GPS-led machines -that likewise fuel, in their dependency, a host of less-visible extractive processes to procure minerals and materials (i.e., gold, lead, lithium, manganese, mercury, mica, nickel, quartz, silicon, silver, sulfite, uranium, and zinc). Ancillary yet preponderant in design and construction, these technologies contribute massively to the politics and territorialities of resource mining, expanding further the impact of the built environment within extraction capitalism.

Denying Neutrality to Planning Disciplines

The expansionist global enterprise of extraction spans across all scales. Seemingly isolated construction details are physical artifacts that impact entire regions tectonically: mountains, rivers, forests, populations. What Donna Haraway calls “the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture” is grounded in the project of European colonial expansion, and made visible in the architecture and infrastructure of our cities and settlements—at least, for those who care to look.8 The translation of the Earth’s resources into the built environment and its economic model of development historically is mirrored in today’s global neocolonial modes of extraction capitalism. The ramifications of contemporary mining and exploitation are violent, immense, and disastrous, impacting humans and nonhumans alike, with racialized populations most affected, through and alongside severely adverse effects on soil, topography, labor, transportation, water, and food systems.

The claimed neutrality of design disciplines is simply no longer tenable.

Architecture schools globally are structured according to an underlying assumption that planning and design disciplines are removed from politics. They are not alone in this type of thinking, however. Members of the physics and geology department

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

at the Swiss Institute of Technology, for instance, when confronted with the urgent demand to question, decolonize, and depatriarchalize their curricula, offered a puzzling response: “We do mathematics.” This performance of technocratic neutrality grounds the disconnect found in many architecture departments. In Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, architecture departments are rooted in technological universities (Politecnico di Milano, TU Delft, TU Vienna, TU Berlin, ETH Zürich, EPFL).

Even if individuals within them are at odds with this credo, the schools are embedded in a system of ideological governance where scientific and technical knowledge -and the political pretenses that structure it- rules.

Architectural education and theory is largely unconcerned by the political ecology and economy of its materials, a detachment illustrated by the absence of these topics in curricula, and in canonical literature. As an example, Sigfried Giedion dissects in his seminal writings the relationships between architecture, modernity, and building materials but never addresses their production. In the reference work coproduced by Andrea Deplazes and Monica Buckland , only a single page is devoted to the production of concrete, and it is devoid of any geological context.9 While politics, geography, and many other disciplines have begun to acknowledge the problematic materiality of our societies, architecture, planning, urban design, and civil engineering have kept these critical matters at bay, guarded by a rhetoric of aesthetics, progress, and impartiality. This foundational attitude is carried into professional offices. Ignoring the past, present, and ongoing “weaponization of extraction,” practitioners immersed in an unabated narrative of technological innovation feel absolved from addressing their own responsibilities for the “costs across corporeal and planetary bodies.”10 In the name of technological and structural performance, architects and architecture are cleared of liability for the materials they choose to use. And the fact that planning disciplines are historically grounded in colonial systems, “white geology” and its relationship to power -as discussed by Kathryn Yussuf in - remains almost entirely overlooked.11

Politicizing Architectural Details: From Asphalt Shingles to Window Frames

The asphalt shingles on the house’s roof are made of cellulose, wood fiber, and bitumen, which comprises petroleum extracted either from crude oil or from asphalt mines.

They are attached to rain gutters manufactured out of copper, which is found alongside zinc in sulfide-rich ore and extracted via underground (or hard rock) mining, which, once exposed to air and water, generates poisonous sulfuric acid. The additional joint

4

isolation between shingles is made of synthetic rubber derived from petroleum-based elastomer. The insulation panels under the shingles are made of foam (polystyrene or polyurethane, typically -both derived from crude oil) and fiberglass-slag wool (aluminum, silicon, calcium-oxide). Aluminum is made out of bauxite, which is extracted via stripmining processes that obliterate topsoil and, therefore, wildlife habitats. The roof framework is constructed of wood, typically cedar or pine. Supply for these woods comes from industrial forestry, responsible for the clearcutting of carbon-dense older forests that releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The structural elements holding the framework together are made of steel, which is composed of iron ore and coke (a coal-based fuel) extracted through underground mining, then mixed in a blast furnace -a process alone responsible for generating some nine percent of carbon dioxide emissions globally. Interior partition wall layers are typically fashioned from plywood (sheets of pine adhered together using water and a petroleum-based glue), alongside fiberglass insulation made of plastic, borax, and mirabilite. Borax is mined in open pits, while mirabilite com prises sodium sulfate harvested from lake beds.

The windows and their frames are made of float glass, which, in turn, is composed of soda lime, glass, silica, quartz, and metal (either tin or iron ore). Silica is sourced from sand and quartz, both of which are extracted in open-pit mines. Drywall is made of gypsum (calcium, sulfite, and silica). Flooring is typically wood -perhaps from the Brokopondo Reservoir. Electrical wiring and heating systems are in metal (copper, aluminum) and plastic (silicon, elastomer-petroleum based). The doorknobs are fashioned in brass (an alloy composed of copper and zinc). The foundations are built with cement brick and concrete (limestone, sand, gravels, and other aggregate).

Concrete, which even its own industry representatives recognize as unsustainable, remains the most prevalently used construction material in the world.12 This non-exhaustive, somewhat naive, and simplified listing of the materials necessary to build a house derives from my current research on architectural details and their physicality. Using the exploded axonometric drawing called “Parts,” produced by the Californian office Morphosis -a precise inventory of each element used in the details of a house constructed following North American construction protocols of the 1980s- this critical view seeks to establish a methodology on building construction. Morphosis’s catalogue of architectural details is not preoccupied with the origins of the materials employed, but rather provides “a Revell-modellike” format that details each aspect of the building’s construction “in a form any layperson could comprehend.”13 Only once it has been “politicized” by accounting for the sources of each details’ material does this document make visible patterns that determine how biophysical attributes of space production are combined, produced, and sourced -re-

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

fracting views into the political economy of construction. Yet the detail is still considered by designers a neutral, strictly performative entity.

This is a view also expressed by Edward Ford in , where he mentions the materiality of details only in relation to their structural abilities or properties, and the economic use of it.14 What this interpretation of the detail offers is an important diagnostic, conveying the distance established by designers between their architecture and the forms of aggression and violence that the extraction processes necessary for its materialization generate. For many architects, the fact that the construction industry is responsible for forty percent of the world’s carbon emissions, of which eleven percent comes from material and construction processes, appears of little concern.15 Asked what architects “should do about the unmistakably impending environmental catastrophe,” Jacques Herzog answered “nothing,” his point being that architecture is powerless in “contributing to decisive issues of society.”16 In a disempowering statement addressing architect’s gusto for concrete, he admits that “architects abuse materials by thoughtlessly exploiting them or only taking an interest in their surface appeal.”17

Technological Extractivism

Still, many architects are slowly coming to terms with their responsibilities in the inexorable association between architecture and its geological genesis. This wakefulness arrives late and is overshadowed by another relationship to a greater physical dimension of extractivism. The intensification of digital technologies and its cohort of systems infiltrates every aspect of architectural design and construction assistance -and of our lives. Today, technological escalation materializes in design through several layers and scales, penetrating education, research, and practice. Common objects of material culture, abstracted invisible systems, and digital tools are integral to every aspect of the architectural process, from design to construction to occupation. Laptops, mobile phones, CAD modeling, rendering software, artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, measuring instruments, and GPSled caterpillars -to name a few technologies- are tools that partake in design aid and construction assistance but also in material extraction and manufacturing processes. Inanimate objects are given agency by information networks, GIS maps, geolocalizing machinery, and big data. The production process of these high-technology machines drives extractivism perhaps as much as “classic” construction materials do. But the material impact of data is rarely recognized or subjected to accountability, even though the substantial infrastructures it requires, such as electrical power, fiber networks, air-based cooling systems, and hard-drive disks, are

6

all dependent on extractive processes.

The same goes for all the tools and materials deployed in the production protocols of an architectural project and the minerals used in their production. In an article titled “The Digital in Architecture: Then, Now and in the Future,” Mollie Claypool quotes designer Alessandro Bava: “How could these innovations in computing be used to better understand a building’s environmental performance, or the best way to design urban planning interventions, or production and construction processes?

How could artificial intelligence including machine learning enable architects to design novel kinds of architecture that can better respond to the changing world around it?”18 These necessary interrogations echo the question addressed in the 1980s by Langdon Winner about whether artifacts have politics, an issue that remains largely ignored.19 Meanwhile, complete environments are produced based on repetitive mechanized processes, from multi-scale standardized construction products (BIM) to the design of entire cities (Esri). These technologies facilitate an anticontextual production of space. Perhaps it is true that architects partake in these processes less by deciding which material to use in construction and more by producing imaginaries that are then sold and built. Thus, it should come as no surprise that architecture and its byproducts -Lakewood Creations’s sunken floorings and the likes- have found a home on social-media platforms such as Instagram. Facilitating a disassociation between the image of a sanitized product and its material reality is a form of detachment that only seems to ensure a retreat from the responsibilities of the real world. From the window frames to concrete foundations, from the ceramic tiles of the kitchen to the roof shingles, and from the steel bolts of the entrance door to the glass panels of the shower, the materiality of the built environment relies on extraction. The conjugated needs for nonrenewable resources unify the materialization of technological tools with that of the built environment, pointing at the necessity for politicizing details and components in order to connect them to contemporary forms of resource extraction and appropriation, as well as, ultimately, to rethink the production of our infrastructure, our cities, our homes, and our lives.

1. SEE RICHARD AND SALLY PRICE, RAINFOREST WARRIORS: HUMAN RIGHTS ON TRIAL (PHILADELPHIA:UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS, 2011).

2. SEE GEORGE LEDEC AND JUAN DAVID QUINTERO, GOOD DAMS AND BAD DAMS: ENVIRONMENTAL CRITERIA FOR SITE SELECTION OF HYDROELECTRIC PROJECTS. LATIN AMERICA AND CARIBBEAN REGION (WASHINGTON, DC: WORLD BANK, 2003).

3. THANKS TO DAPHNE BAKKER FOR BRINGING THIS CASE TO MY ATTENTION AND FOR SUGGESTING READINGS. 4. RICHARD LORD, “A DIVIDED LAND AGREES ON DIVORCE TERMS WITH ALCOA,” PITTSBURGH POSTGAZETTE

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

(AUGUST 30, 2019), HTTPS://WWW.POSTGAZETTE.COM/NEWS/WORLD/2019/08/30/SURINAME-LAND-ALCOAPITTSBURGH-DAMSOUTH-AMERICA-SURALCO-PARLIAMENT-VOTE/STORIES/201908290213.

5. ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT, “AGREEMENT REACHED WITH ALCOA OVER END OF OPERATIONS,” ECONOMIST (AUGUST 16, 2018), HTTP://COUNTRY.EIU.COM/ARTICLE.ASPX?ARTICLEID=597036843&COUNTRY=SURINAME &TOPIC=ECONOMY&SUBTOPIC=F_1.

6. INSPIRED BY SIMILAR EFFORTS IN BRAZIL, THE COMPANY BROKOPONDO WATRA WOOD INTERNATIONAL NV (BWWI), NOW PARTNER OF LAKEWOOD CREATIONS, WAS FOUNDED IN 2002 AND GIVEN PERMISSION BY SURALCO TO HARVEST WOOD FROM THE SUNKEN FOREST. RELOCATED INHABITANTS WERE NOT COMPENSATED 7. SEE NEIL SMITH, UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT: NATURE, CAPITAL, AND THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE (ATHENS, GA: UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS, 2008); NEIL BRENNER AND ROBERT KEIL, “FROM GLOBAL CITIES TO GLOBALIZED URBANIZATION,” IN CRITIQUE OF URBANIZATION: SELECTED ESSAYS (BASEL: BIRKHAUSER GUTERSLOH, 2017).

8. DONNA J. HARAWAY, MANIFESTLY HARAWAY (MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2016), 13.

9. MONICA BUCKLAND ET AL., CONSTRUCTING ARCHITECTURE: MATERIALS, PROCESSES, STRUCTURES: A HANDBOOK (BASEL: BIRKHAUSER, 2013), 60.

10. KATHRYN YUSOFF, A BILLION BLACK ANTHROPOCENES OR NONE, FORERUNNERS (MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2018), 104.

11. YUSOFF, A BILLION BLACK ANTHROPOCENES OR NONE. YUSOFF DEFINES “WHITE GEOLOGY” AS THE WAY IN WHICH MINERAL NOMENCLATURES USED IN TRADITIONAL GEOLOGY ARE DEVOID OF REFERENCES TO RACIAL AND COLONIAL HISTORIES OF MATERIAL POWER. 12. JONATHAN WATTS, “CONCRETE: THE MOST DESTRUCTIVE MATERIAL ON EARTH,” GUARDIAN (FEBRUARY 25, 2019), HTTPS://WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM/CITIES/2019/FEB/25/CONCRETE-THEMOST-DESTRUCTIVEMATERIAL-ON-EARTH 13. MORPHOSIS, “TECTONICS, FRAGMENTS, AGGREGATES, AND A SENSE OF THE UNFINISHED PERCOLATE INTO EVERYDAY LIFE,” 2-4-6-8 HOUSE (1978), HTTPS://WWW.MORPHOSIS.COM/ARCHITECTURE/30/ 14. EDWARD R. FORD, THE ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL (NEW YORK, NY: PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS, 2011), 125 15. SEE MATTHEW ADAMS, BRINGING EMBODIED CARBON UPFRONT (LONDON: WORLD GREEN BUILDING COUNCIL, 2019) 16. JACQUES HERZOG, “JACQUES HERZOG: LETTER TO DAVID CHIPPERFIELD,” DOMUS (OCTOBER 13, 2020), HTTPS://WWW.DOMUSWEB.IT/EN/ ARCHITECTURE/2020/10/13/JACQUES-HERZOGLETTER-FROM-BASEL.HTML. 17. HERZOG, “JACQUES HERZOG: LETTER TO DAVID CHIPPERFIELD.” 18. MOLLY CLAYPOOL, “THE DIGITAL IN ARCHITECTURE: THEN, NOW AND IN THE FUTURE,” SPACE10 (2020), HTTPS://SPACE10.COM/PROJECT/DIGITAL-INARCHITECTURE/.

19. LANGDON WINNER, “DO ARTIFACTS HAVE POLITICS?,” IN THE WHALE AND THE REACTOR: A SEARCH FOR LIMITS IN AN AGE OF HIGH TECHNOLOGY (CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 1986).

COVER IMAGE: LUKE JONES, MATERIAL FLOWS IN AND OUT OF A STEEL FRAME, TO SCALE. NON-EXTRACTIVE ARCHITECTURE, VOLUME 1: ON DESIGNING WITHOUT DEPLETION (BERLIN AND MOSCOW: STERNBERG PRESS AND V-A-C FOUNDATION, 2021).

CHARLOTTE MALTERRE-BARTHES IS AN ARCHITECT, SCHOLAR, URBAN DESIGNER AND ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF URBAN DESIGN AT THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN. IN 2009, SHE FOUNDED OMNIBUS WITH NOBORU KAWAGISHI, AN URBAN DESIGN AGENCY DEDICATED TO NEW FORMS OF PRACTICE AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION. AS GUEST PROFESSOR AT TU BERLIN (2018-2019) SHE INVESTIGATED AND CHALLENGED THE PREDATORILY MODUS OPERANDI OF REAL ESTATE IN THE GERMAN CAPITAL, AND AS PROGRAM DIRECTOR OF THE MASTER OF ADVANCED STUDIES IN URBAN DESIGN AT THE CHAIR OF MARC ANGELIL (2014-2019) FOCUSED ON MIGRATION AND URBANISM IN MEDITERRANEAN CITIES (TANGIER, MARSEILLE, BEIRUT). A RESEARCH FELLOW AT FUTURE CITIES LABORATORY-SINGAPORE IN 2012-2013, CHARLOTTE LECTURED AND TAUGHT WORKSHOPS AT THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN, THE AA, THE STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE, AT HONG-KONG UNIVERSITY, AMONG OTHERS. HER WORKS AND WRITINGS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN SEVERAL MAGAZINES AND EXHIBITED