Bargain-priced televisions being snatched by eager buyers in Sao Paulo and everywhere else on Black Friday.
The day frequently represents disturbing and frenzied scenes of avaricious would-be buyers who have camped outside
shops overnight, to join the melee to buy ever-bigger, ever-smarter consumer goodscommensurate price. Perhaps it wouldn't tend towards the average.
Perhaps it wouldn't be made from so many highly processed,
low entropy components. Perhaps it wouldn't be subjugated
by its obligatory role in perpetuating economic growth. P erhaps
it wouldn't be locked into perpetuating environmental breakdown.
The last year has seen an explosion of climate awareness.
Architecture finally appears to be turning its attention to
environmental design at scale. A cabal of more than 500 practices
have declared a climate and biodiversity emergency and called for
a paradigm shift. The Royal Institute of British Architects and
an increasing network of architecture students have followed suit.
We're seeing a dramatic mobilisation of architects in the fight
against climate change, but an architectural paradigm shift is
impossible without also reconsidering what we value. The media
frequently presents economics as a classical science - the study of
a natural phenomenon beyond our control such as the moon and its
tides. Really an economy is just a mechanism for deciding what to
value. Economics is in fact a social science, a way of examining and
theorising how humans assign worth. Just as when we talk about
architecture we consider new forms, languages and techniques
·which might open up possibilities, when we talk about economics
we should also be thinking about alternative economies. We should
interrogate different ways of structuring trade, of measuringprosperity and of governing the relationships that exist within
society. Different kinds of economies prioritise different ideas
of what is valuable and so enable, or inhibit, different kinds of
culture and architecture.
Hints of non-liquid architecture are already abtmdant,
quietly flourishing around the world. In the Netherlands, for
example, Hnmanitas Deventer is an experimental intergenerational
retirement home where students can live for no cost alongside
elderly residents in return for the investment of time each month
contributing to the life of t he community. The scheme has been
criticised for its reliance on a generational wealt h divide but, despite
its flaws, takes the value exchange between renter and landlord
out of a monetary system while enabling the residents to live free
from the burden of mortgage debt.
Libraries of things, which are steadily growing in popularity,
also attempt to disentangle valuable tools and toys from t he money
it usually costs to make use of them. SHARE Oxford - a library
of things and repair cafe in England - seeks to save space, money
and the environment by allowing its users to borrow items only
sometimes or occasionally needed such as tools, outdoor equipment,
or semi-professional cooking appliances. Sharing objects through
membership of a lending institution is a strategy for minimising
waste and chips away at consumerism by holding products