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

Climax Change! represents the much-needed overview of how climate change and the current environmental emergency will affect the practice of architecture, both in terms of its design philosophy and rising opportunities to innovate and radically transform the current tenet of architecture’s aesthetic, ethical and professional drives.

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.

Pedro Gadanho is an architect, curator, and writer. He is a Loeb Fellow from Harvard University. He led a recognized architecture renovation practice until 2012, when he became the curator of contemporary architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. There, he curated the Young Architects Program and exhibitions such as 9+1 Ways of Being Political, Uneven Growth, and A Japanese Constellation. He was the founding Director of MAAT, Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, where he initiated more than 50 projects, including publications such as Utopia / Dystopia, Tension & Conflict, and Eco-Visionaries. He has edited Beyond, Short-Stories on the Post-Contemporary, the ShrapnelContemporary blog, and contributes regularly to international publications. He wrote Arquitetura em Público, a recipient of the FAD Prize for Thought and Criticism in 2012.