Thread by @RobJCurley

Fascinating talk hosted by @AAIarchitecture tonight.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes calling for a global moratorium on new construction.

To paraphrase “what is being built is being built within economical logic by people that do not have the interests of the unhoused at heart.”
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“Design offices need to deploy their organising abilities to think about not building, building less and building with what exists.”

“Questioning new construction as a solution to the housing crisis is the route out of a crisis of imagination.”

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#ConstructionMoratorium

This is boiling the piss of all the right people. The idea of a “construction moratorium” is essentially click bait to start a conversation.

The quote tweets highlight the lack of nuance in the current discourse on our built environment dominated by blind “build build build”

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The point is to question what are we actually building?

What materials are we using? Why are we building a certain way and how are we setting regulations?

The construction moratorium calls for a pause for analysis and engagement with these issues.
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Many of the qts & replies (some from quite prominent accounts) to a couple of paraphrased quotes picked out from a 2 hour lecture, really prove a point about the dogmatism & lack of nuance around construction and housing discourse online. Lots of baseless assumptions being made.