In sustainability discourse, the loudest voices are often those with the flashiest new gadgets and quickest—albeit superficial—fixes. (See projects like Bjarke Ingels’s Masterplanet, Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale, or Foster + Partners’ Masdar City.) But in recent years, we have seen a rise in designers advocating for simply doing less. Degrowth began as an economic term arguing that our markets and economies need to be managed so we don’t deplete the finite resources of our planet. The concept has gained ground among those who study one of the most resource-intensive industries in the world: construction. Voices such as Jonathan Levy, John Harwood, and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes oppose the status quo, in which architects function effectively like coal miners— extracting resources from the ground to meet demand set by the rich and powerful, fueling the planet’s demise. But the work of these emerging voices today was made possible by early pioneers who found a voice to critique the field’s assumed exponential growth—and embraced the detritus left behind.
Refusal and degrowth thinking present an uncomfortable question for architects: What would happen if the world stopped building new buildings? Looking for the root of architectures of refusal, I spoke with Jack Rusk, a director of climate strategy at EHDD, and also with Jill Stoner, coeditor of the November/December 2022 Architectures of Refusal issue of AD, and Lloyd Kahn, author of Shelter and publisher of Whole Earth Catalog. Both Stoner and Kahn have spent their careers advocating for degrowth principles rooted in an intimately individual experience of architecture. While climate anxiety takes hold of us all, Kahn’s and Stoner’s reflections on individual agency and the ethical clarity expected of architectural professionals are worth revisiting.
Post-Dome
Lloyd Kahn’s career began when he allowed himself to change his mind. The builder, publisher, and designer might be best-known for publishing Whole Earth Catalog, but he was equally famous for popularizing utopic new architecture like the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller. He wrote and published the enormously popular Domebook in 1970, which led to a follow-up with expanded techniques and photographs in the 1972 Domebook 2. “I actually built several [domes] at Pacific High School with Bucky,” Kahn said, “but after all this building, and building one myself, I realized they didn’t work.” Kahn felt constrained in his ability to organize life and designs inside the domes, and moreover, they used plastic and nonrenewables that were costly to the planet and complex to assemble.
“When I called and put a stop to the printing of Domebook 2, people thought I was crazy,” Kahn said. Demand for Domebook 1 and 2 was so high that multiple presses were in motion. But Kahn was firm in his resolve. After halting production, he traveled for two years and listened deeply. He lived with communities around the country and throughout the world that had deeper connections with the land; he discovered the good energy humans feel when interacting with natural materials. After these travels, the next steps were clear: Kahn published Shelter, which has sold more than 400,000 copies.
Like Whole Earth Catalog, Shelter takes the form of a how-to manual—a format that has been undergoing a renaissance recently among young practitioners and academics. Kahn notes that “millennials, in particular, have become suddenly interested in my work and the work of the Pacific builders in the ‘60s and ‘70s.” We speculated as to why: “Back then, there were no financial barriers to building out here”—Kahn has lived and built homes in Big Sur and currently lives in a house of his own making in Bolinas, California—“but now, it costs millions. People today are interested in the autonomy of building their own spaces because there are seemingly no other options.” His work centers on empowering people to chart their own design paths that use local, natural materials and incorporate passive principles. Not only are these light on environmental impact but they are quietly radical in their assertion that architecture can exist outside the specifications, timelines, and pockets of homebuilders and developers.
Design Through Subtraction and Literature
Jill Stoner has also seen her groundbreaking work come back into style. She began by teaching design studios at Berkeley on the concept of degrowth as she witnessed San Francisco exploding around her. “I looked around and thought maybe the buildings that we were building, the buildings we had already built, are enough. This was my first manifesto: a statement calling for a 50-year moratorium on new buildings.” This was the era of the corporate lobby and of overwhelming PoMo gestures—in many ways a revolt against the free-flowing ideals of the 1960s and 1970s like environmental sensibilities (Silent Spring) and utopian design triumphs (A Pattern Language). “It was then that I said, ‘No new buildings.’ Imagine the response in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, right? I was considered a lunatic,” Stoner told me. “But my career has been based on this belief ever since.”
Stoner’s studio teaching engaged with the concept of converting vacant office space in dense cities like San Francisco decades ago, but others balked. “I taught graduate studios at Berkeley for probably 15 years that focused on the theme of what I called ‘architecture by subtraction,’” she explained. She and her students designed by taking material away from, for example, big postwar office buildings, therefore allowing them to serve what Stoner described as “a deeper urban use.”
Beyond connecting creative writing and architecture in the book Toward a Minor Architecture, Stoner also taught an annual seminar titled “The Literature of Space,” in which she introduced architecture students to concepts of world-building outside of the material demands of the studio or the extractive demands of traditional client work. Today it’s commonplace for architects to invoke the narrative aspect of proposals and concepts, which can be used to formulate a new flavor of “paper architecture.”
“What I look for in literature for architects isn’t necessarily a spatial theme, but certain characters that actually observe things that are incredibly revealing,” Stoner said, explaining her original impetus for teaching the course. “I refer to the characters as architectural critics themselves. Following them we can see something differently: Through the eyes of a suburban car salesman, we can suddenly look at his neighborhood and think, ‘God, you know, there’s no children outside.’ When he was growing up, the street was full of children playing. Why have things changed? Things like that.” These ways of storytelling impact work on the built environment and push the culture forward in interdisciplinary ways. And Stoner found narrative to be an effective vehicle for her more radical ideas to take hold.
Degrowth Today
Stoner and Kahn both know that advocacy is needed to give their architectural visions room to grow. Kahn puts out a weekly Substack with tips on how young urban dwellers can build their own homes. “I usually say, ‘Find an existing building you can fix up and make your own.’ That’s the most cost-effective way to build sustainably and responsibly today with building permits and mortgage rates being what they are,” Kahn offered.
Stoner also invoked policy hiccups—as well as progress: “While I’ve long taught design students to embrace opportunities for subversive action, timelines for adaptation in local government have shortened. We’ve made a huge leap in the past ten years regarding ADUs, for example. What was heresy ten years ago—no parking for a unit!— is now totally supported. The politics went from being ‘sneak it in without permits’ to something very much part of the mainstream industry. And this is all due to who’s framing the narrative.”
Other voices are taking up these ideas that Kahn and Stoner have favored for decades. Beyond Stoner’s issue of AD, Marcelo López– Dinardi edited a 2022 issue of ARQ on the subject, with contributions from familiar names like Virginia Hanusik, Civil Architecture, and Lacol, among others; AN contributor Amelyn Ng has organized exhibitions like D.E.P.O.T. ® to explore salvage and material exchange; and a range of voices have participated in eflux’s After Comfort: A User’s Guide series.
Plus organizations like The Architecture Lobby’s Green New Deal Working Group advocate for workplace improvements while also leading the charge to demand a more essential version of “sustainability” that starts with the professional’s right of refusal. Jack Rusk, director of climate strategy at EHDD, sees refusal as a key tool for architects looking to practice more sustainably: “Passing on work because it doesn’t support a firm’s mission and vision isn’t a radical idea; every architecture firm has their version of a go/no-go analysis for new pursuits. Increasingly, firms are recognizing the reputational value of pursuing projects where climate action is a priority and passing on projects where climate inaction could pose reputational risk.” Across practice and academia alike, it is increasingly difficult to discuss environmental responsibility without talking about refusing the assumption of endless growth. “We are not designing and constructing buildings for their own sake,” Rusk explained, “but to meet human and societal needs. A new building might be the answer to this, but it’s not necessarily so.”
While sustainability rightfully remains a hot topic, Stoner invites contemporary designers, academics, and educators to interrogate the heart of the word. “Sustainability was originally used to mean an ethics of resource use to allow future generations to enjoy the same privileges that we enjoy now. And to me, that was not nearly profound enough. If we’re only worried about people still being able to have air-conditioning 80 years from now, I feel like that’s the wrong message. For me, it’s about refusing the excess that we’ve come to expect.”
