Architecture and Aetiology:

Thomas Hyo-min King is a dual Master of Architecture and Master of City Planning candidate whose work explores the role of architecture in our shifting energy regime, examining how the political ecology of building production, technology, and practice can reinforce or challenge meaningful climate action. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from McGill University, where he serves as a research lead at Reconstruct, an R&D initiative developing a mass deep-energy retrofit program for Quebec. Previously, he worked as an urban designer on projects addressing urban health, coastal vulnerability, and water scarcity across Asia and the Middle East, and co-founded Biocene, a cleantech startup focused on water remediation and waste upcycling. His research has been published in Buildings & Cities, the Passive House Institute of the US, Cellar Architectural Journal, and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

The workshop investigated material cultures of forestry in the Finnish Lakeland. Combining theoretical explorations and ‘timber cruises’—forest excursions to document and represent tree stands—the course provided participants with an opportunity to interrogate timber provenance and its attendant value systems, instruments, and technologies. Pictured here: a timber cruise diagram on the workshop poster.

In some ways, redefining the scope of architectural projects to interrogate or intervene in broader politico-economic arenas feels like a disciplinary overstep—but the nature and immediacy of climate change perhaps urges us to revisit this sentiment. Sensibly so, as architecture has, according to some scholars, inherited a centuries-old epistemic tradition of Western science that was arranged both intellectually and institutionally around “disciplines,” in which specialists were trained to amass a high level of expertise in a narrowly bounded area of inquiry. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway elaborate in their essay on the history of climate change, The Collapse of Western Civilization, this “reductionist” approach was thought to provide intellectual power and rigour to research by focusing on discrete, tractable elements of larger complex problems. While reductionism and tractability helped advance many domains, they inhibited correlative investigations of complex phenomena—effectively rendering it difficult for scientists to both articulate and/or feel empowered to speak to the causes and effects of climate change. Today, that legacy persists in many architectural institutions and their curricular mandates. It follows that the tension that emerges at the interface of reductionist expertise, nihilism, and complex socioecological problems is what provokes, in part, an existentialism of agency within the discipline.

Against the backdrop of these structural and epistemic constraints, Malm’s call to dialectical materialism offers one part of a framework that might help architectural practice gain common political ground. Here, agency is neither an ontological property equally distributed across all beings nor a transcendent human privilege, but a historically situated capacity for understanding the effects of social action on material phenomena. Society possesses a unique set of emergent properties (not latent to nature) that can be reconfigured as much as they were intentionally constructed. This is not to deny the potency of other nonhuman forces, but to assert that agency is asymmetrical and operates through social chains of causation—whether these are supply chains and material standards, procurement policies and regulatory frameworks, or business models, maintenance regimes, and labour and construction practices. Understanding architecture’s aetiology through this web then helps identify moments of rupture that may renegotiate the engagements of building production in broader environmental outcomes.

Admittedly, this incrementalist approach feels in some ways closest to what might be a realist definition of agency for the discipline of architecture: meaning a praxis based in cumulative action and an acceptance of the constraints of existing economic and political systems. However, a submission to realism leaves practice susceptible to the forces that choreograph it, and increasingly diminishes the agency of architects—who have fewer and fewer linkages through which to effect meaningful change—at least within a speculative market economy that construes buildings primarily as financial instruments. The incrementalist position, although benevolent, is not equipped with tools to resist the contraction of the architectural arena and urgently confront the multiple compounding crises that climate change renders legible in the built environment. How, then, can architecture pursue structural climate action? Does our current existential paradigm demand a redefinition of agency within the practice of architecture?

It might be worth investigating the aetiology of architecture: that is, the causal phenomena underlying the problems practitioners inherit in the process of building design and construction. Rather than assume a passive, reactionary position to such effects, the age of climate change might necessitate more proactive, and transdisciplinary, forms of intervention that, at the very least, reckon with problems at their root. Indeed, an incrementalist practice that does not negotiate with structural linkages further upstream or downstream of building production can, in cases, exacerbate greater harm. This is among the most alarming risks of the contemporary frontier of architectural pedagogy and research, where much emphasis has been placed on the capacity for architects to simply address the symptoms (rather than manners of causation) of uneven and injurious urban metabolism, with projects of efficiency, reuse, and optimization. There is a pedagogical reluctance here to confront Jevon’s Paradox, which tells us that increased efficiencies can lead to deeper cycles of consumption and self-destructing growth, by decreasing costs and ultimately increasing global material and energetic throughput. Evidently, the paradox is not in the foreground of academia or practice, as recent fashions for reuse, retrofit, remediation, and all manners of re- without structural reckoning can reduce architectural interventions to techno-fixes in the face of climate breakdown. While these projects are critical and urgent, they risk remaining a band-aid on a much larger operation of extraction, and co-option to frontiers for capitalist accumulation in and of themselves.

While this is less a call to overhaul all contracts of architectural conduct, it is an appeal to engage meaningfully with the causal relations and value systems that underwrite architectural production. If architects are to play their part in the age of climate breakdown, they must reckon with the limitations of nihilism or reductionism, moving beyond building production as a reactive instrument of capital or a vessel for climate-averse political agendas. Rather, it means cultivating a design praxis that is necessarily political, transdisciplinary, and proactive, to understand architecture as an arena for arbitrating the forces that produce it. To redefine agency, then, is not to dissolve it into the flux of matter, nor to retreat into non-action, but to work through building as a platform for urgent mediation: one capable of discerning where and how to intervene in the tangled aetiologies of the environmental crisis.