Decarbonism: A New Architectural Form

It’s been one hundred years since Modernism, that great paradigm shift in architecture, that unified production and form, industry and design. Through the end of the 20th-century, a plethora of architectural movements followed, but unlike their pre-modernist predecessors, each movement from the postwar period onward relied on one constant of Modernism: carbon form. Beginning with the modernists like Le Corbusier, van der Rohe, and Gropius, unique, novel forms were realized, borne out of new materials and constructions. Hiding in the promise of this new aesthetic was an implicit adoption of industrialization, and the carbon energy it relied on to create those technical modernist architectures, in the materials, in the construction methods, even in the forms themselves. Carbon systems, as they permeated through society, also embedded themselves in architecture. Of the many distinct architectural movements throughout the late 20th-century, the overwhelming trend throughout, regardless of theory, programme or intention, was a utilization and reliance on building technology and hyperbolized form enabled by these industrial capabilities. The deconstructivists and the postmodernists, though starkly different, shared a use of dramatic spaces and compositions, only made feasible by the modernist notions of carbon form. Architecture in the 21st-century has been marked by this legacy, beginning the pain-staking process of untangling itself from carbon form, even as that task challenges some core remaining architectural tenets of the 20th-century.

Carbon as Aesthetic

Cultural reliance on carbon is not only embedded in the products and behaviors of our society, it is deeply entrenched in the formal and aesthetic decisions our culture makes. For a century, architectural style has been complicit in the perpetuation of carbon form, though over the last two decades increasingly attention has been paid to form and materiality in an environmental context. In January of 2020 ARCHITECT, the monthly publication of the American Institute of Architects, devoted an entire issue to carbon form in architecture, focusing on the typical construction and operational carbon costs of a given building, but also, importantly, its embodied carbon, a direct product of design and aesthetic choices. Architectural features all incur a carbon cost. Overuse of glazing leaks energy and ties up carbon in high production-cost material. In Qatar, where it is above 90 degrees fahrenheit nearly year round, a building’s exterior must be less than 40% glass. Continuous, exposed concrete slabs and steel beams, like those in Renzo Piano’s Kimbell Museum Addition, puncture the building’s envelope in the name of style, acting as thermal conduits equalizing the interior and exterior temperatures and dragging down the efficiency of the building. Similarly, increased exterior surface area of an architecture, like the curved and fragmented shapes of deconstructivism, cause increased heat loss and require overbuilt structures and resource-intensive engineering. In Praise of the Dumb Box, a widely circulated article written in 2018, proposes that in fact, the typological ‘dumb box’, though aesthetically scorned in contemporary architecture, is actually a highly carbon-effiecient form. Architecture in the 21st-century, migrating away from the carbon-blind aesthetics of the past, also encompasses an incorporation of the natural into the architectural template. Whether the use of vegetation as ornament in Heatherwick Studio’s “1000 Trees” project and BIG’s “IQON” tower, or building skyscrapers using solely wooden structure, to fully consider carbon in architecture is to reevaluate the aesthetics of our built environment and how they reflect our values around finite resources. The push towards a new formalism driven by a morality around carbon is long overdue in architecture, but the last decade signifies a breakthrough in decarbonized aesthetics that looks likely to continue into the century.

Carbon as Structure

Beyond physical aesthetics, macro-level architectural design has the power to reify and further ensconce our society in carbon systems, and conversely expose and renounce them. The paradox of architecture in the age of climate change is that it is tasked with sheltering its inhabitants from the impacts of its own construction. In the guise of large parking structures underneath highrises, implicitly affirming car usage, inadequate waste disposal infrastructures, or poor urban corridor layouts, the design of public and private spaces has a dramatic impact on our carbon behavior. In Houston, TX much of downtown is connected by an extensive network of subterranean tunnels that were first constructed in the post-war era, protecting their inhabitants from the outside and the summer heat. This is not an architecture that refutes carbon form, but one that enables it, coddling society in the safety of a world unaffected by its environmental consequences. As it becomes cumulatively warmer around the world, and technology increasingly infiltrates architecture, interior climate-controlled environments shield us from this change. In a 2015 Rem Koolhaas, of OMA, weighed in on the smart city, identifying an Internet-age tendency to offer digital solutions to an exponentially growing set of urban problems, among them: climate change. Though his argument against the smart city is generalized, he posits that inserting digital technology into the structure of the city in pursuit of optimizing lived space could lead us far astray from pressing urban issues. In relation to carbon form, to designate the urban as the domain of Big Tech, not architecture, is to seek a refuge of ignorance from the real problem in yet another incarnation of technology and industry, not to true solution to carbon form. Architectural structuring since modernism has been heavily integrated with carbon systems, and today, that close connection continues to produce tension between how effectively and efficiently architecture functions for the individual and whether those efficiencies are necessary or worth the cost.

Carbon as Social System

Architecture and carbon form are also relevant in the socioeconomic hierarchies of the city, and urbanism at large. With the impending threat of sea-level rise, warmer temperatures, and more frequent weather events, it has been shown quantitatively in urban analyses that lower-class neighborhoods are often under-developed, lacking green-spaces and natural terrain that mitigate the effects of a heating atmosphere and. A New York Times article from August 2020 shows in depth mapping of temperatures across Richmond, VA, among other cities, cross referenced with the racial divisions and makeups of those neighborhoods. While this is not a novel phenomenon, it is only in the 21st-century that architecture has become aware of how impactful its reliance on carbon form has been to the social systems of society

Finding New Form

Architecture in the 21st-century finds itself caught in the crosshairs of a battle between the rapid and fastening pace of technology, and the objective need to manage its relationship with carbon form. Today, architecture sits in this tension, tasked with providing new aesthetics, built comfort, and equality, while knowing that the carbon status-quo cannot continue. Progress has come slowly, carbon form is present in every minute aspect of daily life, but where the adoption of carbon form during Modernism was a radical pivot, so will the process of decarbonizing architecture call for a path equally as divergent.