IMPURE TECH
Alexandre Monnin
In discussion with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
Monday 25 March 2024, 6.30 pm
If any building designed according to the currently dominant architectural principles is ‘zombie’, non-living, as it is based on technologies and energies that will soon be exhausted or too costly for the planet, how can we rethink our relationship with buildings and technology? What are the possible attitudes between the usual categories of cutting-edge technology, high-tech, and its antonym, low-tech?
BIOGRAPHIES
Alexandre Monnin heads the “Strategy & Design for the Anthropocene” Master of Science program, run jointly by ESC Clermont BS and Strate Ecole de Design in Lyon. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, with a thesis on the philosophy and architecture of the Web. Co-initiator of the ecological redirection movement with Diego Landivar and Emmanuel Bonnet, he published with them Héritage et Fermeture (Éditions Divergences, May 2021), edited Écologies du Smartphone with Laurence Allard and Nicolas Nova (Bord de l’eau, 2022), and more recently published Politiser le Renoncement (again with Éditions Divergences, April 2023), and a Majeure about negative commons in Multitudes (n°93, Winter 2023).
Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology—EPFL, where she leads the laboratory RIOT. Malterre-Barthes’ interests focus on urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization, material extraction, climate emergency, and social and spatial justice. In 2020, when appointed Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she started the initiative ‘A Global Moratorium on New Construction,’ interrogating current development protocols (forthcoming 2024, Sternberg Press & MIT Press). A founding member of the Parity Group (Meret Oppenheim Prize 2023) and of the Parity Front, activist networks dedicated to equality in architecture, Malterre-Barthes holds a Ph.D. (ETH Zurich) on the political economy of commodities and the built environment.
This spring, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (RIOT-EPFL) and Olaf Grawert (Station+ ETHZ) will conduct a joint studio on labor and class struggles in architecture under the theme ‘Stop Building: Fix the Office.’
