From housing redistribution to re-inviting value generation, from anti-extractive measures to profound structural changes, from reinventing design processes and revolutionising construction protocols, from curricula reforms to purging the exploitative culture of the office, from respecting soil to embracing reuse and dismantling, an entire rewiring of architecture and planning disciplines lay ahead if these are to be serious about tackling the multiple crises. Somewhere between a thought experiment and a call for action, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes will discuss the initiative of A Moratorium on New Construction as a possible self-repairing tactic for a broken discipline.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (ENAC-EPFL). Most recently Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Malterre-Barthes’ interests are related to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanisation, material extraction, climate emergency, and ecological/social justice. In 2020, she started the initiative “A Moratorium on New Construction,” interrogating current development protocols. A founding member of the Parity Group (Prix Meret Oppenheim 2023) and of the Parity Front, activist networks dedicated to equality in architecture, Malterre-Barthes holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich on the political economy of commodities in the built environment. She is the co-author of prize-winning books Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity (2020), Eileen Gray: A House under the Sun (2019), Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore (2018), and Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (2016), among others.