Every new building is a problem. Our planet's natural resources are at odds with the capitalist model of infinite economic and territorial expansion through the built environment. The Un-built as re-use, repair, and regeneration advocates for the necessity of embracing a circular vision to eliminate the building and construction’s industry’s anthropogenic footprint and embrace a more caring attitude towards our planetary ecosystem. Architects and planners must embrace their agency and “re-direct their creative power as well as their lobbying capacities, to support urgent transformations”¹ towards a more sustainable and regenerative built environment.

Today’s building industry accounts for thirty-six per cent of global energy demand and thirty-seven per cent of energy-related CO2 emissions. To reach the 1.5 degrees of the Paris Agreement, the global buildings and construction sector must almost completely decarbonize by 2050. Specifically, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action Human Settlements Pathway has outlined the following goal:

"By 2030, the built environment should halve its emissions, whereby 100 per cent of new buildings must be net‐zerocarbon in operation, with widespread energy efficiency retrofit of existing assets well underway, and embodied carbon must be reduced by at least 40 per cent, with leading projects achieving at least 50 per cent reductions in embodied carbon. By 2050, at the latest, all new and existing assets must be net zero across the whole life cycle, including operational and embodied emissions."

These figures are even more concerning when we consider that the total number of buildings in the world is expected to double over the next 40 years, reaching an unprecedented 465bn square meters in 2060, “the equivalent of adding the floor area of Japan to the planet every single year to 2060.”² These concerns must first of all alarm the Global North, whose unrestrained urbanisation has caused large ecological damages through resources’ extraction – oftentimes in the Global South – and most of the global carbon emissions produced by the construction industry.

The un-built as re-use looks to both the re-use of materials deployed within the construction industry as well as the adaptive re-use of existing buildings. It asks us to look at our built environment without prejudice and not as a problem, but rather as a foundation and a resource.³

The un-built as re-use stems primarily from an analysis of the embodied energy of our built environment as the total expenditure of the energy involved in the material extraction, processing, transport, assembly, installation, demolition and decomposition associated with the life cycle of any building.⁴

Although contemporary environmental certifications are mainly concerned with the lifetime operations of a building in terms of “energy” consumption, this only accounts for twenty percent of the systematic energy associated with astructure, with the remaining eighty being concerned with the extraction and construction, manufacture and maintenance, demolition and decomposition of the artefact. Within this context and considering that the average life span of buildings in the developed world are declining - from around 70 years in America to as few as 30 years in Japan - emphasis on the fuel efficiency of a building almost appears unnecessary. By level of magnitude of impact, we should rather focus on energy and architecture⁵ and fundamentallyadvocate for the re-use of existing materials and constructions, from the hinge to the building. This led to the renowned motto of the Pritzker Prize laureates Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal:

"Never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse!^"6

"Demolishing is a decision of easiness and short term. It is a waste of many things – a waste of energy, a waste of material, and a waste of history. Moreover, it has a very negative social impact. For us, it is an act of violence."⁷

The un-built as repair stems from the Latin reparare, from re- ‘back’ + parare ‘make ready’explores the knowledgeand practices that contribute to the durability of our built world.A post-carbon planet can only exist if one looks to the servicing and maintaining spaces, designing and implementing sustainable forms, reducing waste and obsolescence and ensuring the often-precarious continuity of the functioning of our cities.

The un-built as repair moves beyond the materiality, footprint, and site impactof an individual building to the social dimension of the practice exploring architecturewithin a complex web of interconnected people, animals, plants and other non-human entities.⁸

Beyond the individual edifice, the un-built as repair looks to the fragility of ecosystems and communities and situates their relations at the forefront of the design process.Rather than providing static responses, it encourages us to imagine dynamic, adaptive solutions that evolve hand in hand with things and people, environments and spaces.

The un-built as regeneration argues that the way we understand sustainability in architecture today is an inadequate measure for current and future architectural design, for it aims no higher than trying to make a building “less harmful” to the planet. So the un-built as regeneration challenges the discipline of architecture to urgently rethink this edeavour as one which can have a positive impact on the environment⁹ by engaging the natural world as the medium for, and generator of the architecture. Regenerative architecture both “responds to and utilizes the living and natural systems that exist on a site as the 'building blocks' of the architecture as well as understanding and treating the environment as an equal shareholder in the architecture."¹⁰

The un-built as regeneration embraces approaches that “restore ecosystems, reunite divided communities, and reciprocally enhance the interdependent health of people, place and planet.”¹¹

The Un-built as re-use, repair, and regeneration calls for a “halt of the ongoing rape of virgin land”¹¹ and demands a paradigm shift from our contemporary, selfish frenzy of designing and constructing new buildings rather than repairing, re-using and regenerating what is already there.

Notes

1 Pedro Gadanho, Climax Change! Architecture’s Paradigm Shift After the Ecological Crisis (Barcelona: Actar, 2022).
2 United Nations Environmental Program, “Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction 2021”. Available at: [link]
3 Anne Lacaton, “Architecture Talks: Repair and Access” Filmed on 31 May 2022. Available at: [link]
4 Thomas de Monchaux, "A New Idea in Architecture? No New Buildings" in Metropolis Mag, December 30, 2019. Available at: [link]
5 Samuel David Bruce, "In Conversation with Kiel Moe" in Yale Paprika vol 4, issue 3, 2018. Available at: [link]
6 F. Druot, A. Lacaton and J. P. Vassal, PLUS – Les Grands Ensembles des Logements (Barcelona: GG, 2007).
7 Oliver Wainwright, "'Sometimes the answer is to do nothing': unflashy French duo take architecture's top prize" in The Guardian, March 16, 2021. Available at: [link]
8 Mario Baracco, Luise Wright, eds, Repair: Australian Pavilion 16th Venice Biennale (NYC: Actar, 2018).
9 Sarah Chioka, intervention at the LINA conference in Ljubljana, 2022.
10 B. Reed, “A Living Systems Approach to Design” at the AIA National Convention, May 22, 2007.
11 Sarah Chioka, intervention at the LINA conference in Ljubljana, 2022.
12 Gadanho, Climax Change!