Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe are two exceptional architects that are re-defining the boundaries of the discipline through their practice Cooking Sections. They are critically addressing environmental concerns and “more-than-human” environments through a series of exhibitions, performances and publications. In 2021 Cooking Sections was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, and they recently published Offsetted (2021), a book that addresses the financialisation of nature and its impact on the climate emergency. We discussed with them the implications of environmental offsetting, they extended their reflections to the future of the discipline, their pedagogical commitment and their future projects. The interview ended with a question open to all architects: How do we start un-building the environment?
Offsetted lecture-performance by Cooking Sections in Performa, New York, 2017
KOOZ We would like to start with a very general question. Why do trees matter to architects today? Why should they start caring about “more-than-human” ecologies?
DFP We became interested in trees when we were invited to exhibit and present our work in New York; it is perhaps one of the most studied cities in terms of urban history, maps and cartography. It is also one of the strongest case studies in terms of the financialisation of space and the built environment. And at the same time, it has been a place that was at the forefront of urban greening with the “One Million Trees for New York” project. We tried to understand how it evolved over time and asked ourselves what role trees play in the city within the larger debate on the climate emergency, along with the financialization of nature - especially since the financial crash in 2007-2008. So we started looking into the way in which trees are now put to perform and offset human footprints. We started from the contemporary situation, and we then went back in time to look at different moments when trees have been appreciated, or when the value of trees has been contested. More importantly, perhaps, we looked at the relationships between residents and trees: how residents have been using trees to stay in their neighbourhoods or to protect them. At the same time, we looked at how different planning forces have been using greening and planting trees as a way to get rid of “undesirable” populations.
KOOZ Since you just introduced it, can you please explain the paradoxes of “environmental offsetting” and how it affects climate change?
AS The logic of offsetting emerges from the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s and the paradigm that was developed whereby the Global North or so-called developed countries can offset their emissions with countries that are still forced to perform as “underdeveloped”, those that have basically not reached their quota of carbon emissions. This started a whole financial mechanism where countries could trade with each other the surplus emissions that they were polluting into the atmosphere.
DFP Basically, this introduced a new taxonomy: countries with the right to pollute vs. countries with the obligation to cleanse.
The perverse logic behind offsetting basically implies that we can continue to do the same activities that we are doing, as long as we offset or mitigate our emissions, whether we are flying, renting cars or buying food. Offsetting ultimately created the conditions whereby individuals are blamed as the ones responsible for much larger damages that big corporations are simply ignoring.
AS From there offsetting became one of the main drivers in our study of the climate crisis. The perverse logic behind offsetting basically implies that we can continue to do the same activities that we are doing, as long as we offset or mitigate our emissions, whether we are flying, renting cars or buying food. Offsetting ultimately created the conditions whereby individuals are blamed as the ones responsible for much larger damages that big corporations are simply ignoring. NYC trees are branded as an “urban forest”. But more than just greening the city, they are an “offset forest”: its trees have acquired the mission to exonerate environmental destruction.
KOOZ In your book you explain how “natural capitalism” and “polluting governments” foster the “carbon market” through, among others, the use of a new economic and legal language. How does the new proposal on the rights of trees you outlined address the problem of the financialization of the natural environment?
AS The double agenda of calculating the carbon footprint for each tree, and the services it provides, exposes how every tree of New York is connected to a very specific architectural site of destruction. Trees might be purifying the air on-site, but the financial value of each tree does not stay in front of citizens’ houses. Quite the opposite. Tree-planting in low-income areas is just another wave of what David Gissen refers to as “environmental gentrification”, in reference to a park-improvement process initiated in NYC during the 1970s, which enhanced urban nature at the cost of pricing people out of their homes and neighbourhoods.
DFP And that was the main question for us: how do we, as citizens, address all these mechanisms and forces that are way beyond our power? We collaborated with Mari Margil, who also wrote a piece in the book when she was at the front of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). For years they had been working to include the rights of nature into the constitution of countries like Ecuador or Bolivia. So they acted at a governmental level but they have been also collaborating with community organizations to include non-human rights as a way to empower either residents, or just acknowledge the value of nature or the environment for the sake of it. We looked at all these aspects together, but we also discussed the possibility of including the rights of trees through legal amendments in the New York City charter. These amendments prevent the use of trees as carbon offsets and let them just be trees, which sounds very obvious, but at the moment trees are no longer trees because they are used to offset pollution, among other causes. It was through that recognition and legal amendment that we could advance the discourse around the value of trees.
KOOZ The problem of “value” seems indeed central to your argument. What is the point of determining the financial value of trees? Would it be beneficial to move away from economic criteria and open to other value systems, such as Tavares’ point on the “cultural” value of trees?
AS One of the main goals of the book is to understand the way trees have been used to displace people, and the way trees have been used by people to stay in place. This opens to multiple connections, meanings and understandings of trees, be them cultural, environmental or ecological. We tried to draw these connections around the agency of trees at a global scale, but specifically within an urban context. Especially in light of more and more mitigation markets like blue carbon commodity markets that are emerging based on the offsetting formula that was developed with trees. In response, the book explores how one can think of alternative paradigms to all these different forms of offsetting mechanisms.
Economic quantification is at the core of the problem: the moment you start calculating environmental services performed by trees, bogs, coral reefs or any other natural entity is when friction occurs.
DFP Economic quantification is at the core of the problem: the moment you start calculating environmental services performed by trees, bogs, coral reefs or any other natural entity is when friction occurs. It is needless to say that trees have cultural and social value, along with so many other values that are incommensurable. As we see from some of the episodes in the book when thousands of people get together to protect a single tree, well, how can you even start quantifying that? This is precisely the point of the book. It is a tool for architects, planners and designers, or anyone else involved in city planning, to think twice every time there is a tree to be planted or uprooted. The book is an invitation to reflect on the complex set of values that go beyond what each tree can offer to the city. How can people live with trees without being priced out from their greenified neighbourhoods?
KOOZ In fact, you discuss the relationships between financial offsetting and colonization, both human and non-human. Do you think it is possible to draw parallels between environmental gentrification and colonial dispossession based on your research of both NYC trees and indigenous sites?
DFP Absolutely. The case of New York is very clear. The neighbourhoods we studied were the ones that had higher rates of air pollution and, unsurprisingly, these were also the neighbourhoods with the more racialized and marginalized populations. Unfortunately, these conditions reflect post-colonial processes (or still colonial processes) whereby low-wage workers, many times first or second-generation migrants, can’t afford, or don’t have access to, decent housing. Since the 1970s, grassroots activists have been fighting against air pollution, toxic facilities, the lack of trees and green spaces. But their environmental struggle has now also become a housing struggle. With the “One Million Trees” plan, some of those neighbourhoods suddenly became green, and quickly gentrified, attracting other sectors of the population that want to live there because it is now a desirable atmosphere. Now that these activists have trees, they are forced to fight back to stay in place, because of trees. That is one of the paradoxes that emerged in New York. The change from an environmental struggle to a housing struggle is eventually showing an overall class struggle that affects racialized groups who do not have access to secure housing. Not for nothing there have been cases whereby residents have uprooted newly planted trees, seen as a threat to their livelihoods.
Since the 1970s, grassroots activists have been fighting against air pollution, toxic facilities, the lack of trees and green spaces. But their environmental struggle has now also become a housing struggle.
KOOZ I think he connects some of the points you raised earlier. From the research of grassroot associations and activism it emerged the possibility of shaking things from the bottom up: what collective, spatial practices you think could inspire future, ethical architectural and urban designs?
DFP There is no right or wrong answer to that question, but the way we try to address it is by collaborating across disciplines, even just with the conversations such as the one we had with Mari Margil. Suddenly we saw a whole world of possibilities that we had not even considered, or simply did not know. Offsetted is a book that encourages people to cross those disciplinary boundaries, to understand the legal or economic implications of a tree, or the many other possibilities that have not even been thought about. It suggests that we should start thinking about trees, other plants or other environments in a more holistic way, asking how all these different species depend on each other.
AS The book also expands on the question of how to transform Western legal systems to become for the people and for nature, as opposed to against people and against nature. The new public ordinance at the end of the book aspires to do that, moving from the discussion of personhood towards an insistence on naturehood. New York is, in effect, a highly developed experiment in capitalism, and thus it is also just the place where the shift from neoliberal approaches to different forms of tree appreciation may be possible.
KOOZ I think this leads to questions about the future of the discipline. Your work pushes the boundaries of architecture. In Offsetted you propose new epistemologies (“for nature and not against”) and state:
With offsetting as a means of environmental mitigation, architecture has acquired the agency to destroy, displace, and replicate natural landscapesmiles away from their original location. It is thus the responsibility of architects and realtors to de-quantify the “value” of trees instead of profiteering from them and what they offset. Neither energy-efficient glazing nor LEED certificates will insulate humanity from the effects of the climate crisis; instead, architects must be responsible towards the sites they are asked to build in, engaging with the consequences of damage before externalizing or offsetting it. It is time to imagine new forms of architecture and environmental care that include more than-human worlds.
Is it a call for a radical rethinking of the profession? What would you suggest architects ultimately do?
AS In many ways the book tries to open up these questions and to show the consequences, or the way architects, planners and spatial practitioners are deeply embedded in these mechanisms. It also asks how we could start thinking about these problems from a multiplicity of scales. In fact, these problems cannot be continuously externalised. There is a need to act and transform the practice, along with the way we build and construct our environments, or even actually deconstruct the environments we work in.
DFP In the book we put forward the idea that trees have no value. They, of course, have a lot of value, but at the same time they should not have any in financial, quantifiable terms. The idea of offsetting was not so much discussed in the media when we started working on this project, which was around 2016. However, over the past two, three years (especially since the pandemic) “no net zero carbon emissions” became shockingly popular, a framework that has been adopted by many governments as their future agenda. But “no net zero” is actually not total zero, which is what we should be aspiring to. No net zero means there is still some damage.
KOOZ That is very interesting, in fact, I was wondering whether there are other aspects or insights that you might have included, or might wish to retrospectively include in the book?
DFP Certainly. You always wish to have more time to collect more stories and expand the research beyond New York. Especially because the idea of planting millions of trees and creating maps of the trees has been recently expanding beyond the boundaries of New York City. As far as we know this is taking place in London and Amsterdam, but more research needs to be done. The New York neoliberal model, instead of being rethought, has been copy-pasted to other places with a cookie-cutter.
P. Lambert, Seagram: Union of building and landscape, Places, April 2013.
KOOZ Let me change subject. Education and pedagogy seem to be two key components of your work. Given your experience with the post-graduate students at the RCA, were you and your students able to identify virtuous spatial and design solutions/agendas/practices?
AS Between 2016 and 2019 we ran a studio that focused on the question of offsetting. We like to avoid the notion of solutions, and instead think of different approximations, tactics or ways to address the question of offsetting from multiple approaches. Architecture practices today are unfortunately more and more embedded in offsetting and “no net loss”, so we departed from these reflections as a premise. Students developed projects that identified conflicted species and spaces to identify how different construction sites in different geographical areas - mainly in the global north - are implicated in emissions trading that are displacing more and more indigenous people from their ancestral lands. On the other hand, when forests become conservation areas people that previously had profound living connections to that environment (as the forest provided important habitat and natural resources) do not have access to it anymore, and as a result, they become so-called “conservation refugees”. The pedagogical exercises and research projects the students developed challenged how we think about construction and building by not externalising construction’s harm. How do we start thinking then about the de-construction? How can we start thinking about removing the obstacles that many times we are creating ourselves?
KOOZ I noticed that you use the term “deconstruction” frequently, which is, of course, a very powerful and loaded term. I think, however, that it leads to something that we are exploring in our platform: the “un-built” as a concept or tool that can contribute substantially to the future of architecture, especially if we think about it critically. What is your position towards the un-built environment from a critical and even political perspective?
DFP We are very interested in the built environment but also in the unbuilt environment, and that can be from a very speculative standpoint to a very material and physical one. So how do we start un-building the environment? Many modern infrastructures were paradigmatic, especially within the architecture world, because they tested new technologies, new materials, new open plans. They were really modern but at the same time, many of those infrastructures might be redundant, because we might not want nuclear power plants in our cities, for instance. So we have been thinking a lot about how to remove redundant infrastructures of modernity. This connects to a project we are currently working on in Scandinavia, which we will launch in September. It is an exhibition called Undamming Rivers, looking at the removal of redundant hydropower dams that were thought to produce green energy when they were implemented at the expense of damaging indigenous lands. They soon became a burden for riparian ecologies, and even in terms of electricity production they are not the most efficient anyways. Humanity has been building some of these infrastructures that might not make sense anymore, and that might open up a whole new future for the discipline. Probably in ten years there will be many architects that will specialize in un-building or demolition or, of course, repurposing of the existing to reimagine a new world and investigate nature’s new terms.
Link to the book: Offsetted (Hatje Cantz, 2022)
Bio
Cooking Sections examines the systems that organise the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation. Their work has been exhibited at many institutions such as Tate Britain, Serpentine Galleries, SALT, the Taipei Biennial, the 58th Venice Biennale, Performa17, Manifesta12, and New Orleans Triennial among others. They lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London, and were guest professors at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Cooking Sections were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021. They were awarded the Special Prize at the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and were nominated for the Visible Award for socially-engaged practices. Daniel is the recipient of the 2020 Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize for Being Shellfish.
Francesca Romana Forlini is an architect, Ph.D, editor, writer and educator whose research is located at the intersection of feminism, cultural sociology and architectural history and theory. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York Institute of Technology and Parsons The New School in New York. She worked as chief editor at KoozArch, where she is currently a contributor. She is a Fulbrighter ed alumna of Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the RCA.
