For the sake of construing a holistic understanding of the factors that have influenced architectural evolution, it is imperative to examine antithetical strands and their concurrent advancement through history. For instance, while novel technologies have enhanced the efficacy of the construction industry and influenced architectural styles, the excessive and discordant usage of the same tools has also incurred detrimental effects on, most prominently, the urban environment across the globe. Likewise, while the free market system incentivises innovation and creativity in design and architecture, it also leads to unequal access to infrastructure and the precedence of profits over welfare in the context of urban developments. Similarly, changing lifestyles have altered both urban morphologies and the indoor layouts of residential units, which, in consequence, escalates social isolation, among other pitfalls.

Whether issues emerge due to seemingly solutional innovations, construction practices, design procedures or architectural trends, remedies are typically sought from professionals within the architectural community itself. These architectural innovations then arise either in a restorative or preventative capacity.

In a similar vein, climatic conditions induce architectural and technological innovations, too. Undertaken to ensure thermal comfort, some of these innovations are extractive while others are either regenerative or impervious towards the environment. As a partial consequence of the former, we are witness to the degradation of the environment, the subsequent climate change and by extension, climatic catastrophes around us. Conversely, these issues, too, beget architectural innovations. It is this synergistic flux of climate and architecture that is examined in the book It's About Time: The Architecture of Climate Change, developed under nai010 publishers, which is based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

The book's title aptly condenses the perpetual state of frustration that is unanimously felt by individuals in tandem with climate change and its many physical and visceral manifestations. Moreover, it concertedly serves as a call to action and a promise by premising the title on the eventual links drawn between climate and architecture in the book. With an urgent tone, the book asserts that “the momentum to realise change has arrived and that the field of architecture plays an important role in the systemic transitions we are moving toward.” 

The ideas relayed within the book were conceived during the curatorial meetings held in preparation for the 10th edition of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) that bore the eponymous theme It’s About Time. Brought together by Saskia van Stein (General and Artistic Director, IABR), the authors of the book have merged, intertwined and safeguarded their respective areas of expertise to illustrate “the connection between meaningful histories and alternative futures; the science of academic research and the lived experience of practices; an understanding of the architectural object and the holistic foundation of landscapes; linking transition thinking with the seeds of participatory evolvement and implementation.”

These include Derk Loorbach (researcher, Director of DRIFT, Professor of Socio-economic Transitions at Erasmus University Rotterdam's School of Social and Behavioural Sciences), Véronique Patteeuw (architectural historian, Associate Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et du Paysage Lille and Academic Editor of OASE, Journal for Architecture), Léa-Catherine Szacka (architect, writer, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at University of Manchester and Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group) and Peter Veenstra (landscape designer and Co-Founder of LOLA Landscape Architects). The culmination of this research resulted in the publication and launch of It's About Time: The Architecture of Climate Change during IABR 2024.

This reinvention of architecture as long-term thinking calls for other design attitudes, for instance by understanding time as a design material that could incentivise and catalyse the change of our ways. – Saskia van Stein

Scoping the contents of the book, an excerpt from the press release delineates, "The history of climate change and the history of architecture are connected in many ways. This book intertwines climate action and architectural design through time. It explores architectural experimentation in the past, depicts the present moment of transition and offers hopeful glimpses of the future.” It includes a repository of various historical and contemporary projects that have been conceived to pacify climate change or mitigate its impacts in particular regions. Additionally, the book also outlines more than 45 key moments in the history of environmental awareness. It’s About Time, thus, serves as both a handbook and a source of inspiration for designers, architects, educators, students and individuals "motivated to shape the plural futures of our contemporary landscape".

Without resorting to sanctimonious declarations, the book conveys the drawbacks of solely relying on short-term profit-driven models. It opens with Stein’s introduction, which features a discourse on the nature of time and its relationship to climate change. Critiquing the Western world’s conception of time as a linearly flowing entity wherein growth is equated with linear accumulation, progress and acceleration, Stein proposes the need to adopt a more cyclical and interconnected understanding of time to respond to the extant issues of climate crisis.

"Our kneejerk reaction to change is to hold on to and safeguard what we have – stasis, border control and further fortification,” Stein remarks within the introductory essay in the book, exposing the ramifications of viewing time as linear and hence, an entity available in deficit. “Yet we are inherently inseparable from time, our histories, each other and our planet,” she further asserts, premising the need to develop a non-linear understanding of time and “embracing a more adaptive relationship to uncertainty because it holds the promise of igniting positive change in ourselves, our communities and our environments”. Concurrently, Stein also discusses the need to drive diversity and adaptation within the architectural realm as well as create societies where the historical remnants and repercussions of colonialism, social injustice and the extraction of labour, material and energy are addressed. Finally, the chapter argues that architecture must shift from short-term profit-driven models to long-term, ecologically responsible approaches.

Within the book are listed several key moments from history wherein environmental issues were addressed. Some of these include the public awareness raised about the impact of industrial pollution on air quality in the winter of 1952 during the Great London Smog; the 1957 trial against DDT spraying in Long Island; the documentation of the harmful effects of mankind’s war on insects in American marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962); the development of the Gaia hypothesis which posits that the Earth and all its ecosystems are one giant entity or organism; Douglas Trumbull’s environmental post-apocalyptic science fiction film Silent Running (1972); the Chernobyl disaster; the 1988 Ocean Dumping Ban Act; the anti-globalisation movement that unfolded at the turn of the century; a theoretical proposition of the Planetary Boundaries by Swedish scientist and educator Johan Rockström in 2009; and the introduction of the Doughnut Economy by British economist Kate Raworth in 2012.

Recurrent environmental calamities have also led to the initiation of various organisations and events. These include the initiation of Earth Day in 1970; the founding of global environmental organisation Greenpeace, which uses direct action, advocacy, research and ecotage to raise awareness and promote solutions for environmental issues; the 1972 ‘Only One Earth’ United Nations Conference on the Human Environment; the first World Climate Conference in 1979; the Earth Summit in 1992; the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997; the establishment of Earth First!, a radical network of autonomous groups, promising ‘no compromise in defence of Mother Earth’; the Paris Agreement with 196 parties at COP21; and the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and 17 accompanying Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by all 193 member states of the United Nations in 2015.

[...] by shaking up the community of architects and other stakeholders, by foregrounding contemporary issues in relation to the role(s) that the professions have to play, they can help develop methods to empower them to strengthen the narratives for an architectural discipline beyond extractive practices. – Saskia van Stein

Further, the elaboration of events such as the oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPAEC) on countries that had supported Israel at any point during the Yom Kippur War, illustrates the various short and long-term effects incurred on the global economy and politics due to the sanction. The embargo also led to an acknowledgement of the acute nature of man’s dependence on fossil fuels and further spurred accelerated innovation and research of renewable energy. Some recent happenings that have not yet escaped our working memories and continue to inundate both our lives and imaginations include Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future movement; the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the geopolitical disarray ongoing in disparate parts of the world.

Premised on the mention of these aforementioned happenings through history, It's About Time: The Architecture of Climate Change is further segmented into three portions. The first of these, denominated under the head ‘Limitless Growth, Finite World’, discusses the history of environmental awareness, with particular focus levied on the year 1972 when The Limits to Growth report was published by the Club of Rome. Presenting an accurate outline of the causes behind the global emergency we face today and forewarning about the dangers of fossil fuel-based economic growth, the report catalysed better environmental consciousness at a global level. Within the chapters spread across this section, the writers trace the impact global economic and political structures have had on environmental degradation. The assessment of various ambitious climate policies and simultaneously running extractive projects reveal that the dissonant nature of proceeding with sustainable efforts will typically lead to only marginal changes.

In this vein, the chapter also presses upon architecture’s potential for change and propounds that “the goal is not to incorporate the latest sustainable technologies into the next building, but to help build a radically different long-term future”. Further, it asserts the potential for architects to employ their knowledge of materiality and inspire the practice of traditional, non-extractive methods for sustainable outcomes among non-professionals.

The second section of the book, titled ‘Sustainable Architectural Experiments: The Past’, presents several historical attempts that have been made to integrate sustainable practices in architecture. These also include innovations that have emerged as responses to recurrent energy, climatic and environmental crises throughout history. Some of these include alternatives developed for fossil fuels, the development of autonomous structures, energy-efficient construction, usage of natural building materials, the implementation of biomorphic entities and biophilic mechanisms and the undertaking of experimental projects with an emphasis on circularity and salvaged materials. The exploration of the aforementioned initiatives in the book showcases the immense potential of architecture in sustaining and promoting a cognisant and well-paced consumption cycle.

The concluding section, ‘Architecture in Transition: The Present and Futures’ propounds that which is known, yet not practised, as Greta Thunberg points out, “The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change.” With the intent of decluttering findings and propositions, this section focuses on architectural challenges that emerge while striving to attain sustainable futures and explores future directions for climate responsive and sustainable design.

To this end, the book proposes three conceptual roles for architects, that of the ancestor, the activist and the accelerator. Pivoted on the idea that architecture needs to work at multiple speeds, this proposition propounds learning from past architectural wisdom in the role of an Ancestor, challenging unsustainable practices through direct action and advocacy as an Activist and utilising novel technologies and system thinking to drive widespread change as an Accelerator.

At its core, It's About Time is an appeal for cognisant pacing, an invitation to pause deliberately and often, to mount on rides that can carry us through for a long time and on journeys that do not solely incur capital and prestige but ones that ensure non-extractive means of sustenance.