Addressing the environmental, social and political quandaries of this century will require changing basic theoretical and practical assumptions about what architecture design is and does. Kiel Moe, a practicing architect and the Gerald Sheff Chair in Architecture at McGill University and author of 10 books, including Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial and Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy, delivers this talk at the Architectural League that addresses mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, especially as it is evidenced in modern architectural production. This fallacy is the source of architecture’s manifold unequal ecological and social exchanges, its environmental ambivalences, and the misdirection of its faulty environmental efforts. A cogent response to this fallacy will necessarily question the very means we use to design and describe architecture as a terrestrial endeavour within the storms of this century. Example responses will be drawn from research, pedagogy, and practice.

This lecture is part of “Towards a New Architecture: Climate change and design,” a series of discussions held by New York’s Architectural League in which leading practitioners and educators describe the urgent need for change and sketch the outlines of new ways of thinking and acting as architects and landscape architects. On each evening, respondents will draw out the implications of the ideas presented and offer suggestions for implementing them at a speed and scale commensurate with the climate emergency.