Credits: Jerry Zhang

2020 marked a symbolic milestone in the Anthropocene era: for the first time, the anthropogenic mass – the whole set of solid materials manufactured or modified by humans – exceeded the overall biomass of the planet. This tipping point underscores the extent to which human activity has reorganized planetary systems and set into motion feedback loops that destabilize the biosphere. The construction sector lies at the center of this transformation, responsible for nearly 40% of global energy-related CO₂ emissions and generating around 30% of the world’s solid waste through construction and demolition debris. Despite ongoing efforts to incorporate recycled materials, the industry remains locked into extraction-based production cycles, leading to scarcity of even basic resources such as sand.

The Design Commons in the Anthropocene Studio takes the built environment simultaneously as a problem and as an opportunity. It engages with the “technosphere,” a concept defined by geologist Peter K. Haff to describe the emergent layer of interconnected infrastructures, industries, and technologies that reconfigure planetary systems. Unlike the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, or lithosphere – spheres that recycle energy and matter in dynamic equilibria – the technosphere expands by consuming increasing amounts of resources, fossil fuels, and land, destabilizing the very systems it depends on. Architecture, deeply embedded in this apparatus, functions as a conduit within larger ecological, material, and social flows rather than as an isolated object.

The city of Barcelona provides a precise and urgent context for this investigation. A densely populated city, with nearly 1.2 million housing units and neighborhoods reaching up to 50,000 inhabitants per square kilometer, Barcelona has long been a laboratory where technology, urbanism, and climate crisis intersect. Its strategic role as a Mediterranean hub has amplified the pressures of hypertouristification and housing speculation. These forces have embedded a logic of disposability into the built environment, where demolition is celebrated as renewal despite its hidden costs: the erasure of cultural memory, the loss of embodied energy, and the generation of waste that exceeds landfill capacities. What if we treat the city itself as a material bank, a living archive of energy, labor, and matter already invested in existing structures?

This studio situates at the intersection of three structural crises: the urgent need to decarbonize in the face of climate change, the inability of speculative urban economies to produce equitable spaces, and the persistence of architectural practices that perpetuate these dynamics rather than transform them. Against this backdrop, the studio cultivates an architectural approach that resists what Ivan Illich described as the “iatrogenic” effects of practices that, in attempting to solve problems, produce new threats. Students will learn to work with buildings as open systems where multiple timescales, material flows, and social processes overlap and interact. This means designing for unpredictable future uses, mapping the relationships between a structure and its surrounding urban ecosystems, and creating interfaces that allow buildings to respond to changing conditions rather than remaining static.

Framework and Methodology

The course is structured around three interconnected skills that students will develop through iterative practice. First, the students will learn diagnostic methods for tracing unintended consequences. This involves lifecycle analysis that extends beyond carbon accounting to include social displacement, resource extraction impacts, and long-term maintenance concerns. Through a material flow mapping exercises that track where materials come from, what energy is embedded in them, and what happens when they leave a building’s useful life. Case study analysis of past “sustainable” projects, helpful to identify patterns of failure where well-intentioned interventions created new problems, such as green technologies that require rare earth minerals or energy-efficient envelopes that trap indoor pollutants.

Second, the students will develop systemic awareness through multi-scalar analysis. This means simultaneously examining the project at the scale of material assemblies, building performance, neighborhood dynamics, and urban metabolism. Mapping energy flows, water cycles, and waste streams, identifying where the proposed intervention intersects with existing infrastructures and where it might create feedback loops. This scalar thinking encourages to see architecture not as a finished product but as a node that mediates between human needs and ecological processes across different temporal and spatial dimensions.

Third, to acquire practical strategies for adaptive reuse through hands-on engagement with existing structures. This begins with forensic documentation, where it will be required to survey buildings scheduled for demolition or renovation, cataloging materials, construction methods, structural systems, and spatial qualities. Students will then develop reuse scenarios that prioritize retention of existing structure and envelope, followed by selective demolition that salvages materials for on-site reintegration. Only after exhausting these options will be possible to consider recycling or new material introduction. This hierarchy teaches how to see existing buildings not as obstacles but as reservoirs of embodied energy and latent potential.

Credits: Windows of the Future, New Narratives for Circularity Seminar, MAA01 2025/26

Material practices and Vernacular knowledge

Design work will focus specifically on materials and techniques that establish reciprocal relationships with ecological systems rather than extractive ones. For instance to work extensively with solid timber systems, learning how responsibly harvested wood functions as a carbon sink while providing structural capacity; to explore earth-based construction, including rammed earth walls and compressed earth blocks, understanding how these techniques eliminate the need for energy-intensive firing processes while providing thermal mass and humidity regulation. Studying lime mortars and natural plasters that allow walls to breathe, preventing moisture accumulation that leads to mold and material degradation.

These are not seen as romantic gestures toward the past but practical responses to contemporary constraints. Vernacular construction methods evolved over centuries through trial and error within specific climates and geographies, developing sophisticated solutions to problems of thermal comfort, structural stability, and material scarcity using locally available resources. Examining traditional Catalan masonry vaulting, for instance, a system that achieves long spans with minimal material and no formwork, using geometry and gravity rather than tensile reinforcement. Studying Mediterranean courtyard typologies, to find an example of passive cooling strategies that create microclimates through strategic placement of vegetation, water, and shade.

The main task is to understand the logic embedded in these systems and update them for contemporary requirements. This might mean using digital fabrication to produce complex earth formwork that would be prohibitively expensive by hand, or combining traditional timber joinery with modern fastening systems that meet current seismic codes. It means recognizing that industrial materials like steel and concrete have their place in hybrid assemblies, but questioning their default dominance. Most importantly, it means developing judgment about when high-energy materials are genuinely necessary versus when they simply reflect inherited habits of practice.

This focus on material cycles extends to understanding health impacts. Synthetic materials that dominate contemporary construction often contain volatile organic compounds, formaldehyde, and other substances that contribute to respiratory illnesses and long-term chronic conditions. By prioritizing natural, minimally processed materials, students will simultaneously address ecological and human health concerns, recognizing that these are not separate issues but interconnected dimensions of the same system.

Social and Political Dimension

It will be requested to consider how design decisions about material choice, construction methods, and spatial flexibility affect not only environmental performance but also who can afford to build, maintain, and inhabit structures over time.
To imagine forms of practice that move beyond the architect as a solo creator toward collaborative models involving multiple stakeholders. This might mean designing systems that enable incremental construction by residents, creating maintenance protocols that become sites of community gathering, or developing modular assemblies that can be disassembled and reconfigured without specialized equipment. In an era of fragile supply chains and economic precarity, architecture that depends on specialized contractors and proprietary systems becomes exclusionary. By contrast, approaches that draw on accessible materials and legible construction logics expand who can participate in building and caring for the built environment.

Learning Objectives

At course completion the students will have completed a site-specific adaptive reuse project that demonstrates these principles in action. The final documentation will include the diagnostic analysis that justified the intervention, the systems mapping that situated the project within urban flows, and the material strategies that prioritized existing resources and low-energy alternatives. More importantly, it will develop a critical methodology for working within ecological limits and social complexity, equipped with conceptual frameworks and practical tools that can inform the  continuing education and future practice. The goal is not to produce a universal formula, but to cultivate habits of attention, skepticism toward technological solutions that ignore social and ecological complexity, and responsiveness to what each project site actually offers: the materials at hand, the ecological systems that sustain it, and the communities who hold knowledge of place and whose lives the work must serve.