House Keeping: From Architecture to the Planet, the Urgency of Care cured by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes

Designing care doesn’t really belong to the mandate of architects. To integrate within our projects the routine care, aging, and afterlife of spaces is not crucial to the discipline. In fact, all these casual acts of preserving, nurturing, cleaning, and fixing are perceived as minor tasks, overwhelmingly performed by racialized, gendered low-paid laborers. But in reality, housekeeping- the never ending work of sustaining something or someone in good conditions- aka reproductive labor, holds many keys. Inspired by many authors—from Mierle Ukeles to Achille Mbembe, Katherine Shonfield or Elke Krazny, this panel seeks to address upkeep as a conceptual and practical framework for design to challenge the unsustainable practice of endless construction, to combat the climate emergency, as well as to disturb our problematic value system.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Most recently Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she taught studios and seminars, she launched in 2021 the initiative ‘A Global Moratorium on New Construction’ interrogating current protocols of development, and urging for a deep reform of planning disciplines to face the climate and social emergency.