The latest UN special report on climate change, released in October 2018, was bleak - perhaps unsurprisingly after a year of recording breaking temperatures, wildfires, floods, and storms. The report, released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), reiterated the magnitude of climate change’s global impact, but shed new light on the problem’s depth and urgency. Climate change is a catastrophe for the world as we know it and will transform it into something that we don’t. And we have just 12 years to prevent it.
Around the same time that the IPCC report was released, architectural media were reporting on a statement from architect Peter Zumthor who, when asked about the environmental crisis, stated: "I am aware of these things, but I can only do so much." Shortly after, in an article published by The Architects' Journal, Piers Taylor mused “...do we really want to be complicit in a culture where we can pretend that what we’re doing has any significance whatsoever in a world that’s so screwed, it's making our eyes water?”
