Charlotte Malterre-Barthes

This conversation was first published for OPEN Architecture Festival, Issue Five (2025): In the Eyes of the Ordinary.

In conversation with Birke Langkjær Jakobsen & Osmo Hadad-Lange 
Written by Osmo Hadad-Lange

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes.

French architect Charlotte Malterre-Barthes resists being defined by a single role.
She teaches, publishes, and maintains her own strategic practice, but avoids being pinned down by any fixed label. Instead, she embraces a more open position—one that allows her to lay out and articulate issues, formulate them, bring them to the table for discussion, and support programs or initiatives that address what she refers to as the polycrisis: the interconnected social, environmental, and political crises in which architecture is deeply entangled. In parallel to her academic and design work, Charlotte is also a vocal advocate for HouseEurope!, a registered non-profit for which she serves on the advisory board.

Her recent publication, A Moratorium on New Construction, is part of the Critical Spatial Practice series published by Sternberg Press. In this manifesto, she takes direct aim at the construction industry’s complicity in ecological destruction, advocating for a radical halt to new building. Alongside her writing, Charlotte leads the laboratory RIOT (Research and Innovation On architecture, urban design and Territory) at EPFL. With RIOT, she addresses the built environment’s role as a major driver of global warming and ongoing environmental and social harm. Acknowledging architecture’s complicity in the extraction of resources, wealth, labor, value, and culture, RIOT advances the case for a less destructive, non-extractive, and reparative architecture. Convinced that design disciplines must pivot to confront social and climatic urgencies, the lab develops tactics and strategies to rewire architecture and urban design—by design itself.

Conceived as a policy lab, HouseEurope! is dedicated to shaping legislation through the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), demanding a right to reuse existing buildings based on three key pillars: 1) tax reductions for renovation works and reused materials, 2) fair rules to assess both potentials and risks of existing buildings, and 3) new values for the embedded CO2 in existing structures.

For an ECI to succeed, it must gather at least one million valid signatures across a minimum of seven countries. As of our interview in June 2025, the initiative had collected 23,000 signatures. I sat down, virtually, with Charlotte to discuss with her about the campaign, her view on the architects role and the importance of activism.

O: Hello Charlotte! I am the bearer of bad news. I’ve just checked the campaign this morning to see how it goes. The ECI has collected just 23,000 of the one million required signatures so far. Do you believe it holds enough democratic weight to truly influence EU legislation?

C: (laughs) Yeah… all hope is not lost, but it has quite a limited impact so far. Still, one of our goals is to shift discourse, even if it doesn’t reach the official threshold. The campaign is a contribution, a way to bring attention to the problem and learn how much visibility the issue gets, whether politicians start listening. So I wouldn’t call it a failure, even without the signatures count. I’m hoping we can still push that number a bit higher. But even without the million, the campaign teaches us things.

There are different lessons learned. For instance, it points out to how much people care about climate and space. Because the success of this campaign largely depends on convincing those outside of the sphere of architecture—assuming that everyone agrees on these questions, which is not necessarily a given. It also speaks to the need to bring this conversation on the built environment and construction as a matter of concern for everyone. And to center the latter as responsible for the harm that we do.

O: Do you see this campaign as provocative?

C: I don’t think it’s much of a provocation. It’s not that radical to ask for stronger renovation regulations and incentives. It’s perhaps not the most exciting topic, but it puts the issue on the table, makes it visible, and shows there’s both interest in and need for such measures of care for our environment.

O: What would it take for renovation and transformation to become “the new ordinary”? Do you believe it as a real paradigm shift in the architecture and the construction industry?

C: Whether I believe it will happen is one thing, whether I want it to happen is another. I do think more and more people really care about how their life impacts Earth at large. There is more awareness. People are conscious that change is necessary, urgent even. And this question of literacy—for all—towards the built environment and construction is really something that I advocate for. Especially as it’s so heavy on our carbon bill. Not to contradict myself, but if you look at how large construction’s carbon footprint is, and how little it is talked about outside our circles, it’s clearly disproportionate. People often discuss air travel, which accounts for about 3%¹ of global CO₂ emissions, or fast fashion, which makes up roughly 2-8%². But construction and buildings together are responsible for 34%³, by far the biggest share. And yet, it’s still rarely part of the mainstream climate conversation. In that sense there’s work to do about it.

There’s an example I really like and I use it a lot because I think it’s particularly telling. It’s in the Moratorium on New Construction that I actually presented at Aarhus back in 2022, before it even was a book. Twenty years ago, people smoked in cinemas, hospitals and planes. This was completely normal and accepted. Then came a legal push, and resistance against the tobacco lobbies, supported by data-driven campaigns showing that it was bad for public health. First, it was banned in cinemas due to fire hazards, and in hospitals, it was clearly absurd given the health risks. Now, smoking in these places is completely unacceptable. There are always the odd ones where it’s still allowed. I know of a couple of bars in Vienna that double as cinemas where you still can smoke, but generally, in everyday life, it’s completely unthinkable. So I like to think of demolition the same way as smoking in planes: something that was first frowned upon, then became illegal, and then simply unthinkable, undoable. And a form of harm reduction.

Then comes the question of renovation. If we up the value of what we already have, what do we do with it? We must take care of it. We must maintain it, make sure that it’s up to standards. And then how we do that is another story even. Currently we renovate our buildings and insulate them in a super trashy way, we wrap them in plastic—this is something we don’t really thematize yet in the HouseEurope! initiative. But we would want renovation to be done in a much more ecological way, and there are many alternative options, but those are not yet mainstream. This means all of the work that HouseEurope! is doing is not ending at the referendum. Even if it fails, it must have an extended life.

SpaceCommodityProductionChain-v06_clean_landscape

O: You’ve mentioned literacy, with your lab at EPFL, RIOT, you’ve made these super diagrams showing how complex systems are, which are qu…

C: (laughs) …completely unreadable.

O: …Or at least you should take the time to untangle them. Do you think architectural tools like an analytical drawing, or diagram can actually help make communication? Should we stop building and communicate how to leverage the systems in place as architects?

C: I don’t think that architects should be simply organizers and communicators. I believe that through renovation, extension or transformation, there is plenty of design work for architects. Renovation is more complicated than new construction, which is so much easier because it’s straightforward. With renovation, you can’t control everything and it brings its share of surprises: What’s behind the facade? Is the structure solid? Lots of interrogation and risks. A portion of the profession already engaged in this important work will keep doing what they do. So in my hope for a transformed industry, there is a huge need for alternative construction materials and reformed norms, along with the ‘classic’ skills of an architect. What you’ve mentioned, and what I think for me is one of the more promising and really hopeful aspects of architecture, is that it’s a conversational practice.

The average practitioner is someone who talks with the clients, who talks with the contractors, who talks with the authorities, who has discussions on-site. It is a practice that is intrinsically connected to many of the other spheres of the construction industry. Architects can even talk to investors, at one point if working at a larger scale, also to the end users of the building, if we were to go through the whole cycle. A conversational practice means you’re always in dialogue—like us now as well—I think that is a skill which we should leverage more to advocate for change. I’m very hopeful about the profession itself. The question is how aware are we that we have to change and foster change. Of course, there is a political and historical problem, which is that architecture is not a profession that is very social in nature. In the past, the profession has shown that it was only remotely concerned with social problems, and rather at the service of power, regardless of their ethics. Today, many see architects as lackeys of capitalism, at the service of real estate and a construction industry that is interested only in profit and that is extremely destructive. My job is to articulate these critical views, make sure that everyone is aware of what is actually going on, and propose ways out.

O: So in a way, bridging the gaps between different actors?

C: Yes, advocating for a more political position of architecture, for instance, centering questions of ethics, gender, and inclusion. If we are the ones who design the world, which you should keep in mind is not always the case, we should also, as a profession, better mirror the diversity of the people we serve. Currently, we are largely an educated, privileged, white, male-dominated profession. There’s an undiscussed class situation where many architects come from educated, wealthy backgrounds, for instance, rarely the first to graduate in the family, and able to afford long and expensive studies. Of course, this depends on the educational landscape of the place you come from. In short, and I don’t want to generalize, but as a profession, we do not represent the wide diversity of people that are going to live and use the spaces we design. So getting conscious of that, for me, is also part of tackling larger questions of how to shift our role to make sure that we practice in the least harmful way possible.

O: Speaking of the diversity, or rather the lack of it in the educational landscape, how do you see the role of academia, especially as a teacher and co-founder of Parity Group?

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, A Moratorium on New Construction, Sternberg Press,

C: I think a university really has a duty to equip people with the tools to change. I also think that we should equip students with critical thinking, to be able to develop and defend their ideas, to show and stand for them. And whether that is at the service of architecture or of something else is not my problem. I do advocate for critical voices to stay in the profession and change it, but I also think we don’t owe anything to the profession. I insist on this because I think that there’s a sacrificial component to architecture where you give yourself to it.

Fortunately, this is changing, but it remains very strong in some places—where it’s okay to do all nighters for instance. It’s almost cool. For some, it is a positive thing to build up camaraderie, solidarity. But it’s not, because it teaches you to give your rest time to the work, and prepares you to do that in a professional setup. I call it half-jockingly Stockholm Syndrome, the fact that we feel sympathy toward our captor, architecture, but maybe that’s a different story.

O: Changing topic, I’ve heard you describe reuse as a kind of cannibalism, which is quite an unusual take. What do you mean by that?

C: I do dare to criticise reuse, yes. Of course, if you look at how things operate today, it doesn’t seem like something you’d criticise, because in reality, reuse is still happening far too little. But I think the idea of reuse has been co‑opted and weaponised in the service of greenwashing. You reuse a few elements, and sudvdenly it’s presented as a major environmental achievement. It seems like reuse is always better than doing nothing, but on the contrary, its use in greenwashing prevents real change. If you push the logic of reuse to its end, you have a strange, self‑cannibalising dynamic—i’m uneasy with ‘urban mining’ as a concept as well.

For example, the Canton of Zurich recently required that its public buildings use at least 25%4 recycled concrete. On paper, that sounds great. But because there is not enough concrete to be recycled locally, it ends up being imported—crushed concrete from another canton to meet the quota. It feeds demolition elsewhere. That, of course, reveals the limitations of such virtuous goals. One might argue that as the system develops, those inefficiencies will go away but greenwashing remains. And the cannibalistic part is that you’re essentially eating yourself up to feed new construction. As soon as you demolish something, you release all the CO₂ stored in it.

When you’re saying “We’ll demolish, but we’ll dismantle and reuse the elements,” you’re really just finding the arguments you need to justify continued demolition. That’s one of my main criticisms of the current discourse around reuse. That being said, I must admit that, given how little reuse actually happens today, my critique might be a bit disproportionate.

O: Speaking of demolition, I might have skipped this question because you’re maybe already preaching a converted, but it is the main slogan of the HouseEurope!, “No to demolition, Yes to renovation”. Why is that so important?

C: Demolition is so problematic in many ways. I talk about carbon myopia, a term I use to articulate a critique of carbon being the only metric and argument we bring up for why we shouldn’t demolish. It’s true: if your building is old enough, it has basically repaid its carbon costs. In that sense, it’s good as is, and you shouldn’t demolish it. Demolishing releases that embodied carbon, both literally and in accounting terms, and we simply can’t afford that.

That’s the first point, carbon, and of course it’s important but it’s only the start of a chain of consequences. Beyond carbon, there’s the immediate, direct, negative impact of demolition on site. As a telling example, a residential building is being demolished right next to my workspace right now, and it’s an absolute nuisance for the area. The street is blocked, there’s a huge amount of dust and noise, health impacts that the talk on demolition almost never addresses. And the reality is: even when they claim they’re carefully demolishing, it’s not true. It’s simply too expensive to dismantle things properly. I’ve seen this happen here, in a very wealthy country where it shouldn’t, where the building elements are thrown straight down because sorting and salvaging would take too much time and money. Then there’s the issue of displacement and gentrification. Where does demolition happen?

Make a map that overlaps income and demolition activities—when you demolish, you evict people. They have to find somewhere else to live. Rents are already atrocious, and I’m not even talking about the cost of buying property. People are pushed out of the city, and the result is often a homogeneous population of wealthy residents, depending on where this is happening. And then there are all the “soft values, non measurables” no one really wants to talk about, that don’t fit in Life Cylcle Assessments. What happens when your building is demolished, your life uprooted? Networks are dismantled: You lose your babysitter, your neighbour, your memories, a sense of belonging. All these things that don’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet. But actually, they could: what’s the cost of finding a new babysitter, for example? That’s just one small example, but it’s part of the picture. I’m not even addressing heritage and preservation here. Of course there are buildings considered historically valuable, but I find that argument slightly slippery. Who decides what is valuable? Is it because some “important man” once slept there? Or because it displays a particular style or construction craft? Or because it fits into a certain narrative of value? This kind of heritage argument has its own edge and complications. Yet, for all of these reasons, we should stop demolishing.

O: You mentioned at the book launch at EPFL an anecdote about the book. Your editor saying you have too many verbs—a list of acts of extraction. Was it also your intention with the book to shock readers, maybe even to disgust them a bit with the construction sector, to make them more aware of the harm it causes?

C: One of the strategies of the book is that it should be a shocker. How much harm we do and how little we are aware of it, or how little we care. That’s what the book is trying to bring forward, and also to ask whether there might be other ways to do things, and how we could start to address these harmful systems.

The book is meant to function as a tool, with tons of references. It is also about trying to influence discourse and give arguments to people who have an intuition that things are not okay. One doesn’t need to agree with the whole book, you can just take some parts and leave the rest if it annoys you. Pick and choose, use some grounds, thinking points, and hopefully, push the conversation further. I do that too, I use all possible tools to make my point. I’ve published graphic novels, entered competitions, and just last week I did a makeup tutorial. Whatever it takes, while also keeping it fun, and not letting myself get too much dragged into the looming depression that comes from the fact that the world is in such a dire state.

You know, it’s really important to emphasize the idea that joy is a revolutionary act! Keeping the fight fun and engaging!

This conversation was first published for OPEN Architecture Festival, Issue Five (2025): In the Eyes of the Ordinary.

The issue was produced by students from the Aarhus School of Architecture:
Ida Bjerga, Osmo Hadad-Lange, Alexander Skovgaard Bagger Hadi, and Birke Langkjær Jakobsen.

The non-profit project was supported by The Dreyer Foundation.

Image credits: 1) Caroline Palla, 2) RIOT, 3) Osmo Hadad-Lange