International Lecture Series: Barnabas Calder

Denne forelæsning af arkitekturhistoriker Barnabas Calder er en del af forelæsningsrækken 'International Lecture Series', hvor Det Kongelige Akademi - Arkitektur inviterer store internationale navne indenfor til en eftermiddag med fokus på væsentlige internationale temaer i arkitekturen.

Enough is enough: Finding hope in the history of architecture

Almost all of today’s “sustainable” architecture is profoundly dependent on heavy fossil fuel inputs for its construction and maintenance, and mostly for its operation too. Even building Passive House projects can cost nearly twice as much embodied energy per m2 as 1950s Soviet concrete panel blocks. As ecological crisis spreads and deepens, buildings continue to cause over a third of emissions. Most people urgently want to solve the problem, but its scale and complexity exhausts and debilitates us.

In this lecture, Barnabas Calder will look at the long history of architecture to show how comfortingly brief and anomalous architecture’s current unsustainability is, and how it came about. He will demonstrate the brilliance with which most humans have adapted their ways of life to countless ecologies worldwide using appropriate, low-impact architecture.

Drawing on the cultural and technical adaptations of historic architecture, Calder will propose realistic, immediate actions that we can take to radically reduce ecological harms and will present historical evidence for the possibility of a happier, fairer world the other side of radical climate adaptation.

About Barnabas Calder

Barnabas Calder is the author of Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency (Pelican, 2021) and co-author of Form Follows Fuel: 14 Buildings from Antiquity to the Oil Age (Routledge, 2025), each of which explores the historic relationship between buildings and human energy systems. Barnabas is head of the History of Architecture Research Cluster at the University of Liverpool, the largest group of architectural historians in any UK university. 

Bluesky/LinkedIn/Instagram: @BarnabasCalder