Sharjah Architecture Triennial: RCA researchers tackle climate crisis through expanded approaches to architecture

‘One of the things that we are doing in the triennial is to expand the idea of architecture beyond a strictly Western European genealogy, to become something that then starts to understand long term environmental modification by other societies as a kind of architectural practice, as a design act, even though it doesn’t necessarily figure within conventional histories of how architecture understands itself,’ explained Dr Lahoud. 

‘This intersects with the kind of education that we are producing in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, which is incredibly broad and expansive in its understanding of architecture. One of the things that has been motivating the School since I’ve been leading it, is to take the challenge of climate change very seriously. You can see that refracted through every single studio in the MA Architecture programme and also in the new MA Environmental Architecture programme, which is currently looking at lithium extraction in Chile and palm oil plantations in Indonesia.’

Below we have highlighted six projects by participants with close ties to the RCA – from alumni to programme leaders. 

1. Feifei Zhou, MA Architecture 2018

Following on from her graduate project, Sa(l)vaging the Forest, which investigated how the matsutake mushroom, can shape a new landscape through collaborative survival, Feifei joins Feral Atlas’s project at Sharjah. Feral has brought together more than seventy scientists, humanists, artists, and designers to offer field observations on the more-than-human Anthropocene. 

2. Dr Godofreido Pereira, Senior Tutor and Programme Leader on MA Environmental ArchitectureDelete Dr Godofredo Pereira

In a performative lecture during the opening weekend of the Triennial, Godofredo considered the history of exhumations in the context of environmental activism and the truth and reconciliation commissions in Latin America. 

Godofredo is also producing Last Evenings On Earth, in collaboration with the Sharjah Indian Association Community Centre and Sharjah's Labor Standards Authority, a project that entails the constitution of local teams to curate a film program for their neighbourhoods. The project, whose title is taken from Roberto Bolaño's story Últimos atardeceres en la tierra, points at how futures are perceived or imagined.

3. Ibiye Camp, MA Architecture 2019

Ibiye’s graduate project Data, the New Black Gold explored how data has materialised in the West African landscape and the spatial consequences of its production, consumption and storage. The project highlights the biases and conflicts of data consumption and the tensions between government, private corporations and citizens. 

For the Triennial, Ibiye joins anthropologist Tom Boylston to explore another unique location as a system of resistance – the thousands of sacred church forests in the Amahara state in Ethiopia., in the context of rising pressure from intensive farming and deforestation these churches are enclaves of religious practices and ecological intensity.

4. Shanay Jhaveri, current PhD candidate and member of The Otolith Group, 

The Otolith Group present a new commission that continues their exploration of the conditions of post-human life. Working with the poetics of vocality, choreography, and animation, the project looks at the entanglements of climate and racism in the creation of The Commonwealth, the 1948 British Nationality Act, and the unstable and ambient fear that constitutes citizenship in the UK today.

5. Alonso Barros and Gonzalo Pimentel, Partners in the Lithium Triangle Research Studio, an MA Environmental Architecture Research studio

More than a thousand years old, the Atacama lines and geoglyphs embody pre-Hispanic representations of the relationship with the subterranean and its resources. As such, they carry strong consequences for genealogy and ownership. Alonso, Gonzalo and Juan Gili from the Fundación Desierto de Atacama, with Mauricio Hidalgo from the Quechua people of Huatacondo (Tarapacá, Chile), use this history to support indigenous struggles against mining companies and the Chilean State –  in order to preserve the Quechua land and its history.

5. Francesco Sebregondi, Tutor MA Architecture 2013–15

Francesco and queer theorist Jasbir K. Puar research practices of maiming and containment in Palestine, particularly in the context of the brutal repression of the Great Return March protests in Gaza. Their joint project exposes the condition of the Israel/Gaza border as a site where new techniques of biopolitical, infrastructural, and urban control are currently being trialled.