MOULD is a research collective working across Central Saint Martins, TU Braunschweig, Goldsmiths and the University of Sheffield, investigating the intersection of spatial practice and climate breakdown. It was founded in 2021 around a research project Architecture after Architecture funded by AHRC in the UK and DFG in Germany. The project was initiated by the question: what happens to architecture after climate breakdown undoes its foundational assumptions of growth, extraction, and progress? MOULD take the premise that climate breakdown will be accompanied by a breakdown in architecture as we know it, and so look for other ways in which spatial practice might develop in the face of climate breakdown.
Their project has now moved to the more direct title: Architecture IS Climate, reflecting the belief that architecture is entangled in the causes, conditions, and futures of climate breakdown. The argument is that if architecture is to engage meaningfully with climate, then it must start by addressing the causes of the crisis, and architecture’s complicity in them, rather than skimming off the symptoms – moving away from the technocratic and solutionist approaches that dominate so much discussion around sustainability.
The main outcomes of MOULD’s work are a website and book, both entitled Architecture is Climate. The website, launched in December 2023, is divided into three sections. Foundations gathers issues and sites related to climate breakdown. Practices is a wide-ranging collection of over 100 practices dealing with the issues of climate breakdown in an exemplary manner, and from whom we can all learn (on the basis that the future is not created from scratch but found in the gaps in the present). Futures presents a model through which people can challenge and reshape their own work and practice in the face of climate breakdown.