Can Architecture Repair the Planet? Fractures, Discontinuities, Synchronies, and Other Epistemological Dislocations Necessary for the Post-Carbon City

Can architecture repair the planet? With this seemingly unusual yet fundamentally urgent question, the exhibition project The Great Repair at the Haus der Künste in Berlin confronts a critical reorientation: moving away from architecture as the endless pursuit of novelty and consumption, towards a practice grounded in preservation, durability, and care for existing realities. This shift towards ‘mending’, maintenance and repairing calls for the recovery of ancient and embodied knowledge systems, where materiality is not merely a means but a locus of meaning and engagement, and where building becomes an act of relational stewardship, embedded cooperation, and the transmission of practical wisdom. From the point of view of its epistemological underpinnings, it further requires abandoning utopian projections of a decarbonized future; visions that remain perpetually deferred and abstract, in favor of a radical presentism, an ethical stance that insists on responding to the urgencies of the here and now. Navigating between the expansive but often totalizing ‘distractions’ of utopian thought (as Cesar Rendueles warns us against) and the immobilizing despair of apocalyptic narratives (as in the timely critique to so-called ‘endtimes fascism’ by Naomi Klein), this essay proposes an architecture rooted in radical materialism and an attentiveness to the differential, the faulty and the polyphonic. From this foundation, a framework of practices and recommendations will arise, focused on repair, and sensitive to the cracks, wounds, vernacular tactics, and the fractures that shape the social fabric of our cities

Embodied cognition · Existentialism · Expansive · Materialism · Narrative · Vision · Architecture, Modernity, and Design · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation · Architecture