Stories of Earth: echoes in architecture
In his 2024 essay, ‘Enough? Architecture and the Sufficiency Imperative’, Professor Daniel Barber asks:
In its quest for efficiency and performance, sustainable architecture has only made us want more—more buildings, more extraction, more stuff. What if architects crafted new desires, within planetary limits?
As we hurtle towards exceeding those planetary limits, the Foundation is bringing together some of the world’s most celebrated architects as they present a hopeful vision for a purpose-led profession – rooted in a return to people, place and planet, over profit alone.
We are now virtually certain to exceed our planetary limits, and we face the real possibility of a 3 degree rise in average global temperatures within the lifetime of buildings architects are designing today. What does architectural practice look like in this new reality?If architecture is to retain its purpose and integrity, architects must recommit to those fundamental cultural influences that give architecture its meaning. Practicing in Slovenia, Marusa Zorec believes “We belong to those places we come from. They define us and we define them with the interventions we do. My land is very much defined by nature and history, it is full of stories and layers of the past. Is modern architecture capable of awakening people's sense of belonging?”This is a sentiment echoed by the UK's Niall McLaughlin:"The first houses gave us a history. They encouraged us to believe that we could jointly invest in more ambitious activities whose returns were not immediately available. This expanded horizon transformed human culture. It also gave us our present conception of architecture, which is, above all, a representation of temporal depth. I will speak about architecture as a material embodiment of time."Architects can and must do more than conform to the targets, offsets and compliance checklists that have got us here; or that have at least have failed to stop the rise and rise of emissions, and its devastating impacts on communities around the world. According to Marina Tabassum “the displacement of people poses a major crisis induced by climate crisis, disparity in human conditions, war and conflict. People are living in transition for indefinite period of time while life is being lived. As architects what can we offer as dignified living and how?”‘Stories of Earth: Echoes in Architecture’ brings to Sydney four highly recognised international architects on 14 September 2024. Marusa Zorec (Solvenia), Rick Joy (US), Marina Tabassum (Bangladesh) and Niall Mclaughlin (UK) join Peter Stutchbury and other gold medal winning architects at a fully catered one day event inside the Chau Chak Wing auditorium and on Sydney’s much-loved Goods Line.The work is varied but coalesces to represent mutual values. Practice scale and project environments are expansive; from London to Ljubljana to Tucson to Dhaka, representing a cross-section of international architecture and cultural influences.Each architect has a body of work that speaks of the radical alongside the intelligent: from fine-grain insertions into ancient towns to significant urban infill buildings, from crafted singular objects to beautifully humble shelters, ‘Stories of Earth’ is an anthology of purposeful architecture from around the world; asking questions of responsibility, methodology and art.Stories of Earth: echoes in architecture is a symposium with a difference, to be held 14 September in Sydney. 
