*Image of the XR protest, Bristol August 2020 Image source: Rachel Sara*

Extinction Rebellion Architecture is coming to Dudley!

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CoLab Dudley

4 min readSep 9, 2021

We are beyond excited that we will be collaborating with Birmingham City University again. From September 2021 to April 2022, Masters Architecture students from the Extinction Rebellion Architecture studio unit will be bringing their imagination and creativity to Dudley High Street. Here are snippets from their brief, written by Prof. Rachel Sara and Andy Hilton.

‘We are facing an unprecedented global emergency. We are in a life or death situation of our own making. We must act now…We must radically and immediately begin reducing emissions and improving carbon absorption, drawing it down and locking it up again…Let’s make a better world.’ Extinction Rebellion

In a state of climate emergency we cannot simply carry on designing ‘business as usual’ buildings. We need to radically rethink in order to develop a new architecture that does more than merely minimizing environmental impact. We need to rethink what architecture could and should be.

In this studio we will push the boundaries of architectural production to explore architecture that aims to be an active part of the solution to the current climate crisis. We will work co-creatively with community partner CoLab Dudley and experiment with new carbon-absorbing materials, design to intensify biodiversity, create spaces which clean the air and generate renewable energy. We will investigate the radical approaches of movements like Extinction Rebellion (XR) to understand different modes of practice including self-organising structures and regenerative cultures that may in turn begin to suggest new regenerative or restorative architectures.

We propose that regenerative/ restorative architecture has the following overarching principles -

responding to and utilising the living and natural systems on a site that become the ‘building blocks’ of the architecture. Understanding bioregions and what the ecosystem of that place would originally have looked like (even in a city).
being carbon positive — using materials that take carbon out of the atmosphere and buildings that generate more energy than they consume
being water positive — harnessing natural water sources for living systems
using biophillia to improve wellbeing and biodiversity
designing for re-use using circular economy principles.

Other concepts that tie into this will be systems thinking, biomimicry, operational energy reduction (Passivhaus) and healthy/bio-based building materials.

In the spirit of XR we will work as a collaborative, participatory and inclusive unit that aims to be supportive and nurturing. We will start by working with CoLab Dudley to produce a manifesto for ERA, undertaking research into the most radical emerging responses to the climate emergency, as well as developing an evidence base to identify the most pressing concerns. This means that we will collectively decide where we should focus our investigations in terms of site and programme, as well as establishing smaller more focussed projects in collaboration with partners from CoLab Dudley. We will work with real communities in collaboration with CoLab Dudley as ‘to be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.’ We will focus our work on developing restorative high streets this year, with a focus on Dudley High Street. We have identified a range of urban infill sites (for new build proposals) and existing buildings/collections of buildings (for creative re-use). We will work under the principal of ‘Think Global, Act Local’, and will work towards 2 key public events.

In order to generate radical solutions we will look beyond architecture to explore alternative approaches in fine art and other critical spatial practice in order to transgress the boundaries of what is already known and begin a new architecture revolution: where ‘revolution implies an ambition to fundamentally change the way in which society [or in this case architecture] works or is organized: it suggests a particular, radical intent, as well as inferring the use of action as a catalyst for change.’