The question whether architects have anything to learn from writers is an old one, but what if we turn it around? Sometimes it may seem that architects truly distinguish themselves from other cultural or intellectual professions by their ability to face the negative effects of their own discipline. A few years ago, Ben Lerner wrote a book on the hatred of poetry, but what architects are really good at is hating architecture.¹ In recent decades, this means that they, together with their critics, historians, and theoreticians, have become quite aware of the ecological footprint of their profession. Many contemporary presentations, articles, texts, books, and exhibitions open with a statistical declaration of the global percentage of carbon emissions that architecture—or its big brother, the construction industry—accounts for. As you rightly point out, the same also applies to studio briefs.

This is, of course, a correct and necessary analysis: architecture is, as Elisa Iturbe rebaptized it in 2019 in a thematic issue of Log, a “carbon form.”² However, one of the paradoxical outcomes of her study was also the simple fact that nothing exists anymore that is not a carbon form. Even my cat, dependent as she is on industrially produced and mechanically transported food, is a carbon form; even the trees outside my window, which—for the time being—are maintained by the city and pruned with loud machines twice a year, are carbon forms, although their positive contribution to the composition of the atmosphere is much greater than that of my cat. Nevertheless, I think I’m not the only member of the worldwide architectural community that has been conditioned during the past decade to immediately equate building with the further destruction of the climate and the planet.

All this can lead to the most recent iteration of that attractive custom of comparing architecture with literature. Imagine, indeed, a contemporary writer—let’s say Rachel Cusk, Zadie Smith, Richard Powers, or J.M. Coetzee—starting interviews, lectures, or essays, with an honest and open recognition not only of the negative environmental impacts of the industry they are a part of, but also of writing and publishing in general. Imagine them saying: my profession—everything I do—damages the earth, and life on earth. While it is possible to spend hours on end browsing online reports about the considerable ecological footprint of the book industry, as well as many treatises on environmentally responsible publishing, it still seems that for literature and its many theorizations, this is not—or not yet—the same arresting issue as it is for architecture.

The explanation for this imbalance has to do with the obvious but also the less obvious differences between literature and architecture, and between writers and architects. One of those discrepancies has to do, I think, with language—or, more negatively put, with writers’ aversion to numbers. Calculating your ecological footprint (or that of your profession) means summarizing yourself numerically, and therefore also scientifically and objectively. You can’t argue with concrete data, or so it seems. For writers, numbers and figures belong to another domain, another kind of reasoning—it’s the tale of the two cultures, the split between science and the humanities, as C. P. Snow defined it in 1959.³ Writing deals with ideas, but also with paradoxes and ambiguities—with the exact opposite of undeniable numerical facts. That many architects are tempted not only to speak, albeit partially, in numbers and statistics, but also to base their activities on these data, does at least show a rapprochement with the world of the exact sciences, and of engineering. Denying those “technical” aspects of architecture—by defining the architect strictly as a “(wo)man of letters”—has always been accompanied by self-deception and rhetoric. And yet, in the age of climate crisis, the architect is much less of an intellectual or a writer, and much more of an engineer and an activist.

Another problem with the comparison between writer and architect is that the latter has always been much more concerned with matter and with physical presence. Both buildings and books are objects, but few writers openly discuss the fabrication and the form of their books. A text, as you put it, is indeed nothing but “words on pages,” and while these words and the pages they are printed upon, have a material existence, they quickly end up as ideas in the mind of the reader, which is also were they belong. It is, therefore, much more permissible for a writer to act as a Platonic idealist—as someone who adds ideas and stories to this world, and not bricks, beams, window, chimneys, pipes, plastics, solar panels, heat sinks, or wind turbines. How could, in this sense, a text ever have a real ecological footprint?

The question remains whether writers can indeed get off the hook so easily. Doesn’t the call to produce less apply, in the end, to everyone? Again, it’s possible to once more consult statistics on the number of books that exist on this planet, on the number of new books that are added daily, worldwide, and on the number of texts that circulate online, just as it is possible to link all these activities to their corresponding emission of carbon dioxide. But that is not the point. The point is, rather, what we do with books and buildings that already exist—and how we value the old versus the new. It is here that demolition comes in. In order to construct a new building, in many cases, an old one must go. Doesn’t the same apply to writing? Each new book, or article, pushes another one overboard, away from the relatively small boat on which all the writings reside that mankind can reasonably absorb. It might have been wiser for you and me too: to have read a piece of writing that already existed, instead of adding yet another text to the billions of words that humanity has already produced.