Green buildings, green cities, waste management, waste prevention, climate change mitigation, and other challenges of “green” construction and architecture. How to build, renovate, and demolish ecologically? We will confront today’s eco-thinking with the utopian visions of the 1st half of the 20th century. 

Necessism: forgotten utopia or a potential example? “The massive restoration and creation of natural values must occupy  more important place than the existing overproduction and production of man-made goods”. This idea, still present today,  was written only two years after the World War II by the Czech architect and theorist Ladislav Žák. The quote above comes from his publication Residential Landscape. It is one of the first theoretical works about regional planning in Czechoslovakia, an urban discipline, which is today a symbol of the technocratic exploitation of the landscape and a metaphor for the anthropocene present. The lecture however, will not only talk about the archeology of the environmental ideas of modernism, but will also aim to discuss the current situation and potentials of architecture and urbanism in a time of climate change.