This work kept in view a central question: why architectural researchers have recently tended—and needed—to collaborate with interdisciplinary fields such as geology, climate science, biology, and physics, alongside their longstanding engagements with anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. The aim of this second literature review was to map recent architectural researches as a way of tracing a shared concern among emerging researchers: finding ways to challenge conventional architectural thinking and disciplinary boundaries that have significantly contributed to climate crisis and to social, ecological, and economic injustices.
Architecture's fragile landscapes mapping identifies several clusters within this emerging research. Some theorists reveal architecture's extractivism by tracing its material dependencies — Charlotte Malterre-Barthes' account of architectural extractivism and the politics of provenance (2025), and Jane Hutton's Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (2019), which traces the entangled source-and-destination geographies of everyday construction materials. Others follow a specific matter — soil (Denizen & Bonvehi Rosich, 2025), air (Calvillo, 2023), or monsoon (Bremner et al., 2022) — developing new frameworks, methods, and tools adequate to these issues' complexity. Aslı Uludağ reveals infrastructural relations that slip away from isolated disciplinary knowledge, tracing hydro-geothermal and geopolitical entanglements across disparate forms of sensemaking (Uludağ, 2025). The research collective MOULD reconsiders what architecture fundamentally is or does through their project Architecture is Climate, thinking across disciplines, scales, and geographies to ask what climate breakdown demands of the discipline (2025). Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) reminds us of the labour, economy, and craft embedded in the buildings we too easily take for granted, in their Critical Field Guide (2017). Others use different lenses or tools such as food to trace the metabolic relations behind industrialised systems, as Cooking Sections do through their ongoing CLIMAVORE project (2015–present; Cooking Sections, 2020).
As a discipline that designs and builds structures occupying sites, using limited resources, extracting ground, relying on materials drawn from distant geographies through mining, and transforming human and more-than-human worlds, architecture has succeeded in creating an illusionary bubble that displaces responsibility, convincing practitioners and publics alike that labour, social, ecological, and economic injustices are outside its concern. Architectural researcher Anthony Powis describes this displacement through the concept of externalities, arguing that “outside of concern” is a tale of extractive practices such as architecture tell themselves by continually imagining externalities while their practices remain deeply entangled with violence across places and times (2026, p.2-4). Similarly, Kathryn Yusoff, in a 2023 talk at the Yale School of Architecture, summarises architecture’s contemporary position by stating that “every building is a mine. Mines are shadow architectures.”
As mentioned above, many architectural researchers—through journals, books, and edited collections (Hutton, 2019; Malterre-Barthes, 2021; Space Caviar, 2021; Journal of Architectural Education, 2025)—are now working to demonstrate architecture’s material dependencies by confronting the sites where materials are extracted and comparing them to the sites where these materials become architectural objects. While these arguments powerfully materialise architecture’s extractivism by foregrounding its material dependencies, which have long been assumed to lie outside the architect’s concern, the discipline’s relation to extractivist ideologies extends beyond material questions alone.