Apocalypse Now?

Abstract

Architecture, as a profession, discipline and practice, has played a vital role in designing, constructing and maintaining modern culture. The creative work of imagining and building places, infrastructure and dwellings for the complex activities of contemporary life has contributed to the global world we now inhabit. There are, however, indications that this edifice of modernity is cracking because of external and internal forces that undermine our global society. Climate change, species extinction, and worldwide threats to democracy and governance, along with new technologies, converge and reveal the uncomfortable possibility that modern industrial global culture and civilization may collapse. As a response, an expanding body of ‘stories of collapse’ has emerged to interpret causes, processes, and scenarios. This essay engages with key voices (Rees, Bendell, Lewis, Hagens, de Oliveira, and Macy), to describe in what ways architecture is complicit in this moment, and suggests what ethical and place-based responsibilities may be required of architects and placemakers as collapse unfolds.

1. Introduction

Architecture mediates the human condition through the creation, destruction, preservation, construction and management of places for human habitation. The ideas and actions of the profession have enabled/disabled individual and collective life in the modern world. Yet there is abundant evidence that the existing structures, disruptive technologies and processes of contemporary life are under extreme strain because of climate change, species extinction, and worldwide threats to democracy/governance, among other threats. This is an apocalyptic moment as the convergence of these vectors reveals the uncomfortable possibility that modern industrial global culture and civilization might collapse.

We are using the language of apocalypse in its Greek sense, apokálypsis, a word that denotes a revelation or unveiling of knowledge or something that had been hidden [1]. At the same time, we also bring forward its more general meaning, as in that the end of the world is coming. Our premise in this essay is that the ‘end of the world as we know it’ is already underway as natural systems and modern culture are breaking down, losing coherence and effectiveness. Perhaps it is time to listen to the stories about the destruction and unraveling of the ecologies that support life on earth and to the role of humans in this process. Collapse is underway. In response, an increasing number of stories of collapse have emerged that unpack the causes, processes, and future scenarios of these global forces. Theorists and scientists such as William Rees, Nate Hagen, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Jem Bendell, Lyle Lewis, Joanna Macy, and others argue that collapse is happening and offer insights into the apocalypse. We selected authors to address the apocalypse as it is understood across scales, including the planet, governance, institutions, and individuals. They represent key intersections of a variety of literature as the possible collapse involves multiple vectors. Disciplinary explanations alone are insufficient.

Our essay explores these voices and asks in what ways architecture, as a profession and practice, has been complicit in the current moment. How might we align our work with these new insights as the collapse continues? What might be required of us as placemakers?

There is convincing evidence and data for the premise of collapse. The world we have known as a species since the Holocene and the culture we have lived in since the dawn of modernity is extremely stressed and fracturing. The combination of climate change, species extinction, contamination, disruptive technologies such as nuclear and artificial intelligence, the worldwide demise of democracy and governance, and other threats converge at this moment, reinforcing and compounding the impact of each.

From the perspective of scientific discourse, the climate crisis is one of the clearest stressors. The burning of fossil fuels has caused unsustainable contamination of the air, land, and water, resulting in severe environmental degradation and extreme weather events. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC) [2] asserts that global surface temperatures have risen by 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, resulting in more severe heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, and floods. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO)’s State of the Global Climate 2024 describes 2024 as the warmest year on record, with mean near-surface temperatures at 1.55 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial baseline [3]. A compilation of multiple greenhouse gas monitoring datasets for 2024, published by Earth Systems Climate Data (ESCD), confirms these assessments [4]. According to the International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) [5], approximately 83.4 million people were displaced by climate-related events in 2024. Several organizations that use data from multiple sources demonstrate both the scientific consensus and the severity of the problem. The IPCC, WMO, IDMC, and ESCD are among the most reliable sources of information, revealed by research platforms including Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. They collectively affirm a scientific consensus that the crisis is real.

Even so, the story of global warming has been the site of conflicting voices over the last 50 years, with an enormous investment by fossil fuel companies. Supran [6], for example, published a comparison of internal Exxon Mobil documents and relevant peer-reviewed and public-facing communications over decades, demonstrating that Exxon knew the severity of anthropogenic climate change caused by fossil fuels and intentionally sowed doubt. Oreskes’ [7] Merchants of Doubt places this kind of corporate disinformation campaigning in the context of the history of science. She shows how comparable disinformation templates have been used by business interests to cast doubt on the science of tobacco, acid rain, and ozone depletion.

The climate truly is changing. People and communities around the world have been affected, with billions of dollars spent on restoring impacted areas. We are starting not only to observe the consequences of global warming on the planet but also to understand its significant effects on humans, including physical and biological distress and serious mental health issues like pre-disaster eco-anxiety and post-disaster Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [8].

Another crisis, driven largely by climate change and human land-use decisions, is the collapse of the biosphere and the rapid extinction of species. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment Report [9] warned that up to one million species could face extinction within decades unless transformative change occurs. The indicators are alarming: three-quarters of the world’s land and 66% of marine environments have been altered by humans; insect populations have halved in the last 40 years; 70% of all birds on the planet are farmed; and among mammals, 60% are livestock, 36% are humans, and only 4% are wild. Seven years after the report’s release, no significant actions have been taken to address these issues. The report concludes that accelerating ecosystem degradation threatens food security, water quality, human health, and social and economic stability. The IPBES outlines how relationships among people, ecosystems, and places are understood, negotiated, and acted upon, and how these processes predict ongoing environmental losses. It presents an apocalyptic outlook, exposing the ecological and social unsustainability of global culture’s ideologies and practices.

Beyond the threats of convergent climate change, extreme weather, species extinction, and biosphere collapse, we also face serious risks to human culture, including the decline of democracy and governance, as well as the increasing power of the very wealthy. The 2024 V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report states that over the past 17 years, democratic freedom has declined, leaving only 14% of the global population living in liberal democracies [10]. The impact of this decline is likely to further increase authoritarianism, disinformation, technological surveillance, and disinvestment in both social and physical infrastructure, which have historically contributed to civic unrest. Not only is governance stressed, but the current wealth inequality is also disturbing. Between 1970 and 2020, the World Inequality Lab reports that the top 1% of the population increased their share of wealth from 22% to 38%, while the bottom 50% accounts for only 2%, leaving the remaining 49% of the population holding 60% of global wealth [11]. This wealth distribution compounds the difficulty of addressing these crises, as the wealthiest and most powerful individuals, who benefit from it, have little incentive to disrupt the status quo unless it advances their own wealth objectives and those of their shareholders. In addition, modern society is deeply threatened by the development of disruptive technologies, such as nuclear weapons and energy technologies, as well as untested technologies such as artificial intelligence. These inventions may not be beyond the realm of human imagination and development, but may prove to be beyond our control.

Global scholars have documented how our understanding of the severity of the collapse we now face has evolved over the past fifty years. The influential 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, critiques the growth paradigm as a viable economic model for the planet [12], and an update in 1992 signaled more than economic collapse, but still envisioned a sustainable future [13]. A further decade of monitoring resulted in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, which benchmarks our trajectory toward exceeding the planet’s capacity to sustain life [14].

Three additional publications, each with updated data, extend the Limits to Growth trilogy. In 2009, the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries team defined the specific biophysical thresholds required for stable Earth functioning. They continue to seek a safe operating space for humanity [15] and to guide human development on a changing planet [16]. The latest, from an international team at France’s Ministère de la Transition écologique in 2023 [17], updates how human activities are impacting the Earth’s critical systems that regulate the planet: climate change, biosphere integrity, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, novel entities, ozone depletion, and land system change. Seven of these nine boundaries have already been crossed. An additional assessment in the same year, published in Science Advances [18], concluded that we have crossed the Rubicon on the way to a full collapse of planetary systems. As in the Limits to Growth literature, these measures and others show how humans are pushing interconnected global life systems beyond their limits [19]. However, at this moment, the resulting food insecurity, economic instability, and social disruptions are not experienced equally across the globe [11].

Evidence of an apocalyptic future is strong, and we should seek to understand the roots of the multiple crises that lead to it. We might ask: how did humans arrive at a point where we are literally destroying our home, Earth, and damaging essential life support systems like air, water, and soil? How did we develop a culture that systematically does this? What drives us to explore and experiment with dangerous technologies that cannot be reversed?

There are, of course, many theories and ideas about these questions, and it is not the purpose of this paper to explore them all. But one foundational story of modernity seems particularly provocative and addresses all the intersecting crises: humans have come to believe that we are somehow separate from the Earth’s community and superior to other beings. This belief influences not only our relationship with non-human life but also our view of other people, as some humans hold the belief that some people are more entitled than others. The structures and processes of modern, industrial, and global life are grounded in the story of separation, exceptionalism, and entitlement. Armed with this belief, we have never truly considered the consequences of our collective actions. This story is so embedded that overwhelming contrary information is ignored. Some now believe it is too late, and collapse is inevitable.

The modernist belief of human separation is a tired story, and as Mark Burch suggests, “when all appeals to reason have failed, tell a new story” [20]. Given the failure of modernity to sustain life on Earth, a new story will have to develop a compelling narrative, perhaps one that reintegrates humans into the web of life. Creating a new story that is relational and embraces the complexity of life would serve as a counter-narrative to the isolated homocentric beliefs embedded in our modern culture and its disciplines and practices.

Architecture tells stories about places, people, and values, both in narrative and physical forms. The acts of making and maintaining the world are embedded in a culture, but also point to an imagined future. Given the vectors pointing to collapse, what might architects do, how might their practices be transformed, and what role could architecture play in an unstable and uncertain future?

2. Stories of Collapse

Stories of collapse have been told throughout human history, yet our species has persisted through the last Ice Age, the agricultural revolution, and the transition into the modern industrial and digital world. Current predictions of collapse and ‘end times’ could be just another story that may or may not happen. However, this apocalyptic period is likely not simply another ‘end of the world as we know it’, but rather a fundamental reset of Earth, as in the last five extinction events. The awareness that collapse is possible is clear in narratives from science and technology, social sciences, religion, literature, economics, and related fields. It is also visible in the daily lives of people worldwide.

At the beginning of this essay, we outlined the factors that have converged to create a vast landscape of apocalyptic visions. These conditions have led to a body of ‘collapse’ literature that ranges from warnings about the end of civilization to predictions of human extinction. The voices presented here, a sample of these narratives, share the premise that collapse is already underway. All these authors observe increasingly stressed and uninhabitable regions of the planet as temperatures rise, food systems collapse, and atmospheric destabilization intensifies severe weather events. They recognize that ecological stress and species extinction will persist worldwide, and that current political, economic, and cultural systems are being dismantled and collapsing. Most expect the human population to decline sharply soon from a lack of essential resources such as food and clean water, rising disease vectors, failing energy infrastructure and unstable governance. These perspectives come from individuals with backgrounds in academia, pop culture, science, spirituality, and ethics.

This section is not a literature review, but rather a sample of work by several authors who have spoken openly about collapse. They were selected because each discusses the metacrisis—the intersection of climate change, species extinction, the decline of modernity and culture, and political and economic governance. Further, they provide a range of assessments of collapse, and diverse possible futures that encompass strategies for resilience, deep adaptation, societal and ecological collapse, and the potential for human extinction.

What we do not include in this brief review are voices advocating optimistic technological solutions to the challenges of this time, especially those related to climate change. We also do not include reformists who believe we can maintain the current modern capitalist culture through modified, strategic changes, nor those who argue against the story of collapse. Many climate scientists, ecologists, biologists, and others in the climate movement are very critical of the collapse literature, often in response to Bendell’s 2018 deep adaptation theory [21]. They rightly point out conceptual and methodological errors in the research, but their primary objection concerns the message. Jeremy Lent, author and founder of the Liology Institute, states his objection. “By turning people’s attention toward preparing for doom rather than focusing on structural political and economic changes, Deep Adaptation threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, increasing the risk of collapse by diluting efforts toward societal transformation… It’s not Deep Adaptation that we need right now—it’s Deep Transformation [22].”

There is little disagreement among those working in the fields of climate change, extinction, and cultural stress about the importance of accurate science or the need for transformation. However, there is significant disagreement over the likelihood of climate change collapse in climate change narratives and over how to interpret the available data. One of the main arguments concerns the extent to which information and interpretation should be shared with the public, with many agreeing with Lent that too much information could cause despair and undermine mitigation. Those writing from the perspective of the likelihood of collapse disagree. They believe that honestly discussing this possibility is the responsible thing to do, accompanied by critical and compassionate ‘stories’ of how we might collectively live in such times.

One of the early writers on global collapse is William Rees, a longtime faculty member at the University of British Columbia and a Professor of Human Ecology and Planning. His 1996 book, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, co-authored with Mathis Wackernagel, examined the effects of human activity on the planet and introduced concepts such as ‘ecological footprint’ and ‘carrying capacity’ [23]. Rees’s other works explore and develop measurable concepts like ‘ecological footprint’ [24,25]. As an ecologist, he recognizes that humans are living far beyond the Earth’s capacity to provide sustenance and absorb the waste generated by modern civilization. This seems invisible to the dominant culture because, Rees argues, humans live more in stories than on the earth. The story of human exceptionalism blinds a culture to its total dependence on Earth’s systems and leads to the belief that any problem can be solved through human ingenuity and technology. However, technological and socio-economic solutions that address one issue often create other problems. Rees suggests, rather than fixes, that humans must contract or face inevitable collapse.

He provides data and metaphors that are understandable to a large audience. For example, he calculates carrying capacity by asking, “How much area is needed to support this many people?” It is a proven fact that when a species exceeds the biological carrying capacity of its resources and waste-absorption capacity, i.e., overshoot, the system collapses [19,25]. Our modern culture has so far avoided the consequences of overshoot through the displacement of non-human life, trade that brings in resources unavailable within an ecological system, and widespread global wealth inequality. Rees emphasizes that we must view this situation clearly and honestly. The earth is like an island—once its resources are depleted, they cannot be accessed; once waste and pollution fill all ecological niches, only death remains. His message offers no hope, as humans appear unable to collectively address these crises within the modernist story we have created and inhabit, and unwilling to work toward a different one. After collapse, another story might arise supporting a much smaller human population. But this would mean that the resources, such as fossil fuels, used to advance modern civilization would no longer be available, as they would be exhausted or unreachable.

Another voice, less academic and more polemic, speaking to the inevitability of collapse is Lyle Lewis. In his book, Racing to Extinction: Why Humanity Will Soon Vanish, Lewis outlines an argument from his perspective of how our species is the cause of this planetary crisis [26]. Among collapse theorists, he is among the most prophetic, arguing that humans will become extinct within a relatively short time. He is also one of the voices most inclusive of diverse, intersecting variables that are simultaneously collapsing. He offers evolutionary and ecological reasons for his perspective: mass extinction, habitat loss, agriculture and grazing, climate change, human overpopulation, pollution, chemical load and waste. Homo sapiens’ belief in human exceptionality and separation blinds us to the reality right in front of our faces. He argues that we prefer to believe that our intelligence, sophisticated tools, and abstractions exempt us from ecological boundaries and rules that govern life.

Lewis is an endangered species biologist who worked for years at the US Department of the Interior. His book explains how each of the identified variables has contributed to ecological overshoot, drawing on both scientific evidence and his own experience. He denies that there is any hope and offers no alternative visions of the human future. But interestingly, at the end of the book, he moves out of the voice of science and anger to consider how we might live with this sentence of final death. He urges us to face this truth with humility and compassion, to help prepare communities for the increasing instability of the earth, and, interestingly, to find ways to document our failure for some unknowable future species [26].

Nate Hagens has created and uses the podcast The Great Simplification to present his ideas about collapse [27]. Like Rees and Lewis, he has a science background, particularly in energy systems, and he explores the intersection of energy and economics in depth. His perspective is that surplus energy is the main driver of modern industrial culture and has enabled a surge in technological innovation, resource extraction, and production. The use of surplus energy has also resulted in substantial waste in the atmosphere, oceans, and terrestrial environments. Hagens suggests that humans have been inclined to exploit this energy abundance, as the tendency toward short-term exploitation of resources and ideas has benefited our species through other technological inventions and insights. However, the surplus expansion is coming to an end because energy is no longer plentiful and cheap, and the waste from this rapid growth has caught up with us.

Drawing from historical examples of societal collapse, he suggests that we will experience a major simplification of our systems. He does not specify exactly how or when this collapse will occur. However, he offers ideas for preventing serious harm to human communities and the ecosystems we depend on: we need to adapt our systems and expectations to increased scarcity. This will require substantial material changes, significant psychological shifts, and new narratives.

Another collapse scholar with a background in science is Jem Bendell. He served on the faculty at Cumbrian University, where he founded the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS), and is now Professor Emeritus at Cumbria University. He has left academia to focus on his theory of Deep Adaptation and on developing a school of regenerative agriculture in Bali, Indonesia.

Bendell is well known for originating the concept of Deep Adaptation based on an assessment that humans no longer have the chance to stop climate change and should be preparing for the collapse of society. In his 2018 self-published article, he uses science and systems theory to argue for the inevitability of collapse and the need to focus on adaptation rather than mitigation [21]. In 2019, he founded the Deep Adaptation Forum to support peer-to-peer communications. Its purpose is to develop positive responses at the individual and community levels to increasing societal disruptions induced by climate change, irreversible environmental tipping points, and the lack of any political or economic response to ongoing global warming [28].

In his 2023 book, Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse, he further develops his argument about the limits of the current corporate and technological responses. He believes that it is time for an honest assessment of what is happening. We now have the choice to break together, or, as he says, we will break alone [29]. He does not offer solutions but explores questions and guidance through a discussion of his four “Rs”: Resilience, Relinquishment, Restoration, and Reconciliation. These attitudes could help us as we build a life during collapse. He also raises questions as guidance: what must we give up? What can we restore? And how do we reconcile who we have been with who we will be together? Like Lewis and Hagens, Bendell starts with science but ends with moral reflection and the deep human emotions of grieving, letting go, and coming together.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, a professor and former Dean at the University of Victoria, Canada, has become well known for her public scholarship in collapse, decolonialization, and the global south. Oliveira expands concepts and language for the time of collapse in her ongoing podcasts and her book, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism [30].

She illustrates how the story of modernity serves as the foundation for catastrophic conditions like climate change, species extinction, and extreme wealth inequality. The promises of modernity appear credible: individual rights, consensus governance, progress through science and technology, and so on. However, hidden within these goals are the means and actions we have accepted to achieve them: disruptions, violence, and the taking of lands and peoples rooted in colonialism, capitalism, and hyper-individualism. Our pursuit of a modern life is built on the colonization of lands and peoples worldwide. It has also colonized us by making us unaware of how this life depends on the extraction and exploitation of others.

Modernism is collapsing because of the human activity needed to fulfill what we in ‘modern cultures’ see as basic needs, perceived entitlements, and a righteous self-image. Her analysis of this collapse reveals our culture’s failure to honestly confront the real decay at the heart of our history. She also believes that few have the stamina and honesty to face these failures, instead opting to hide behind ‘fixes’ such as technology, misrepresentation, and virtue.

By going beyond narratives of climate change and species extinction, Oliveira offers a way to shed the violence of modernity and create space for what will come. Modernity is fading and needs support; we can help it by caring for, or ‘hospicing’, its remnants and structures. At the same time, she suggests that we can help bring about something new, even if we do not know what that will be. Her book and various podcasts present challenging ideas for this work if one is brave and mature enough to confront how we are part of the world’s death. It is now our duty to compost the past and support the birth of the new.

We end this series of collapse stories with Joanna Macy, an activist, teacher, Buddhist scholar, and a prophetic voice since the 1960s. Over the last 70 years, and until her death on 19 July 2025, Macy worked in ever-evolving communities to understand how humans might resist the harm we cause, work through despair and shame, and reconnect with human and earth communities. As an activist, she has been engaged in campaigns against nuclear proliferation and earth-harming activities such as deforestation, toxic and chemical pollution, climate change, and species extinction. She developed ways to open spaces for environmental grief about the disappearing Earth.

Macy named a critical breaking point in the human psyche in her 1995 chapter, “Working Through Environmental Despair” [26]. She posited that before the splitting of the atom and the explosion of nuclear bombs, humans had moral certainty that future generations would follow, both in terms of human life and the regeneration of the earth itself. This is no longer true. “That loss, unmeasured and immeasurable, is the pivotal psychological reality of our time” ([31], p. 241). This deep knowledge is compounded by today’s changing climate and species extinction crises. Macy spent her lifetime engaged in conversations about how to respond to this reality. What happens when the possibility of extinction is acknowledged? When it is repressed? How should we face it? How do we heal the story of separation that guides our culture and rediscover our connection to the Earth itself?

In 2012, she and Chris Johnstone published Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy that begins with three stories of our time [32]. ‘Business as Usual’ and ‘The Great Unraveling’ are the primary yet conflicting stories at the root of modern culture today. The third story, ‘The Great Turning,’ imagines a radical transformation of human culture based in renewed relationships with the earth and within human communities—values and practices that reintegrate humans into the fabric of life. The book was reissued in 2022 with a greater sense of urgency and more uncertainty about the possible outcome of the metacrisis we are facing. We will need the courage to face this time with honesty and compassion, particularly when it is emotionally difficult to know or have assurance of the outcome.

In the Work that Reconnects [33], Macy and colleagues have developed a journey toward the Great Turning story. It is visualized as a spiral: an iterative journey rather than a linear process. The foundation of the four phases is ‘Gratitude’, the emotion that shifts the mind away from shame, guilt, or terror into an open-hearted acknowledgment of the gifts of the world. The second phase, ‘Honoring Pain for the World’, recognizes the harm caused by the ongoing destruction of the Earth and acknowledges that the pain experienced is both personal and collective. The third phase encourages ‘Seeing with New Eyes’ to expand our sense of time so that we recognize how environmental justice and social justice are intertwined, how we are connected to other species, and how, through deep time, we remain connected to our ancestors. Lastly, it calls everyone to ‘Go Forth’, and, according to the requirements of each situation and individuals’ gifts, act on behalf of life. The spiral is cyclical, with repeated themes that move both inward and outward, simultaneously acknowledging gratitude, grief, pain, connection, action, and return. This journey offers support as humans struggle with the knowledge of the breakdown of our world caused by the supposed human ‘mastery’ over nuclear processes, climate change, and the destruction of life. This knowledge cannot be undone. To survive as a species on a habitable Earth, humans must face this truth. If we can find ways to live with this knowledge, we might also learn how to live with death.

The authors above suggest that humans must reposition ourselves into the Earth’s relational and interdependent web of life, reevaluating and retreating from the premises of our story of modernity. This will be difficult. As Lewis and Bendell remind us, restraint is not a dominant trait of Homo sapiens, and if we can withdraw, it will require significant effort [21,26]. As Robert Jensen says, “We are the first species in the planet’s history that will have to will itself to practice restraint across the board” [34], p. 37. Is this even possible?

There are openings for this reevaluation. At the same moment, we live in the modernist story of exceptionalism and hyper-individualism, while science is telling us that relationality is the primary condition of natural processes. Many disciplines are reporting that the structures of matter, energy, and life are characterized by interdependency and interpenetration. We are now told that we are related to, and share attributes with, other creatures: animals have knowledge and culture, and trees and vegetation are now recognized as having agency. Science that once supported our story of exceptionalism is now revealing relationships and deep connectivity throughout Earth’s systems, while our exhausted story of separation is destroying the Earth itself.

The metacrisis is real, authentic, urgent, and systemic, rooted culturally in the disconnection between humans and the natural world. As the authors above suggest, denial, minimization, and dependence on technological solutions serve as mental defenses that prevent more meaningful responses to the global crisis. The future remains precarious and unpredictable, even as signs of ongoing collapse become clearer. This awareness may cause not only denial, but also eco-anxiety, fear, and despair, which are appropriate and rational responses to these conditions.

Amid these emotions, we are called to see clearly what is being revealed through the process of collapse. We are called to examine our stories, because it is culture itself that we must reconsider. We are urged to be apocalyptic—to reveal or uncover—by seeing through the illusions of stories we tell ourselves and that are told by people in power to keep us trapped in systems they control. We are called to find ways, in community and through relationality, to practice emotional honesty and to create new/ancient practices that move humans deeper into relationships with others and with the earth itself.

3. Architecture and Collapse

Architecture and allied fields are global phenomena, but we limit this part of the collapse discussion to modern Western culture, primarily as practiced in the United States. We doubt that this review section will be apocalyptic, but hope that it may reveal what might be unclear at this moment of ongoing collapse.

The profession has been involved in transforming practice to mitigate the impacts of global warming and environmental degradation. Architects and other design professionals have made important contributions to address aspects of the polycrisis and to explore the profession’s responsibility and constraints in relation to these conditions. For example, Kelbaugh [35,36,37] wrote early in, and often throughout, his career about the forms of architectural production in cities and the need for an ethical system that embraces climate change. Fisher has worked to codify professional obligations [38,39,40], Till [41,42] speaks to the agency of architecture as contingent and relational, and Deamer approaches the topic with a focus on architectural labor, exploitation, and the politics of design [43,44]. These contributions are important, yet, at the same time, the discipline and practice of architecture have also contributed to the collapse.

This part of our essay aims to explore and problematize the role of architecture in the present moment in four ways. We begin with an articulation of the stated values embedded in the US AIA Code, followed by a discussion of professionalism as a modern response to accountability. We offer a brief review of critiques of architectural ethics relevant to this discussion and conclude this section with an articulation of what might be largely invisible in current professional practice. While we use the AIA as an example, we recognize that professional ethics vary widely globally. Even so, according to the sociology of the professions and the international nature of practice, they all share similar limitations [45].

Codes of Ethics. The AIA Code outlines the profession’s responsibilities to the constituencies it serves. The goal is to set standards, define boundaries of acceptable practice, and ensure economic viability for those trained and employed in the necessary theory and skills. A code of ethics is a structural response to the complexity of modernity, and no professional code of ethics, including the AIA, can fully address the challenges of the contemporary world. Instead, these codes offer a minimal set of core concerns, aspirations, and principles that define the limits and objectives of acceptable professional behavior [46].

The AIA Code follows a three-tiered structure: canons as principles of conduct; ethical standards as specific goals for members to pursue in their professional actions; and mandatory rules of conduct that, if violated, may result in disciplinary action by the Institute.

The AIA Code applies to the professional activities of all classes of members, wherever they occur. It addresses responsibilities to the public, which the profession serves and enriches; to the clients and users of architecture and in the building industries, who help to shape the built environment; and to the art and science of architecture, the continuum of knowledge and creation which is the heritage and legacy of the profession.

Canons in the AIA Code define obligations for the following categories: the public, clients, the profession, colleagues, and, most recently, the environment. These are supported by rules for their application, enforcement, and amendment. The AIA does not specify the professional standard of care, and clearly states that the code should not be used “as evidence that the standard of care has been breached”.

Canon 1—General Obligations addresses members striving to demonstrate what they call “a consistent pattern of reasonable care and competence,” and states this is tested against “the technical knowledge and skill which is ordinarily applied by architects of good standing in the same locality”. The general condition also addresses aspirations to continually improve esthetic excellence in the context of practice and its related research, teaching, and training. Other general conditions aim to respect and conserve natural and cultural heritage in ways that improve the environment and the quality of life within it. Canon 2—Obligations to the Public emphasizes law, disclosure, and the promotion of the public interest, including civic responsibility, environmental equity and justice, and transparency about the potential environmental impacts of their work on behalf of clients.

Canons 3, 4, and 5 address Obligations to the Client, Profession, and Colleagues. Like all professional codes, the AIA’s prioritizes the most important considerations that can be judged, providing clarity about acceptable and unacceptable conduct and ensuring procedural integrity. It also intentionally avoids detailed discussions of contested value statements and fundamental relationships among or across disciplines and professions. Nothing in the obligations acknowledges Macy’s gratitude, grief, pain, connection, action, and return cycles, and the uncertainty inherent in collapse. Ethical codes deliberately avoid humility and cannot acknowledge what we do not know across multiple contexts.

Over the past 50 years, especially with the rise of the environmental movement in the 70s and early 80s, the AIA has integrated educational programs on energy and environmental design technology. These programs emphasize design performance, construction solutions, and material choices. In 2007, these issues were formally incorporated into the AIA Code through the addition of Canon 6—Obligations to the Environment, complementing longstanding responsibilities to the public, clients, and the profession. The AIA Code now requires that professionals promote sustainable design and development in both natural and built environments, with a focus on resource efficiency. This new section highlights five key areas: energy conservation (reducing greenhouse gases), water conservation, building materials (reducing toxins and pollutants), ecosystem impacts (effects on natural habitats and ecosystems), and climate change (adaptive strategies and hazards). Across all the canons, there are general guidelines (“should consider” language) that recognize architects’ responsibility to manage shared resources, such as water and energy, and encourage consideration of climate change impacts. It also emphasizes ethical practices in the sourcing of construction materials to prevent toxicity, pollution, and waste.

Professionalism. Underlying the entire framework of codes of conduct and ethics embedded in the AIA code are the concept and structure of the professions. Modern professions in society are one of the structures that uphold the current social and economic system. Sociological literature on the rise of professions [45,47,48] has shown that professions are best understood as the application of moral technologies in advanced cultures. In complex societies, reliance on expertise helps individuals to define what is morally permissible, thereby establishing public trust that professionals will act ethically. In doing so, they also legitimize exclusion and privilege, maintaining inequality under the guise of neutrality.

Magali Sarfatti Larson’s influential book, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis, argues that, at its core, professionalism was created to regulate markets within specific intellectual fields or jurisdictions, such as medicine, law, engineering, and architecture. Professions develop core skills and ethical standards that highlight altruism and expertise, which boost their social status. This allows for privileged roles in practice, legitimizes certain ideologies, creates social boundaries, and sets the stage for future exclusion. In this way, professions tend to prioritize expertise over democracy and favor market dominance through monopolistic control [45].

According to Eliot Freidson in Professionalism: The Third Logic [47], professionalism is best understood as a blend of three sometimes conflicting logics. The first is a market logic where authority and quality assessments are controlled by consumers and buyers. Even knowledge is treated as a commodity within this framework, governed by each intellectual field. The second is a bureaucratic and managerial logic that is rule-based, with authority held by managers and regulators. Knowledge is standardized, and quality evaluations are based on compliance and performance. The third, and most important, logic asserts that authority resides with professionals who share standards of practice grounded in specialized, socially validated knowledge and discretionary judgment, rather than in scripts or price signals. According to Freidson, ethics arising from the practice of experts are internal, not externally imposed, although they require social validation. He also emphasizes that judgment is essential when dealing with the ambiguous situations characteristic of practice in a complex world.

While Abbott, in his The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor [48], aligns with both Freidson and Larson, his contribution to this literature is a systematic assessment of how expert labor is organized to manage authority through processes designed to gain, protect, or lose it. Abbott’s contribution uses jurisdiction as the main unit of analysis, suggesting that boundaries are negotiated among professionals who do the work, the legal systems that formally recognize and regulate it, and public opinion that values or does not value the work. Professions are strong when they control all three systems and are weakened when these arenas are misaligned. Abbott’s systems analysis shows how professionals use abstraction to represent real life—often messy and contested—as under their expert control through theorizing, developing coherent processes, and establishing standards of performance (both material and professional). This control may be possible, but conflict is inevitable as circumstances change, leading to unpredictable consequences and the emergence of new problems, technologies, and adjacent professions that make rival claims. All three scholars see professions as fragile, constantly negotiated, and prone to failure when they cannot adapt to shifting realities.

The recent scholarship on ethics in architecture aims to establish conditions that address various sociological critiques of the professions. The concept of professionalism discussed above assumes that professional authority justifies exercising power over specific areas, such as architecture. One consequence of granting authority to the profession is that it hinders the negotiation of what moral action might entail during times of collapse, which could involve developing alternative forms of relationships between people and places and among people within a place.

Critiques of Ethics in Architecture. Thomas Fisher [38,39,40], as part of a broader body of work on ethics in architecture, discusses polycrises as a convergence of obligation, risk, and responsibility in practice, highlighting that these crises create professional ethical dilemmas rather than merely technical problems. This is an important addition to the technical rationality found in the AIA Code of Ethics because the placement of a crisis within social and political discourse raises questions about whether these polycrises can be ‘solved’ or must be approached as culturally complex dilemmas [38]. Fisher views architecture as a civic profession with a primary duty to the public [39]. Not all canons hold equal importance in every project, and when considered as a set, dilemmas will always arise that require negotiation. Architects should recognize their limits of tolerance and may need to walk away from harmful work, avoid externalized risks, accept responsibility, and advocate. In Fisher’s ethics, architects are not solo heroes; instead, they are stewards with other professionals and citizens of the public and private realms [40].

Jeremy Till [41,42] agrees with Fisher and emphasizes that architectural practice “depends”. It is rooted in power structures and political urgency beyond the architect’s control [41]. He states that professional responsibility involves directly confronting crisis politics within our institutions and governance systems. Till views architectural technology and performance metrics as distractions from deeper issues within our culture and the politics shaping it. Peggy Deamer [43,44] connects democratic labor ethics with climate ethics, suggesting that the profession must organize itself to better address crisis conditions. Like Fisher, she claims that the heroic myths we tell ourselves about how places are made hinder our ability to properly value architectural labor and the architecture we create. She also argues that we should not accept global or local extractive practices.

Hélène Frichot may be the most relevant to how we try to survive amid the changes to life as we know it on the planet. Her book, Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture, offers insights into how we could shift architectural ethics away from assumed mastery over complex ecological systems toward multi-species care, humility, and relational accountability [49]. The common theme among all these authors is that the polycrisis is not just about design, but is also rooted in ethical ruptures that cannot be addressed solely through technical change and architectural expertise. They all assign responsibilities to practice, as well as to institutions, government regimes, and citizens. For Frichot, architecture as co-production exists only within an ecology of practices rather than as isolated artifacts.

We have written a similar assessment that questions the presumed independence of professional experts, arguing instead for a democratic practice that leverages what architects can contribute to places, but always within a broader spectrum of insights and ways of knowing [50,51,52]. We proposed a border pedagogy inspired by Henri Giroux [53,54], where we operate in the space between modern and postmodern intellectual thought, allowing meaning, power, and truth to be negotiated throughout and beyond the life cycle of any place. Therefore, we conceptualize practice as democratic cultural production, although the current context in collapse may require us to negotiate between modernity and an unknowable ‘postmodern’ condition.

Unmaking and Moral Injury. The critique of architecture as a profession and practice reveals some of its moral and cultural limits, especially in relation to the broader social and natural worlds. These issues are crucial for professional conduct and ethics as we face a period of collapse. Another aspect of architectural making is less obvious to both professionals and the public, yet it significantly contributes to the metacrises we are experiencing—the unmaking [55].

The AIA Code, which is focused on architectural making, does not address the shadow side of making. Architecture cannot exist without unmaking, and this process, globally and locally, significantly contributes to the conditions of cultural and ecological collapse. “The problem with the eagerness to make a world is that, because the world is already made, what is there must first be destroyed” ([56] p. 32). The AIA Code text on ecology requires architects to consider the project’s impact on the site and its landscape, and further requires consideration of the specified materials. However, it does not mandate that each intervention specifically evaluates the injury to the context, region, or global ecosystem. As a result, architecture has played a major role in terraforming the Earth, altering the surface and ecology of places to access materials and create sites for human habitation [49].

The scale of resource extraction and land use transformation starting 600 or 700 years ago and continuing today, is staggering. The IPBES reports that humans have terraformed 75% of the Earth’s surface [4]. This is the main cause of the rapid extinction of planetary life, an unmaking in which architecture participates.

Consider, for example, that architecture is among the largest material interventions in Earth’s systems. McKinsey Global Institute says that the world will need to build the equivalent of a city the size of New York every month for 40 years to accommodate population growth and urbanization [57,58]. When we extrapolate that monthly construction rate over 40 to 60 years, the result is approximately the size of the entire existing global building stock. How much unmaking would be required to meet this goal, even if unrealistic in the face of possible collapse? Data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs confirm the McKinsey assessment [59].

The profession of architecture has contributed significantly to modern life. However, we must recognize that our profession and its practices have also caused harm to people, places, and the earth. The damage is physical, psychological, and moral, rooted in architecture’s acceptance of modern norms. As part of the dominant culture, architecture has been complicit in destroying thriving ecosystems for resource extraction and relocating entire populations from their homelands, all in the name of progress and development. As professionals, we have participated in dismantling cultures and eradicating countless other species worldwide through our creations, a process that also involves unmaking.

Architects do not set out to destroy the world and people’s lives, but this occurs every day in communities across the United States and the globe through siting, material specification, and waste management. It occurs when we build new towns or cities on wetlands or forests, or build subdivisions on green fields, or cut trees that are home to a myriad of creatures for a rare mineral or an office park. In the global political economy of resource extraction and industrial production we live in, the impact is both local and planetary.

The language of ‘moral injury’ has recently entered our language and names a newly understood type of harm. It refers to the deep distress that results from experiencing, perpetrating, or failing to prevent acts that violate deeply held beliefs [24]. Our actions cause moral injury to others when we destroy their neighborhoods through contamination resulting from a new industry or build on sacred or ecologically fragile sites. And we, as professionals, have also experienced moral injury when we feel or believe that we are forced to make decisions we believe are wrong and harmful because of client demands or accepted political and economic ‘realities’.

4. Reflections and Questions

The science reviewed in this essay indicates that collapse is not only possible but probable alongside architecture’s involvement in many of the stressors on ecological and cultural systems, revealing the profound participation of the profession at this moment. The 2007 addition of Canon 6 to the AIA Code of Conduct is a clear indication that members of the architectural profession in the US are aware of the threat of climate change, contamination, and planetary stress. At the same time, there is a lack of awareness of how architecture is complicit in (multiplying) these vectors. As Oliveira says, our culture strongly supports the goals of modernism, while remaining uncritical or perhaps unaware of the means we deploy to achieve them, including unmaking and moral injury [30].

As modernity unravels, it is becoming increasingly clear that standard practice in architecture, indeed in many of our accepted professions, will have to be reconceptualized. There are questions we might ask ourselves. Can we let go of professionalism and the boundaries of unmoored capitalist markets and current legal structures? Can we participate in making and unmaking efforts that support life and facilitate the transition to possible futures that are more interconnected and relational? Can we contribute our skills and knowledge, not as outside experts, but as members of a community that take responsibility for caring, managing, making, unmaking, and protecting all the inhabitants, human and non-human, who share this place? Can we value mending, repairing, restoring, rewilding, withdrawing, recycling, and upcycling alongside making? Can design help us through the collapse of modernity and deeply stressed ecosystems?

The literature on collapse implicitly questions whether professionals and communities around the world can shift from focusing on prediction and authorship to honestly confronting what is happening now. This includes uncertainty about the future, and possibly even whether a future exists at all. We are called to engage with the ambiguities of moral reflection and existential questions in our practices and in our relationships with clients, the public, and other professionals. In short, we must address the tension between moral technologies like clarity, performance predictability, and presumed expertise in our ethics, and the uncertainty, humility, and relationality emphasized in the stories of collapse.

Our practice, whether it involves a single building, urban, or regional design, takes place in specific locations. These local interventions always exist within a broader global context, and exploring the connection between local and global contexts presents opportunities. We can, at the local level, challenge the violence of extraction and environmental destruction and stop “doing bad things”, such as building on green fields, using materials that exacerbate the crisis, and believing that we have heroic powers to make or save the world through better building. We need the courage to recognize our role in loss, understand the seriousness of new limits, and acknowledge the harm caused. Our focus would shift from optimism to honesty and transparency.

A similar shift in our thinking redirects the concept of placemaking from creating to caring for, emphasizing caregiving, continuity, and repair. Vanessa de Oliveira recommends focusing on maintenance and adaptation instead of aiming for growth. She frames hospicing as the new foundation, calling for innovations in palliative care to address failing systems rather than making promises about futures we cannot predict [25]. Ultimately, as Frichot suggests, we need the humility to coexist within shared ecologies with multi-species communities [48].

Paula Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, offers a metaphor that suggests a brand of humility affirming designer agency, and concurrently, the limits to agency. She says that design “is like an enzyme that takes revolutions that happen in science, in politics, in technology, in history, and metabolizes them into life” [60]. The act of enzymes metabolizing into life requires architecture to embrace the fact that we are not in control of the process, but concurrently are part of the constellation of factors that are required to make and sustain.

Bendell describes reconciliation and relinquishment as a dialogic, relational practice, emphasizing working with thresholds, transitions, and uncertainty rather than relying on unsustainable assumptions about control and predictability [21]. It requires humility to shift from centralized authority models of work to more decentralized practices within communities. Here, professions create space for non-professional, indigenous, local, and informal ways of knowing that recognize when intervention is appropriate and when it is not. Macy reminds us that this same humility also allows professionals to operate in ways not often taught in our classrooms and continuing education courses: grief literacy, conflict endurance, ethical refusal (what not to do), and relational courage [32]. We need moral clarity to accept and share our grief and despair in the face of collapse. This is evidence of our care and love for the planet and our species. If we process our grief and hospice that grief, we may have more courage and creativity to participate in story-making about the future as it unfolds.

5. Conclusions

Ultimately, we do not know what to do during this time of collapse. We imagine that ethical practice in the apocalypse is not about predicting the end of the world, but rather about telling the truth regarding our current circumstances, including our complicity in the collapse, and finding ways to cause less harm. The emerging story of collapse is apocalyptic, revealing what has been hidden, something we did not want to see in the cultural story of separation and exceptionalism we live in and maintain through our actions. The literature we have reviewed on collapse does not offer false hope that all will be well; it only provides more, but imperfect, clarity. In collapse, we do not seek destruction, even of modernity. Instead, we would accompany its failures with gratitude for its gifts and grief over its violence to the earth and ourselves.

Architecture, at its best, shapes culture, and humans live within cultures framed and reinforced by the stories we tell ourselves. We need new stories as we face collapse. One story is that the extinction of our species is possible. Contemporary literature offers other stories, such as the world of chaos, disorder, and violence of dystopian novels, or perhaps the new solarpunk, which imagines how life might flourish during and after collapse [61]. We might explore stories of utopian visions of the good life or nostalgia for past ones. All of these will likely coexist. During this uncertain and precarious time, we find ourselves living our everyday lives—buying groceries, tending children, designing buildings, meeting friends, and starting gardens—as if everything is fine. At the same time, we are deeply aware that all is not well and cannot continue unless radical global changes are made. We also realize how unlikely this seems. Our lives are fractured, and we already inhabit multiple conflicting stories.

Those of us alive today are experiencing a transitional moment as the old world falls apart ecologically, culturally, and politically/economically, while a new world is yet to be born. In this transition, we might find solace and courage by creating and living in stories that connect us to one another: stories and practices that reveal our interdependence with the myriad other species and ecologies on this precious and unique Earth.

As Joanna Macy says, “This is an incredible time to be alive, a great privilege” [51].