More than climates will change in this century. To begin to address the salient environmental, social, and political quandaries of this century, many of the basic theoretical and practical assumptions about what we think architectural design is and does will also fundamentally change. Moe will address mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, especially as it is evidenced in modern architectural production. This fallacy is the source of architecture’s manifold unequal ecological and social exchanges, its environmental ambivalences, and the misdirection of its faulty environmental efforts. A cogent response to this fallacy will necessarily question the very means we use to design and describe architecture as a terrestrial endeavor within the storms of this century. Example responses will be drawn from research, pedagogy, and practice. 

Kiel Moe is a practicing architect and the Gerald Sheff Chair in Architecture at McGill University. In recognition of his design and research endeavors, he was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Helsinki, the Gorham P. Stevens Rome Prize in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome, The Architectural League Prize, and the American Institute of Architects National Young Architect Award. He has published ten books on architecture, including Empire, State & Building; Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial; Insulating Modernism: Isolated and Non-Isolated Thermodynamics in Architecture; Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy; and Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture.