NASA - Climate change exacerbates [PDF] the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and human crises such as poverty, famine, mass migration, and war. To model future outcomes, scientists use four standard “pathways” for different possible levels of CO2 in the atmosphere over time. The most extreme-sounding projections, the ones that make headlines, actually follow an entirely plausible pathway, in which humanity simply carries on burning fossil fuels as usual and temperatures continue to rise. According to a recent study, if humanity does not sharply reduce CO2 emissions, by the end of the century the chances of an extinction-level event could be 1 in 20. Pictured: Hurricanes Katia, Irma, and Jose on Sept. 8, moving west across the Atlantic Ocean to North America.

Climate change is the fundamental design problem of our time. Not style, not fees, not education, not community, not health, not justice. All other concerns, many of them profoundly important, are nonetheless ancillary. The threat climate change poses is existential, and buildings are hugely complicit-even more so than that stock culprit, the automobile. As every architect should know, buildings consume some 40 percent of the energy in the U.S. annually, and they emit nearly half of the carbon dioxide (CO2), through greenfield development, cement production, and the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal. Because CO2 traps solar energy in the atmosphere, thereby heating the planet, it is the chief agent of climate change, making buildings-and by association, the architecture profession-profoundly responsible

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing since the industrial age, it spiked with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the advent of globalization in the 1980s, and in 2013 it passed 400 parts per million for the first time since the Pliocene Epoch, 3 million to 5 million years ago. During the Middle Pliocene, which scientists study because its climate foreshadows our own rapidly approaching future, the global temperature was 5.4 F to 7.2 F higher than today. Sea levels ranged 16 to 131 feet higher, and the polar regions were so warm that coniferous forests grew there.

Architects face a choice: to remake the built environment so that it produces no CO2, or to carry on, business as usual, and live with the consequences.

The World at Stake

The effects of climate change are increasingly self-evident, and costly. Hurricane Harvey took some 70 lives when it hit the Houston area in late August, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott has estimated the damage at $150 billion to $180 billion. At press time, the 3.5 million residents of Puerto Rico remained without power after Hurricane Maria and many of them lacked access to fresh water. “The devastation ... has set us back nearly 20 to 30 years,” Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González-Colón told the Associated Press. Across the globe, higher temperatures are contributing to record heat waves and droughts, rising sea levels, more intense storms, wildfires, and floods, and other extreme conditions [PDF]. A mass extinction is underway, thanks in part to climate change; a study in the journal Science Advances contextualizes it as “the sixth of its kind in Earth’s 4.5 billion years of history,” with vertebrate species going extinct at 100 times the historical background rate.

Even if humanity was to immediately stop releasing CO2, the climate would continue to change because the greenhouse gases that we have already dumped into the atmosphere could take millennia to dissipate. But that doesn’t mean we can throw up our hands and ignore the problem. The sober reaction is to pursue both mitigation, in order to minimize emissions, as well as resilience, to bolster cities, towns, buildings, and infrastructure so they can endure the storms to come. (The designers of Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park explain how resilient strategies made a difference with Harvey here.) Skeptics should consider that innately risk-adverse institutions such as the U.S. Defense Department, giant re-insurer Swiss Re, and the masters of the universe at Goldman Sachs are planning accordingly. (Read the Washington state insurance commissioner’s take here.)

And if we don’t reduce CO2 emissions? Imagine, by the end of the century, a Hurricane Sandy–level flood inundating Long Island, N.Y., every two weeks, Dust Bowl–intensity drought in the Southwest that persists for decades, Miami largely abandoned and under water, and Missouri as hot as Arizona [PDF] is now, with 46 to 115 days above 95 F each year. Such catastrophic scenarios are not hyperbole, but probable consequences of inaction. Indeed, if there is a fault in climatological findings as a whole, it is that scientists have tended to underplay [PDF] the threats.

Ricardo Arduengo/AFP/Getty Images - Climate change is causing sea levels and temperatures to rise, expanding hurricane strength, range, and duration. At press time, the 3.4 million residents of Puerto Rico remained without power and with limited access to clean water in the wake of Hurricane Maria (pictured). If we don’t decrease CO2 emissions, by 2100 the global mean sea level would rise at least 1 foot and could rise as much as 8 feet, exposing coastal and island populations to even more extreme storms, surge, and flooding.

Climate change exacerbates poverty, disease, famine, and conflict, and the human costs will only increase along with CO2 concentrations and temperatures. By 2100, rising oceans could force as many as 2 billion residents of coastal areas worldwide to migrate toward higher ground. In Florida alone, during Hurricane Irma, some 6.3 million people came under mandatory evacuation orders, and the state could permanently lose 2.5 million or more residents as inundations [PDF] become more frequent. Unrest will increase across the globe, as it did in drought-ridden Syria [PDF], in part because heat makes people agitated, and in part because deteriorating conditions will simply make people desperate.

In the U.S., a 2017 study found, the wetter, relatively cooler northern states will prosper compared to other regions of the country, and attract more crime in the bargain. Agriculture yields in huge swaths of the Midwest will decline by 50 percent or more if we don’t cut emissions. The southern states in particular sound like they’ll be downright miserable: People will die younger and the poor will grow poorer, with tropical diseases making even greater inroads as mosquitoes flourish in the heat and with local economies declining by as much as 20 percent by 2100.

Architects should note that as temperatures rise construction will be hit particularly hard, because so much of it occurs in the open air. Keep burning CO2 like there’s no tomorrow, and by 2050 the 48 contiguous states will experience an average of 20 to 30 more days than now above 90 F. Any day hotter than 90 F cuts outdoor daily labor supply by up to 14 percent, because workers simply aren’t able to show up on site as regularly due to fatigue and illness. On-the-job productivity will drop too. One study found that by century’s end, in the sample city of Houston, the erection of a typical steel structure will require 7 percent or more additional labor hours.

Robyn Beck/Getty Images - In early September, the La Tuna Fire, one of the worst conflagrations in Los Angeles history, burned through 7,194 acres in the Verdugo Mountains and drew more than 1,000 firefighters from all over California to help put it out. If we don’t sharply reduce CO2 emissions, by 2050 the risk of wildfire will increase across the country, the fire season will begin even earlier and end even later, and the greatest impact will be felt in the South Central states, including Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas.

According to a paper [PDF] that the Obama administration released in 2014, any delay in cutting CO2 emissions “could increase economic damages by approximately 0.9 percent of global output. … These costs are not onetime, but are rather incurred year after year because of the permanent damage caused by increased climate change resulting from the delay.” For context, the paper forecasted that 0.9 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product for the year would be around $150 billion.

Leadership in Action

Countries participating in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord have agreed to limit emissions in the hope of preventing the global average temperature from rising more than 3.6 F above the preindustrial level (a target broadly known by its single-digit metric equivalent of 2 C). If the temperature goes any higher, numerous studies have concluded, there’s no stopping the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets from melting, which within this century could raise the ocean 10 feet and 23 feet, respectively.

Given that the national emissions commitments are voluntary, perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a July study put the current chances of keeping the temperature increase below 3.6 F at a depressing 5 percent: “The likely range of global temperature increase is 2.0 C to 4.9 C [ 3.6 F to 8.8 F ],” the authors found.

Every country in the world has signed or plans to sign the Paris agreement except Taiwan (which the U.N. doesn’t recognize as a nation but which has enacted emissions-reduction legislation anyway) and Syria. Since inauguration day, however, the Trump administration [PDF] has not only moved to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris accord, perhaps even more alarmingly it has appointed climate-change skeptics and deniers to virtually every key agency position and begun to roll back environmental regulations and censor government officials on the subject of climate change.

Such moves make no sense, environmentally or economically. A 2015 Citibank report [PDF] estimated the worldwide cost of keeping temperatures below 3.6 F would be $190.2 trillion while the price of inaction would be $192 trillion. What fair-minded individual wouldn’t rather save $1.8 trillion, and civilization in the bargain?

Roland Nagy - Each of the past three years has successively been the hottest on record, and across the planet new local records are being set with astonishing frequency. On July 21, Shanghai (pictured) experienced its hottest day since monitoring began in 1872, with the thermometer topping off at 105.6 F. And as of press time in late September, Chicago was having an unprecedented six consecutive days and counting above 90 F. If we don’t sharply reduce CO2 emissions, by 2100 the average global temperature [PDF] could increase by 10 F or more, and 75 percent of the world’s population could be exposed to lethal heat levels for at least 20 days a year.

Climate change denial is clearly lousy for business, unless you’re in oil, gas, or coal, in which case it’s a marketing plan. Fossil fuel companies, whose products are largely responsible for CO2 emissions, and therefore climate change, routinely manipulate [PDF] research, policy, and public opinion to deflect liability. It’s not that the industry and its fronts actually doubt the underlying science. Quite the opposite. Their own in-house scientists raised the alarm.

As has been widely reported, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in his previous role as CEO of ExxonMobil, used an email account with the fake name “Wayne Tracker” to hide his discussions about climate change and other sensitive topics. New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman demanded the account records as part of an ongoing fraud investigation-alleging that Exxon lied to investors about the potential impact of climate change on the business-only for a company representative to claim that seven years’ worth of the emails have been inadvertently erased.

A study released in August reviewed 187 Exxon climate change communications from 1977 to 2014 and found that the more publicly available the information, the more likely it was to discredit the science: “83 percent of peer-reviewed papers and 80 percent of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12 percent of advertorials do so, with 81 percent instead expressing doubt.”

Plainly put, evidence continues to mount that fossil fuel companies have tried to shield their businesses from a market reaction they know is inevitable, in much the same way that the tobacco industry lied to consumers for decades about the awful health effects of smoking. The motive is obvious. If cleaner energy sources take hold internationally, the Citibank report found, gas stands to lose $3.4 trillion between 2015 and 2040 and coal could lose $11.5 trillion in the same period. BP estimated total proven oil reserves worldwide at 1.7 trillion barrels in 2016. At the Sept. 24 price of $50.66 per barrel, that’s $86.4 trillion in assets that the industry and producing nations will have to write off. You can bet they won’t do so willingly.

The drought that just ended in the West lasted six years and drew down the water in Nevada’s Lake Mead (pictured), the largest reservoir in the U.S., to the lowest level since it was formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s. If we don’t sharply reduce CO2 emissions, by 2100 the Southwest could face a 99 percent likelihood of Dust Bowl–intensity drought that lasts for decades.

Government participation at all levels is necessary to encourage right action in the private sector, through research, underwriting, incentives, regulations, legislation, and leadership. Architecture has a relatively small financial footprint, and it will have to punch above its weight in Washington, D.C., where money is speech and legislative action demonstrably [PDF] follows the dictates of the most “verbose” special interest groups rather than the collective will of voters, as measurable in the policy disconnects between polls and Acts of Congress.

The architecture profession made $7 million in campaign contributions in 2016, an election year, with the AIA’s political action committee, ArchiPAC, contributing $226,300. That year, the construction industry made $122 million in contributions, and the real estate industry made $234 million. By comparison, the political network of climate change deniers and petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch budgeted $889 million for the same cycle. So while architects and firms can and should take individual responsibility for mitigation, the profession as a whole will benefit from a concerted effort to forge cross-industry alliances, single-mindedly speaking truth to power.

Ways to Go

Time is wasting. Humanity emitted some 2,075 gigatons of CO2 [PDF] from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, circa 1750, through 2016. (A gigaton is a billion metric tons.) Plants and algae do consume CO2 through photosynthesis. But there aren’t enough plants and algae on the planet to offset the emissions from the fossil fuels we burn and our other greenhouse gas–releasing activities. The ocean and atmosphere get stuck with the remainder, and they are warming rapidly. We can only emit another 730 gigatons or so of CO2 and retain a decent chance of the atmospheric average temperature staying below the Paris target of 3.6 F. In other words, we are on a carbon budget. And if current trends hold, we are on schedule to blow past the budget in little more than 18 years.

It follows that architects must minimize the use of energy- and carbon-intensive technologies such as electric lighting and air-conditioning, and revive low-tech solutions such as passive ventilation. Yet the future won’t be a Luddite’s paradise. Technology’s role ought to grow in some areas, given recent advances in building design, analysis, materials, systems, construction, and operations that help mitigate climate change. (See Blaine Brownell’s trends report here.) Architects will have to continue using their influence as product specifiers to move recalcitrant manufacturers toward solutions that emit far less CO2 and consume far fewer resources than current norms.

Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

One in nine people worldwide lives in a state of hunger, and climate change is making matters even worse. In Yemen, global warming, civil war, and a rapidly growing population are exacerbating severe water shortages, leaving 17 million people on the brink of famine and humanitarian groups scrambling to provide adequate food (shown). If we don’t sharply reduce CO2 emissions, every degree-Celsius increase in mean global temperature will reduce yields of wheat by 6 percent, rice by 3.2 percent, corn by 7.4 percent, and soybeans by 3.1 percent.

Miraculously, it is now possible for buildings to produce and store more energy-clean energy, from renewable sources such as solar and geothermal-than they consume. Whenever feasible, new construction in the United States should conform to this net-zero energy building standard, and policy needs to support that goal, as it does in the European Union.

Where local circumstances make net-zero energy impossible, a carbon-neutral approach can compensate through the purchase of offsets, which are essentially payments to protect forests, increase renewable energy production, and foster other practices that sequester carbon or reduce emissions. To make financial sense of such an approach, cap-and-trade rules would essentially create a market for corporations to buy and sell a governmentally limited set of allowances to pollute. The limit, or cap, would lower over time, bringing overall emissions down with it. California, the world’s sixth largest economy, has such a program in place.

Architects generally trade on clients’ respect for their expertise and innate creative vision. In a carbon economy, design will obviously still matter, but numbers will matter more, as case studies, modeling, and performance data increasingly drive client decisions. (Discover Arizona State University’s process here.) As the world adapts to climate change, thrift will inevitably supplant consumption as a prevailing cultural value, and the architecture profession, along with the rest of society, will have to relearn the great joy of doing more with less.

The sustainability movement provided an important start over the past two decades, but it hasn’t gone nearly far enough. For instance, out of 20,000 architecture firms in the United States, some 400 are participating in the AIA’s 2030 Commitment to carbon neutrality by 2030, 175 of these reported data [PDF] for 2016, and just six reported achieving the intermediate goal of reducing predicted energy-use intensity in their building portfolio by 70 percent. (Find out how they hit the mark here.)

Now architects must double down and commit themselves totally to mitigation and resilience, testing techniques and technologies for effectiveness, and hewing to conventions and standards such as the 2030 Commitment, Architecture 2030’s 2030 Challenge, the Passive House Institute’s Planning Package, and the International Living Future Institute’s Living Building Challenge. Such tools should serve as the 21st century equivalents of Andrea Palladio’s 1570 treatise I quattro libri dell’architettura and other influential pattern books of the past, and they should be under constant review for improvement.

Richard Vevers/The Ocean Agency/XL Catlin Seaview Survey

For the past three years, climate change has brought rising water temperatures and plummeting pH levels to the world’s ocean reefs, causing an unprecedented bleaching of living corals. U.S. reefs such as those in American Samoa (pictured) were especially hard-hit. If we don’t sharply reduce CO2 emissions, which cause seawater to become hotter and more acidic, by 2100 all 29 World Heritage–listed coral reefs, including Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, will be lifeless.

Of course, the implementation of such standards requires support from numerous stakeholders, including consumers, colleagues in related fields, public officials, lenders, and most especially clients. Architects will have to aggressively promote best practices, summoning all of the information at their disposal to make quantified arguments. In order to develop rigorous case studies proving the value of sustainable and resilient construction, the profession will have to gather data with unwavering discipline and take a fiercely open-source attitude toward knowledge exchange, as facilitated by the AIA and National Institute of Building Sciences’ BRIK research directory. (Gordon Gill and Ali Malkawi discuss how architectural education needs to evolve along these lines here.)

Even relatively modest reforms in approach to the built environment will make a difference. By one count, if 9.7 percent of new buildings are net-zero energy by 2050, emissions will be 7.1 gigatons lower. And energy efficiency is just one of many climate change–related issues that architecture has to address, such as construction waste, land use, and fresh-water consumption.

A New Hope

Despite the fact that, as of last year, 97 percent of climatologists agree that climate change is occurring-and, yes, occurring as a result of human activity-almost 90 percent of Americans are unaware [PDF] of the consensus. Fortunately, science and reason are regaining some lost ground, despite the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to the contrary. According to Gallup, half of Americans now consider themselves “concerned believers” in climate change. Though the number may seem confoundingly low, it’s actually at a 30-year high, up from 37 percent in 2015.

Despite major reverses at the federal level, American universities, corporations, and state and municipal governments are stepping up and embracing the Paris goals. When considered outside the politically loaded frame of climate change, some green issues prove wildly popular. Nearly 90 percent of Americans favor expanding U.S. solar-energy capacity, and 83 percent support wind capacity.

Good old-fashioned economics are helping as well: Last year, for the first time, solar became the cheapest source of electricity. That’s great news, though there’s a lot of market share left to grab. Currently, about 65 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. comes from fossil fuels, and 15 percent from renewables; the remaining 20 percent comes from nuclear power plants.

If appropriate policies, regulations, incentives, and legislation were in place-and lamentably, that’s a big if-climate change paradoxically would present architects with an opportunity. Construction now constitutes 4.3 percent of the U.S. GDP, and the urgent need for greater efficiency and resilience ought to boost that number, on top of future gains that demographic projections suggest. Certainly, a considerable portion of the $190.2 trillion global mitigation cost that Citibank estimated would go to infrastructure and other building projects. Architects can also take advantage of the environmental crisis to advance related causes such as health and equity.

STR/AFP/Getty Images - Increasingly heavy precipitation is a highly visible outcome of climate change. Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 49 inches of rain on East Texas in August, and downpours last month triggered floods in Tuscany and the Italian city of Livorno (pictured), killing at least six people. If we don’t reduce CO2 emissions, by 2100 the frequency [PDF] of local 100-year floods could increase 3,467-fold.

Transformation is already beginning to occur at the regional, state, and local levels. Individual projects such as ZGF Architects’ Rocky Mountain Institute headquarters in Basalt, Colo., and the Miller Hull Partnership’s Bullitt Center in Seattle demonstrate just how remarkably efficient buildings can be. (For insights into net-zero building, check this story out.) On the resilience front, Miami Beach, Fla., contending with the rising Atlantic, is spending $400 million to $500 million to install pumps and raise sea walls, sidewalks, and roads. With water levels having plummeted in the massive Lake Mead reservoir during the 2011–17 drought, the Southern Nevada Water Authority is spending nearly $1.5 billion on a new, lower intake tunnel to ensure that the Las Vegas metro area’s 2 million residents don’t go thirsty. And the Rebuild by Design program is leveraging the skills of architects and planners to strengthen the coastlines of Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. A similar initiative, Resilient by Design, is underway in the San Francisco Bay area.

Without too much imaginative effort, one can see such efforts coalescing into a heroic nationwide enterprise, like the all-encompassing mobilization of the U.S. economy at the start of World War II. Except this time the threat doesn’t come from overseas. It’s all around us: our dangerous way of living and building in the world. Rethinking the design, construction, operation, and dismantling of buildings in order to mitigate climate change and increase resilience toward its effects is the most important, and exciting, undertaking that architects of this era will likely experience in their careers. Architecture must change with the climate, and change now, in order for humanity to survive, and hopefully thrive.

Limestone quarries and cement factories are often sources of air pollution. Photograph: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, the global building industry will have poured more than 19,000 bathtubs of concrete. By the time you are halfway through this article, the volume would fill the Albert Hall and spill out into Hyde Park. In a day it would be almost the size of China’s Three Gorges Dam. In a single year, there is enough to patio over every hill, dale, nook and cranny in England.

After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on Earth. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world with up to 2.8bn tonnes, surpassed only by China and the US.

The material is the foundation of modern development, putting roofs over the heads of billions, fortifying our defences against natural disaster and providing a structure for healthcare, education, transport, energy and industry.

Concrete is how we try to tame nature. Our slabs protect us from the elements. They keep the rain from our heads, the cold from our bones and the mud from our feet. But they also entomb vast tracts of fertile soil, constipate rivers, choke habitats and – acting as a rock-hard second skin – desensitise us from what is happening outside our urban fortresses.

Our blue and green world is becoming greyer by the second. By one calculation, we may have already passed the point where concrete outweighs the combined carbon mass of every tree, bush and shrub on the planet. Our built environment is, in these terms, outgrowing the natural one. Unlike the natural world, however, it does not actually grow. Instead, its chief quality is to harden and then degrade, extremely slowly.

All the plastic produced over the past 60 years amounts to 8bn tonnes. The cement industry pumps out more than that every two years. But though the problem is bigger than plastic, it is generally seen as less severe. Concrete is not derived from fossil fuels. It is not being found in the stomachs of whales and seagulls. Doctors aren’t discovering traces of it in our blood. Nor do we see it tangled in oak trees or contributing to subterranean fatbergs. We know where we are with concrete. Or to be more precise, we know where it is going: nowhere. Which is exactly why we have come to rely on it.

This solidity, of course, is what humankind yearns for. Concrete is beloved for its weight and endurance. That is why it serves as the foundation of modern life, holding time, nature, the elements and entropy at bay. When combined with steel, it is the material that ensures our dams don’t burst, our tower blocks don’t fall, our roads don’t buckle and our electricity grid remains connected.

Solidity is a particularly attractive quality at a time of disorientating change. But – like any good thing in excess – it can create more problems than it solves.

At times an unyielding ally, at times a false friend, concrete can resist nature for decades and then suddenly amplify its impact. Take the floods in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and Houston after Harvey, which were more severe because urban and suburban streets could not soak up the rain like a floodplain, and storm drains proved woefully inadequate for the new extremes of a disrupted climate.

Photograph: Nati Harnik/AP - When the levee breaks ... The levee of the 17th Street canal, New Orleans, after it was breached during Hurricane Katrina.

It also magnifies the extreme weather it shelters us from. Taking in all stages of production, concrete is said to be responsible for 4-8% of the world’s CO2. Among materials, only coal, oil and gas are a greater source of greenhouse gases. Half of concrete’s CO2 emissions are created during the manufacture of clinker, the most-energy intensive part of the cement-making process.

But other environmental impacts are far less well understood. Concrete is a thirsty behemoth, sucking up almost a 10th of the world’s industrial water use. This often strains supplies for drinking and irrigation, because 75% of this consumption is in drought and water-stressed regions. In cities, concrete also adds to the heat-island effect by absorbing the warmth of the sun and trapping gases from car exhausts and air-conditioner units – though it is, at least, better than darker asphalt.

It also worsens the problem of silicosis and other respiratory diseases. The dust from wind-blown stocks and mixers contributes as much as 10% of the coarse particulate matter that chokes Delhi, where researchers found in 2015 that the air pollution index at all of the 19 biggest construction sites exceeded safe levels by at least three times. Limestone quarries and cement factories are also often pollution sources, along with the trucks that ferry materials between them and building sites. At this scale, even the acquisition of sand can be catastrophic – destroying so many of the world’s beaches and river courses that this form of mining is now increasingly run by organised crime gangs and associated with murderous violence.

This touches on the most severe, but least understood, impact of concrete, which is that it destroys natural infrastructure without replacing the ecological functions that humanity depends on for fertilisation, pollination, flood control, oxygen production and water purification.

Concrete can take our civilisation upwards, up to 163 storeys high in the case of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, creating living space out of the air. But it also pushes the human footprint outwards, sprawling across fertile topsoil and choking habitats. The biodiversity crisis – which many scientists believe to be as much of a threat as climate chaos – is driven primarily by the conversion of wilderness to agriculture, industrial estates and residential blocks.

For hundreds of years, humanity has been willing to accept this environmental downside in return for the undoubted benefits of concrete. But the balance may now be tilting in the other direction.

The Pantheon and Colosseum in Rome are testament to the durability of concrete, which is a composite of sand, aggregate (usually gravel or stones) and water mixed with a lime-based, kiln-baked binder. The modern industrialised form of the binder – Portland cement – was patented as a form of “artificial stone” in 1824 by Joseph Aspdin in Leeds. This was later combined with steel rods or mesh to create reinforced concrete, the basis for art deco skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building.

Rivers of it were poured after the second world war, when concrete offered an inexpensive and simple way to rebuild cities devastated by bombing. This was the period of brutalist architects such as Le Corbusier, followed by the futuristic, free-flowing curves of Oscar Niemeyer and the elegant lines of Tadao Ando – not to mention an ever-growing legion of dams, bridges, ports, city halls, university campuses, shopping centres and uniformly grim car parks. In 1950, cement production was equal to that of steel; in the years since, it has increased 25-fold, more than three times as fast as its metallic construction partner.

Debate about the aesthetics has tended to polarise between traditionalists like Prince Charles, who condemned Owen Luder’s brutalist Tricorn Centre as a “mildewed lump of elephant droppings”, and modernists who saw concrete as a means of making style, size and strength affordable for the masses.

The politics of concrete are less divisive, but more corrosive. The main problem here is inertia. Once this material binds politicians, bureaucrats and construction companies, the resulting nexus is almost impossible to budge. Party leaders need the donations and kickbacks from building firms to get elected, state planners need more projects to maintain economic growth, and construction bosses need more contracts to keep money rolling in, staff employed and political influence high. Hence the self-perpetuating political enthusiasm for environmentally and socially dubious infrastructure projects and cement-fests like the Olympics, the World Cup and international exhibitions.

The classic example is Japan, which embraced concrete in the second half of the 20th century with such enthusiasm that the country’s governance structure was often described as the doken kokka (construction state).

Photograph: Ho New/Reuters - A pressure-controlled water tank in Kusakabe, Japan, constructed to protect Tokyo against floodwaters and overflow of the city’s major waterways and rivers during heavy rain and typhoon seasons.

At first it was a cheap material to rebuild cities ravaged by fire bombs and nuclear warheads in the second world war. Then it provided the foundations for a new model of super-rapid economic development: new railway tracks for Shinkansen bullet trains, new bridges and tunnels for elevated expressways, new runways for airports, new stadiums for the 1964 Olympics and the Osaka Expo, and new city halls, schools and sports facilities.

This kept the economy racing along at near double-digit growth rates until the late 1980s, ensuring employment remained high and giving the ruling Liberal Democratic party a stranglehold on power. The political heavyweights of the era – men such as Kakuei Tanaka, Yasuhiro Nakasone and Noboru Takeshita – were judged by their ability to bring hefty projects to their hometowns. Huge kickbacks were the norm. Yakuza gangsters, who served as go-betweens and enforcers, also got their cut. Bid-rigging and near monopolies by the big six building firms (Shimizu, Taisei, Kajima, Takenaka, Obayashi, Kumagai) ensured contracts were lucrative enough to provide hefty kickbacks to the politicians. The doken kokka was a racket on a national scale.

But there is only so much concrete you can usefully lay without ruining the environment. The ever-diminishing returns were made apparent in the 1990s, when even the most creative politicians struggled to justify the government’s stimulus spending packages. This was a period of extraordinarily expensive bridges to sparsely inhabited regions, multi-lane roads between tiny rural communities, cementing over the few remaining natural riverbanks, and pouring ever greater volumes of concrete into the sea walls that were supposed to protect 40% of the Japanese coastline.

In his book Dogs and Demons, the author and longtime Japanese resident Alex Kerr laments the cementing over of riverbanks and hillsides in the name of flood and mudslide prevention. Runaway government-subsidised construction projects, he told an interviewer, “have wreaked untold damage on mountains, rivers, streams, lakes, wetlands, everywhere - and it goes on at a heightened pace. That is the reality of modern Japan, and the numbers are staggering.”

He said the amount of concrete laid per square metre in Japan is 30 times the amount in America, and that the volume is almost exactly the same. “So we’re talking about a country the size of California laying the same amount of concrete [as the entire US]. Multiply America’s strip malls and urban sprawl by 30 to get a sense of what’s going on in Japan.”

Traditionalists and environmentalists were horrified – and ignored. The cementation of Japan ran contrary to classic aesthetic ideals of harmony with nature and an appreciation of mujo (impermanence), but was understandable given the ever-present fear of earthquakes and tsunamis in one of the world’s most seismically active nations. Everyone knew the grey banked rivers and shorelines were ugly, but nobody cared as long as they could keep their homes from being flooded.

Which made the devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami all the more shocking. At coastal towns such as Ishinomaki, Kamaishi and Kitakami, huge sea walls that had been built over decades were swamped in minutes. Almost 16,000 people died, a million buildings were destroyed or damaged, town streets were blocked with beached ships and port waters were filled with floating cars. It was a still more alarming story at Fukushima, where the ocean surge engulfed the outer defences of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and caused a level 7 meltdown.

Briefly, it seemed this might become a King Canute moment for Japan – when the folly of human hubris was exposed by the power of nature. But the concrete lobby was just too strong. The Liberal Democratic party returned to power a year later with a promise to spend 200tn yen (£1.4tn) on public works over the next decade, equivalent to about 40% of Japan’s economic output.

Photograph: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters - ‘It feels like we’re in jail, even though we haven’t done anything bad’ ... A seawall in Yamada, Iwate prefecture, Japan, 2018.

Construction firms were once again ordered to hold back the sea, this time with even taller, thicker barriers. Their value is contested. Engineers claim these 12-metre-high walls of concrete will stop or at least slow future tsunamis, but locals have heard such promises before. The area these defences protect is also of lower human worth now the land has been largely depopulated and filled with paddy fields and fish farms. Environmentalists say mangrove forests could provide a far cheaper buffer. Tellingly, even many tsunami-scarred locals hate the concrete between them and the ocean.

“It feels like we’re in jail, even though we haven’t done anything bad,” an oyster fisherman, Atsushi Fujita, told Reuters. “We can no longer see the sea,” said the Tokyo-born photographer Tadashi Ono, who took some of the most powerful images of these massive new structures. He described them as an abandonment of Japanese history and culture. “Our richness as a civilisation is because of our contact with the ocean,” he said. “Japan has always lived with the sea, and we were protected by the sea. And now the Japanese government has decided to shut out the sea.”

There was an inevitability about this. Across the world, concrete has become synonymous with development. In theory, the laudable goal of human progress is measured by a series of economic and social indicators, such as life-expectancy, infant mortality and education levels. But to political leaders, by far the most important metric is gross domestic product, a measure of economic activity that, more often than not, is treated as a calculation of economic size. GDP is how governments assess their weight in the world. And nothing bulks up a country like concrete.

That is true of all countries at some stage. During their early stages of development, heavyweight construction projects are beneficial like a boxer putting on muscle. But for already mature economies, it is harmful like an aged athlete pumping ever stronger steroids to ever less effect. During the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, Keynesian economic advisers told the Japanese government the best way to stimulate GDP growth was to dig a hole in the ground and fill it. Preferably with cement. The bigger the hole, the better. This meant profits and jobs. Of course, it is much easier to mobilise a nation to do something that improves people’s lives, but either way concrete is likely to be part of the arrangement. This was the thinking behind Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, which is celebrated in the US as a recession-busting national project but might also be described as the biggest ever concrete-pouring exercise up until that point. The Hoover Dam alone required 3.3m cubic metres, then a world record. Construction firms claimed it would outlast human civilisation.

But that was lightweight compared to what is now happening in China, the concrete superpower of the 21st century and the greatest illustration of how the material transforms a culture (a civilisation intertwined with nature) into an economy (a production unit obsessed by GDP statistics). Beijing’s extraordinarily rapid rise from developing nation to superpower-in-waiting has required mountains of cement, beaches of sand and lakes of water. The speed at which these materials are being mixed is perhaps the most astonishing statistic of the modern age: since 2003, China has poured more cement every three years than the US managed in the entire 20th century.

Today, China uses almost half the world’s concrete. The property sector – roads, bridges, railways, urban development and other cement-and-steel projects – accounted for a third of its economy’s expansion in 2017. Every major city has a floor-sized scale model of urban development plans that has to be constantly updated as small white plastic models are turned into mega-malls, housing complexes and concrete towers.

But, like the US, Japan, South Korea and every other country that “developed” before it, China is reaching the point where simply pouring concrete does more harm than good. Ghost malls, half-empty towns and white elephant stadiums are a growing sign of wasteful spending. Take the huge new airport in Luliang, which opened with barely five flights a day, or the Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium, so underused that it is now more a monument than a venue. Although the adage “build and the people will come” has often proved correct in the past, the Chinese government is worried. After the National Bureau of Statistics found 450 sq km of unsold residential floor space, the country’s president, Xi Jinping, called for the “annihilation” of excess developments.

Photograph: Laoma/Alamy - The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, China, is the largest concrete structure in the world.

Empty, crumbling structures are not just an eyesore, but a drain on the economy and a waste of productive land. Ever greater construction requires ever more cement and steel factories, discharging ever more pollution and carbon dioxide. As the Chinese landscape architect Yu Kongjian has pointed out, it also suffocates the ecosystems – fertile soil, self-cleansing streams, storm-resisting mangrove swamps, flood-preventing forests – on which human beings ultimately depend. It is a threat to what he calls “eco-security”.

Yu has led the charge against concrete, ripping it up whenever possible to restore riverbanks and natural vegetation. In his influential book The Art of Survival, he warns that China has moved dangerously far from Taoist ideals of harmony with nature. “The urbanisation process we follow today is a path to death,” he has said.

Yu has been consulted by government officials, who are increasingly aware of the brittleness of the current Chinese model of growth. But their scope for movement is limited. The initial momentum of a concrete economy is always followed by inertia in concrete politics. The president has promised a shift of economic focus away from belching heavy industries and towards high-tech production in order to create a “beautiful country” and an “ecological civilisation”, and the government is now trying to wind down from the biggest construction boom in human history, but Xi cannot let the construction sector simply fade away, because it employs more than 55 million workers – almost the entire population of the UK. Instead, China is doing what countless other nations have done, exporting its environmental stress and excess capacity overseas.

Beijing’s much-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative – an overseas infrastructure investment project many times greater than the Marshall Plan – promises a splurge of roads in Kazakhstan, at least 15 dams in Africa, railways in Brazil and ports in Pakistan, Greece and Sri Lanka. To supply these and other projects, China National Building Material – the country’s biggest cement producer – has announced plans to construct 100 cement factories across 50 nations.

This will almost certainly mean more criminal activity. As well as being the primary vehicle for super-charged national building, the construction industry is also the widest channel for bribes. In many countries, the correlation is so strong, people see it as an index: the more concrete, the more corruption.

According to the watchdog group Transparency International, construction is the world’s dirtiest business, far more prone to graft than mining, real estate, energy or the arms market. No country is immune, but in recent years, Brazil has revealed most clearly the jawdropping scale of bribery in the industry.

As elsewhere, the craze for concrete in South America’s biggest nation started benignly enough as a means of social development, then morphed into an economic necessity, and finally metastasised into a tool for political expediency and individual greed. The progress between these stages was impressively rapid. The first huge national project in the late 1950s was the construction of a new capital, Brasília, on an almost uninhabited plateau in the interior. A million cubic metres of concrete were poured on the highlands site in just 41 months to encase the soil and erect new edifices for ministries and homes.

Photograph: Image Broker/Rex Features - The National Museum of the Republic by Oscar Niemeyer, Brasília, Brazil.

This was followed by a new highway through the Amazon rainforest – the TransAmazonia – and then from 1970, South America’s biggest hydroelectric power plant, the Itaipu on the Paraná river border with Paraguay, which is almost four times bulkier than the Hoover Dam. The Brazilian operators boast the 12.3m cubic metres of concrete would be enough to fill 210 Maracanã stadiums. This was a world record until China’s Three Gorges Dam choked the Yangtze with 27.2m cubic metres.

With the military in power, the press censored and no independent judiciary, there was no way of knowing how much of the budget was siphoned off by the generals and contractors. But the problem of corruption has become all too apparent since 1985 in the post-dictatorship era, with virtually no party or politician left untainted.

For many years, the most notorious of them was Paulo Maluf, the governor of São Paulo, who had run the city during the construction of the giant elevated expressway known as Minhocão, which means Big Worm. As well as taking credit for this project, which opened in 1969, he also allegedly skimmed $1bn from public works in just four years, part of which has been traced to secret accounts in the British Virgin islands. Although wanted by Interpol, Maluf evaded justice for decades and was elected to a number of senior public offices. This was thanks to a high degree of public cynicism encapsulated by the phrase most commonly used about him: “He steals, but he gets things done” – which could describe much of the global concrete industry.

Photograph: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters - Paulo Maluf attending the debate over the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in Brasília, 2016.

But his reputation as the most corrupt man in Brazil has been overshadowed in the past five years by Operation Car Wash, an investigation into a vast network of bid-rigging and money laundering. Giant construction firms – notably Odebrecht, Andrade Gutierrez and Camargo Corrêa – were at the heart of this sprawling scheme, which saw politicians, bureaucrats and middle-men receive at least $2bn worth of kickbacks in return for hugely inflated contracts for oil refineries, the Belo Monte dam, the 2014 World Cup, the 2016 Olympics and dozens of other infrastructure projects throughout the region. Prosecutors said Odebrecht alone had paid bribes to 415 politicians and 26 political parties.

As a result of these revelations, one government fell, a former president of Brazil and the vice president of Ecuador are in prison, the president of Peru was forced to resign, and dozens of other politicians and executives were put behind bars. The corruption scandal also reached Europe and Africa. The US Department of Justice called it “the largest foreign bribery case in history”. It was so huge that when Maluf was finally arrested in 2017, nobody batted an eyelid.

such corruption is not just a theft of tax revenue, it is a motivation for environmental crime: billions of tonnes of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere for projects of dubious social value and often pushed through – as in the case of Belo Monte – against the opposition of affected local residents and with deep concerns among environmental licensing authorities.

Although the dangers are increasingly apparent, this pattern continues to repeat itself. India and Indonesia are just entering their high-concrete phase of development. Over the next 40 years, the newly built floor area in the world is expected to double. Some of that will bring health benefits. The environmental scientist Vaclav Smil estimates the replacement of mud floors with concrete in the world’s poorest homes could cut parasitic diseases by nearly 80%. But each wheelbarrow of concrete also tips the world closer to ecological collapse.

Chatham House predicts urbanisation, population growth and economic development will push global cement production from 4 to 5bn tonnes a year. If developing countries expand their infrastructure to current average global levels, the construction sector will emit 470 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide by 2050, according to the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.

This violates the Paris agreement on climate change, under which every government in the world agreed that annual carbon emissions from the cement industry should fall by at least 16% by 2030 if the world is to reach the target of staying within 1.5C to 2C of warming. It also puts a crushing weight on the ecosystems that are essential for human wellbeing.

The dangers are recognised. A report last year by Chatham House calls for a rethink in the way cement is produced. To reduce emissions, it urges greater use of renewables in production, improved energy efficiency, more substitutes for clinker and, most important, the widespread adoption of carbon imgCaptionure and storage technology – though this is expensive and has not yet been deployed in the industry on a commercial scale.

Architects believe the answer is to make buildings leaner and, when possible, to use other materials, such as cross-laminated timber. It is time to move out of the “concrete age” and stop thinking primarily about how a building looks, said Anthony Thistleton.

“Concrete is beautiful and versatile but, unfortunately, it ticks all the boxes in terms of environmental degradation,” he told the Architects Journal. “We have a responsibility to think about all the materials we are using and their wider impact.”

But many engineers argue that there is no viable alternative. Steel, asphalt and plasterboard are more energy intensive than concrete. The world’s forests are already being depleted at an alarming rate even without a surge in extra demand for timber.

Phil Purnell, a professor of materials and structures at Leeds University, said the world was unlikely to reach a “peak concrete” moment.

Phil Purnell, a professor of materials and structures at Leeds University, said the world was unlikely to reach a “peak concrete” moment.

“The raw materials are virtually limitless and it will be in demand for as long as we build roads, bridges and anything else that needs a foundation,” he said. “By almost any measure it’s the least energy-hungry of all materials.”

Instead, he calls for existing structures to be better maintained and conserved, and, when that is not possible, to enhance recycling. Currently most concrete goes to landfill sites or is crushed and reused as aggregate. This could be done more efficiently, Purnell said, if slabs were embedded with identification tags that would allow the material to be matched with demand. His colleagues at Leeds University are also exploring alternatives to Portland cement. Different mixes can reduce the carbon footprint of a binder by up to two-thirds, they say.

Arguably more important still is a change of mindset away from a developmental model that replaces living landscapes with built environments and nature-based cultures with data-driven economies. That requires tackling power structures that have been built on concrete, and recognising that fertility is a more reliable base for growth than solidity.

A Vision of Sir John Soane’s Design for the Rotunda of the Bank of England as a Ruin," by Joseph Gandy, 1789 (Sir John Soane Museum)

In the opening pages of Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald describes the Antwerp nocturama, a zoo enclosure of simulated darkness designed to allow visitors to watch nocturnal animals in their natural environment. Sebald finds himself fixated on a raccoon compulsively washing a piece of apple, an animal whose work goes “far beyond any reasonable thoroughness,” he writes, as though this “would help it escape the unreal world in which it had arrived.” In the same way, perhaps, I’ve been reading Sebald compulsively for the past few months, as though through this act I might find the means to escape the unreal, topsy-turvy world of this grim winter.

Sebald is often called a Holocaust writer-all his major works deal with the Nazi genocide, some more explicitly than others. But his writing is often more concerned with a crisis in European modernity, one that can be traced back as far back as the Napoleonic Wars-a crisis in which the Holocaust was a horrifying, but nearly inevitable by-product. No historical tragedy arrives, ex nihilo, like Athena from her father’s forehead. Rather, Sebald traces and patterns that are laid out decades, perhaps centuries in advance, often in plain sight. They ostentatiously draw attention to themselves, though we have no desire to recognize them. Rather than focus on cartoonish depictions of Nazism as some anomalous evil, Sebald looked for the ways that fascism grew from the innocuous and banal aspects of European culture-from textile manufacturing, to psychotherapy, to architecture.

It was in architecture that Sebald saw the most telling indicators of the inevitability of the camps, often in the most unlikely of places. In Austerlitz, Sebald’s narrator meets up with the novel’s eponymous protagonist in Brussels’ Palace of Justice, reputed to be the largest courthouse in the world. Built in the 1880s, the Palace is a massive accumulation of stone organized haphazardly, such that many of its corridors and stairways lead nowhere. Sebald sees a paranoid logic in such a building, meant as an awe-inspiring monument to justice, yet containing a lawless rabbit warren of hallways-a belief that marble and brick can forestall death itself. There was an anxious psychosis in the late-nineteenth century that led to greater and greater structures, each trying to outdo the last, further exacerbating a death drive. “At the most,” Jacques Austerlitz tells the narrator about this palace, “we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”

The Palais de Justice in Brussels, Belgium was begin in 1866 and finished nearly twenty years later. It is said that Hitler admired it as one of his favorite structures, but during the liberation of Brussels, retreating German troops set it on fire, heavily damaging the building. (Wikimedia Commons)

This motif of grandiose architecture recurs throughout Austerlitz. In the opening pages, Sebald turns to the ever increasing complexity of European fortresses, which eventually adopted a star-shaped dodecagon plan, one which strikes the layman “as an emblem of both absolute power and of the ingenuity the engineers put to the service of that power.” But it is of course the case that “the largest fortifications will eventually attach the largest enemy forces, and that the more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive, so that in the end you might find yourself in a place fortified in every possible way, watching helplessly while the enemy troops, moving on to their own choice of terrain elsewhere, simply ignored their adversaries’ fortresses, which had become positive arsenals of weaponry, bristling with cannon and overcrowded with men.” The result of such thinking and such buildings, and of what Austerlitz refers to in passing as a sort of “paranoid elaboration,” was that “you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it,” to say nothing of the increasing expense and time to build such outsized buildings, whose efficacy and technology are quickly overtaken by modern developments before they are even completed.

Increasingly our attention has turned to the building of great walls-walls that will rise up from the desert to protect the nation. Already architects are salivating over the prospect, eager to imprint their own ideas on to these structures; they see it, perhaps short-sightedly, as a means of securing a legacy, a project so immense it will stretch into the distance farther than the eye can see.

But walls-even very great ones-rarely protect the lands they encircle. One has only to look to the eastern countryside of France, where ruins of the Maginot Line still lurk. Built between the wars at great expense, the Maginot Line, was to consist of great fortresses of poured concrete, hardened into the landscape and stocked with provisions and armaments, connected by underground railroads, all to protect the country from Germany’s armies. Of course, they succeeded only in drawing attention to the country’s most vulnerable frontier, which the Nazis were able to traverse easily, leaving the battlements of the Maginot Line untouched. Now, decades later, abandoned, the ruins continue their slow rot-gray, shambling monsters half-emerged from the pastoral landscape. But despite their decay, the fortresses appear at any moment, given the blast of trumpets, to rise and set loose across the countryside.

In Austerlitz, Sebald’s narrator travels to the Breendonk fort near Antwerp, whose fate was not terribly different than the Maginot Line. Built to withstand a German invasion during the First World War, the Germans avoided it entirely, moving past Antwerp towards France via a southern route, turning to Breendonk only later and sacking it easily. In the next war, it would be again occupied by German forces, who used it as a concentration camp to prisoners before they were shipped to Auschwitz and other locations. As Sebald’s narrator walks around the fortress’s edges, he remarks,

From whatever viewpoint I tried to form a picture of the complex I could make out no architectural plan, for its projections and indentations kept shifting, so far exceeding my comprehension that in the end I found myself unable to connect it with anything shaped by human civilization, or even with the silent relics of our prehistory and early history. And the longer I looked at it, the more often it forced me, as I felt, to lower my eyes, the less comprehensible it seemed to become.

Built to withstand the onslaught of armies, such buildings can become uncanny without their enemies. “When I studied the symmetrical layout with its outgrowth of limbs and claws,” the narrator continues, “the semicircular bastions standing out from the front of the main building like eyes, and the stumpy projection at the back of its body-I could not, despite its now evident rational structure, recognize anything designed by the human mind but saw it, instead, as the anatomical blueprint of some alien and crab-like creature.”

On the other hand, the beauty of a wall, at least as we imagine it, is that it will have none of these contortions and digressions-it is a line, straight, pure, and simple. Cutting across the desert, it will exude simplicity and purity, a strong and noble sentiment. Its appeal seems to lie less in its efficacy than in its symbolism. There has even been some discussion that the Wall will be paid for by cutting funds from other border patrol organizations-the Coast Guard, or the Transportation Security Administration that guards the country’s airports-as if to make clear to anyone confused that the goal here has nothing to do with safety or security, and everything to do with monument-building.

A youth looks at a new, taller fence being built along U.S.-Mexico border, replacing the shorter, gray metal fence in front of it, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on March 29, 2017 (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

We should not be so sure of the symbolic simplicity of monumental walls-even the greatest, it turns out, can be difficult to find or remember. When the North African traveler Ibn Battuta came to China in 1436, he enquired repeatedly about the famed Great Wall he had heard of from other Muslim merchants; he referred to it as the “obstruction of Gog and Magog.” But after repeated interviews, he confessed that he could find no one who had seen the Great Wall, nor even anyone who knew anyone else who had.

The Great Wall of China, Kafka tells us, is not one continuous, unbroken line, but is instead riddled with openings. His 1917 short story, “The Great Wall of China,” told from the vantage point of a scholar in Peking, reimagines this architectural monstrosity as a meditation of national identity. He begins by discussing how the Wall had to be built in small sections of no more than 500 meters at a time, leaving large holes that could be traversed by invading armies. Because it was so monstrous, he explains, builders would have never in their own lifetimes experienced the satisfaction of seeing it finished. Even after completing a 500 meter section, the scholar tells us, those supervising the construction were “as a rule quite exhausted and had lost all faith in themselves, in the wall, in the world,” and had to return home to their families, leaving other sections to be finished by later generations. Reading Kafka’s story, one does wonder how those young architects, so eager to make their marks on such a monumental process, will feel once it is completed, and their dreams and visions are so permanently welded to something that reeks of despair.

As a parable, Kafka’s story tries to understand how we, as citizens of a country, participate in something larger than ourselves and our immediate communities. The Wall the scholar describes gradually comes to stand for that work of nation-building and sovereignty that all countries must develop-work that is wasteful, exhausting, and serves the vanity of a sovereign who cares nothing of his people. But, Kafka’s scholar notes, while such walls may seem to serve the vanity of the sovereign, they do not actually serve him; rather, such things are dreamed of, conceived of, and implemented by murky leadership forces that exist before and after the king who demands a Wall. “Honest, unwitting Emperor,” he exclaims, “who imagined he decreed it! We builders of the wall know that it was not so and hold our tongues.”

After completing a 500 meter section, those supervising the construction of the Great Wall were “as a rule quite exhausted and had lost all faith in themselves, in the wall, in the world,” and had to return home to their families, leaving other sections to be finished by later generations.

The real reasons for such great walls, the scholar confesses, have little to do with the blustery egos who announce and slap their names on them. And yet it is the belief in the myth of the Emperor and his Wall that holds a people together. Buildings, Kafka suggests, build themselves. Perhaps this is why Sebald too often sees in them an alien and alienating logic that has nothing to do with human life.

Reading Austerlitz, I have come to see these days, in many images of tall and imposing buildings, not grandeur but menace-now even the most innocuous photographs of skyscrapers and government buildings seem to radiate this. My mind often returns to an image by Akira Aimi, a photographer whose work is little known and long forgotten, but whose photographs were used in the liner notes of an album by jazz musician Keith Jarrett, where I first came across his work. In one of Aimi’s photos, skyscrapers rise up into a pure, white fog, the black and white image both grainy and sharp in that manner of 1970s photography. In the foreground, a few sparse trees, their leaves bare for winter. They are sharply delineated, these trees, but nonetheless menaced by the looming towers behind them-as though a reminder that sooner or later these ominous works of humanity will blot out what’s left of our fragile environment.

Last November, I walked out onto the Brooklyn Bridge thinking of the enormous challenges required to build such a monument-not just technical challenges, though there were many, but the significance of how its designers anticipated and accounted for human failure.

The bridge’s architects, John Augustus Roebling and his son Washington, designed the structure to be twice as strong as standard bridge specifications, precisely because of an expectation that somewhere during the process, graft and incompetence would weaken it. Despite great vigilance, a corrupt contractor snuck in faulty cable, so that somewhere, even to this day, the bridge contains around 220 tons of faulty cables-rotten, festering metal that can never be safely removed, so that at best we can only hope the other elements of the bridge can contain them. It’s a reminder that even in a structure as magnificent as the Brooklyn Bridge, we are one short remove from the catastrophes that befell the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the I-35W bridge failure in Minneapolis, and the collapse of the skyway at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency in 1981, killing more than 100 people during a party. Perhaps, if there was some way to locate one of these hidden, faulty cables, deeply entwined with the rest of the bridge’s infrastructure, it could be singled out to passersby and tourists, a reminder that even something so seemingly strong as this has its rot.

NYPL Digital Collections - On the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge, stereoscopic view.

But this is not our nature. The structural engineer and writer Henry Petroski writes in To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure that we should expect to see a massive structure like a bridge spectacularly fail somewhat regularly, every four or five decades. This is not due to the faultiness of materials, as building material technologies continue to advance and become safer each year, rather because architects and contractors fail to learn the lessons of the past. Once a design is proven successful, subsequent architects look for ways to refine it, to make it lighter, cheaper, and more ambitious, always pushing at the edge of what is acceptable in terms of cost and safety. Because they rarely keep in mind previous disasters, eventually this need to improve leads the builder to overlook any faults and repeat the mistakes of their forebears.

Petroski notes that this rate of failure more or less mirrors the turnover rate of generations. A generation that witnesses a tragedy firsthand takes from it sober lessons, resolving never to repeat its mistakes. But in time this resolve becomes mixed with nostalgia, reduced to meaningless catchphrases-never again, never forget. The next generation, eager to make its own mark on history, take these stories as given, mistaking as a bedrock foundation what is in fact only the most tenuous of vigilances. The history of a country shouldn’t chronicle its generals and politicians, but rather its industrial failures, its corner cutters, its grifters and hacks-a reminder not of what we have achieved, but what must be resisted every single day in order to achieve anything.

From my vantage point on the Brooklyn Bridge, I looked across the East River towards the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Built to exude strength and confidence, they radiated only anxiety and vulnerability. No one who has threaded their way through the concrete barricades, metal detectors, and endless layers of security these buildings can fail to notice the sense of desperation that is the modern skyscraper-an awareness of its physical tenuousness, the overwhelming desire of its bones to return to earth.

As I leaned against the great bridge’s railing, pigeons wheeled above me in their idle frenzy, and like all city dwellers learn to do, I instinctively shifted my position to avoid any potential droppings. From this new vantage point, looking north, I could see the Citibank building with its distinctive, slanted roofline, like a knife cutting up out of the city. The tower was a marvelous feat of engineering, rising as it does on four massive pillars, each a hundred feet high, the building’s structure cantilevered over tiny St. Peter’s Evangelical Church that stands at the northeast corner.

But the grace and wonder of Citibank’s knife-sharp design was, as it happened, something of a fiction; because of a deficient manner of construction, the entire building was susceptible to destruction in high winds. The architect, in what seemed like a stunning oversight but was really just common laziness, had calculated the stress of winds from each of the cardinal points, but not from winds coming at a diagonal angle. In order to save money, the design had been further changed during construction: Joints designed to have been welded together were bolted instead, saving on time and money. This in turn reduced the structural integrity of the building, such that a moderate-sized storm could potentially topple it. Once discovered, designers hid this secret flaw from the public-even the surrounding neighbors who would likely have been killed should the skyscraper collapse-and over the course of three months worked feverishly each night to fix the problem before it was discovered or the building collapsed. The tower, itself built as a monument to global capital, was, quite like that capital, equally arrogant and tenuous, inviting its own ruin.

Perhaps I had read Aimi’s photograph of trees, fog and towers wrong. It wasn’t the trees that were endangered, menaced by the buildings behind them, it was just the reverse: The towers drifting into the opaque fog were themselves slated for imminent disaster, and the trees, threadbare and withered, were going to outlast us, once we are finally overtaken by our own follies.

It would have been interesting to ask Aimi himself what he thought of this question, but the photographer died tragically on June 28, 1981. He had also been on the Brooklyn Bridge, in the evening around 5 p.m., waiting for the light to die down so he could take some photographs, when a high-tension cable snapped and fatally struck him. The cable had failed because of years of accumulated pigeon shit. The acidity had slowly eaten through the steel.

432 Park Avenue at sunset. The most expensive sale in the building was for the full-floor penthouse on the 85th floor, sold to a Saudi retail magnate for $87.7 million.

This desire of all things-skyscrapers and great bridges alike-to fail and return to the earth may explain why Manhattan’s high-rises are increasingly empty, filled only with paper ghosts. Recent studies of the most exclusive addresses in the city have found that up to a third at any given moment are unoccupied, owned by foreign businessmen, politicians, and criminals. A place like the recently-completed 432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential building in the western hemisphere, which juts out of the skyline with ill-concealed pathos, is mostly occupied by people who don’t live there, investors who can say that they own a piece of this ostentatious wealth without having to face the terror of inhabiting such a monument. Architecturally, 432 Park Avenue resembles nothing more than a series of storage lockers, stacked one on top of another into the stratosphere. It has no name or identity other than its own address-fitting for the new urban landscape in which residences are nothing but deeds on paper and insurance forms. The Manhattan skyscraper, it would now seem, has become a symbol, first and foremost of decadent decay-emptied out of its purpose, propped up by ghost capital and absent tenants.

It is impossible to see in these towering behemoths anything but the most delicate fragility-yet a vulnerability that must be hidden and protected at all costs. It is hardly a wonder, I thought as I turned to walk back to Brooklyn, that when fascism came to America, it came not, as James Waterman Wise, Jr. prophesied in 1936, “wrapped up in an American flag,” but as a real estate developer.