Construction begets destruction. Architecture has long been admired for being a slow art, but it has been slow too in facing up to the deeply-rooted historical prejudices that continue to cast a long shadow over the profession and its role in what the United Nations describes as the triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. In September, I will begin a three-year piece of original research into the extractive history of architecture as part of a Major Research Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust.Situated at the intersection of architecture, coloniality and the triple planetary crisis, this work will confront the disciplines role in heralding the Anthropocene a potentially new geological epoch defined by our species planetary impact. The research intends to investigate the discipline not as a chronology or assemblage of built objects, styles, personalities, or experiences predominantly from the West, but as an extractive, invariably inequitable and planetary process of world-making.This work builds on my long-standing interest in researching non-canonical histories that have been overlooked, marginalised, or ignored and, more recently, their intersection with the Anthropocene.AdvertisementWhile debates still rage around the definition of the Anthropocene, the terms effectiveness as an overarching cross-disciplinary framework for researchers remains vital.As Chris Thomas,head of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York (UK) recently wrote inNature, The concept of an era of human-driven change provides convenient common ground to collaborate with researchers from other disciplines.This is something that people in the arts and humanities and the social sciences have picked up as well [] It is a means of enabling communication about the extent to which we are living in a truly unprecedented and human-altered world.It is in this spirit that this project was conceived, providing a response to this existential challenge from the discipline of architecture, both as a major study of its past and as an advocation for a different and better future.As someone professionally invested in the built environment and its history for over a quarter of a century,I have long been uncomfortable with how the discipline of architecture privileges the experiences of a global minority over those of what theeducator and anti-racist activist Rosemary Campbell-Stephens has coined the global majority.As we increasingly confront the reality of our planetary impact and limitations, this partial view of the environments we have constructed most of which have been built comparatively recently is not merely disingenuous, but increasingly and dangerously irresponsible.Today, the buildings and construction sector accounts for around 37 per cent of total global CO2 emissions, much of which comes from the production and use of cement for concrete. According to the United States Geological Survey, in the three years from 2011-2013, China consumed more cement than the USA did throughout the entire 20th century. In 2007, as the global human population was nearing 7 billion (it now exceeds 8 billion), humans became an urbanised species for the first time, with more people living in cities than in rural areas. Since the early 20thcentury, the mass of material humans produce (a large proportion of which are building materials) has doubled every two decades, resulting in the total mass of human-made material now outweighing all biomass on earth.Such statistics reveal a bigger picture of extraction over longer timeframes, evidencing architectures planetary impact.These facts not only reveal our species suicidal appetite for building anew, they also mask, as Professor Jeremy Till has stated, architectures addiction to extraction. The roots of this addiction run deep into extractive histories of coloniality, wherein architecture was deployed as a means of projecting and sustaining power intellectually and geopolitically the canon and the cannon.AdvertisementFor more than half a millennium, architecture has been rooted in the extraction of natural and cultural resources through colonial domination and cultural exploitation, from coal to humans, from data to indigenous knowledge and from energy to intellectual property. When published, my research aims to join and support the growing voices arguing for architecture to become a restorative, regenerative and reparative practice, encouraging an emergent and urgent change in architectural education and practice that shifts a centuries-old focus on building anew to repairing and improving the already built.Edward Denison is Professor of Architecture and Global Modernities at the Bartlett School of Architecture 2025-03-31will hurstcomment and share