In this conversation, architect, researcher, and educator Paolo Cascone, and contributor Maddalena Laddaga reflects on the ideas and practices developed in his book African Fabbers Atlas: Manual of Synthetic Vernacular Architecture (Actar Publishers, 2025). Drawing from years of work with CODESIGNLAB and the African Fabbers School, they reflect on material culture as a central dimension of ecological and social transformation. Their answer links hands-on construction, local manufacturing, and resource awareness to a broader critique of abstract sustainability discourse, arguing that ecological transition must begin with a renewed familiarity with materials, processes, and the conditions under which architecture is actually produced.
The discussion explores how transforming materials on site, reducing transportation, and building through repair, reuse, and recycling can support both climate justice and more distributed economic models. Rather than reproducing the greenwashing rhetoric often associated with the Global North, their approach proposes a grounded and hybrid form of sustainability rooted in local industry, collective construction, and the practical intelligence of making.
