Essay 1 – Toward Re-Entanglement: A Charter for the City and the Earth

The Bauhaus Earth Essays, launched in 2024, feature a wide range of critical voices addressing the complete overhaul of the built environment system that the climate crisis demands of us.

The first essay, Toward Re-Entanglement: A Charter for the City and the Earth, is a call to action. It challenges all those with a role in the conception, production, operation, and governance of the building sector to address the systemic ecological, climatic, and social impacts incurred by its activities. Twelve principles of “re-entanglement” guide the re-design of the entire life cycle of the urban realm: the re-formation and re-materialization of the physical artifacts that comprise it, the reconfiguration of the socioeconomic structures that underpin it, and the re-engagement of the bioregions that might sustainably supply it. In this way, our unprecedented convergence of environmental and social crises offers us powerful opportunities for systemic change.

‍Toward Re-Entanglement is available to download or purchase on the JOVIS website.

Philipp Misselwitz, Co-CEO of Bauhaus Earth, is an architect and urban planner based in Berlin. He holds the Chair of Habitat Unit (International Urbanism and Design) at the Institute for Architecture, Technical University Berlin.

Alan Organschi is a principal and partner at Gray Organschi Architecture, an award-winning, US based architecture and timber building practice. He currently serves as director of the Innovation Labs at Bauhaus Earth and is a senior member of the faculty at the Yale School of Architecture where he has taught architectural design and building technology for two decades.

Coauthors: Ana María Durán Calisto, Andrea Gebhard, Cade Diehm, Edgar Pieterse, Franziska Schreiber, Giuseppe Scarascia Mugnozza, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, James Drinkwater, Marlène de Saussure, Marc Palahí, Monica Tanuhandaru, Nathalie Jean-Baptiste, Rocío Armillas Tiseyra, Tillmann Prinz, Vicente Guallart, Vyjayanthi V. Rao