Environmental Histories of Architecture

Environmental Histories of Architecture is a series of essays that, together, rethink the discipline and profession of architecture by offering different understandings of how architecture and the environment have been co-produced. While cross-disciplinary research has focused on the new realities of the Anthropocene, architecture’s complex historical relationship to nature—ind...

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Environmental Histories of Architecture is a series of essays that, together, rethink the discipline and profession of architecture by offering different understandings of how architecture and the environment have been co-produced. While cross-disciplinary research has focused on the new realities of the Anthropocene, architecture’s complex historical relationship to nature—indeed to the very con-cept of the environment—has yet to be reconsidered in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions. The prag-matic, techno-utopian, or even environmentalist stances that have thus far monopolized this relationship do not equip architectural practices for the challenges ahead. The task now falls to anyone producing historical analyses and theoretical reflections to pursue a more critical, even operative, engagement with environmental relations be-yond the themes of energy and climate change. Through unique methodological and conceptual framings, the eight chapters of Environmental Histories of Architecture examine the relationship between society and the environ-ment, complicate understandings of architecture and history, and challenge assumptions of modernization and path dependency. In these ways, as highlighted in the con-cluding essay, the publication suggests sustainable trajec-tories for architectural thought and action that can over-come dominant narratives of inevitability and apocalypse.

This resulting publication, Environmental Histories of Architecture, presents the work of eight researchers who each analyze specific environmental relations, crises, and reforms and demonstrate how society and the environment have been co-constructed, represented, and lived in their respective geographies. While their essays are published independently as chapters (each available for download via the link above), together they cover an expansive range of thinking about how the environment changed, and was changed by, architecture.
Aleksandr Bierig studies the London Coal Exchange, a building that opened in 1849 to house a market where the city’s coal was traded but not distributed. By taking the Exchange as artefact, Bierig examines the moment when coal became a thing—a commodity—and offers an architectural perspective on fossil-fuel history. He draws on a literary analysis of extraction and labour in the mines and an architectural analysis of the display of plant fossils in the Exchange to outline a profound moment in the development of coal’s social and cultural significance. The building’s spatial reach and material expression suggested that fossil-fuel use had begun to unsettle the relationship between human history and geological time, raising haunting questions regarding “ghost acres” that remain with us today.
Nerea Calvillo explores what happens when nature itself, in this case pollen, is deemed a problem, even a pollutant. The essay introduces the pioneering women of Hull-House, a reformist settlement project founded in Chicago in 1889, who conducted extensive socioeconomic surveys that mapped—at least implicitly—the distribution of ragweed in the city, before pollen-induced hay fever had been medicalized and commodified in the United States. Calvillo draws on ecofeminist literature to shape a queer theory of pollution, one that addresses it beyond the architectural scale. Rather than simply revealing and representing pollen as pollution, Calvillo’s focus on the multiscalar politicization of urban ecologies allows for research into practices that intervene in society and nature, care for urban spaces, and are critical of neoliberal greening.
Daniel Barber renders oil (as used to heat and cool sealed interiors) visible in postwar North American architecture by drawing on analyses of petroculture, particularly the road novel as well as other literature, art, and film. Barber uses the Seagram Building in New York (1957) and the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1958) to demonstrate how the International Style created buildings that as cultural object and technical systems explicitly relied—for their functionality and aesthetics—on cheap energy, concealed in their façades, floors, and ceilings. Relative to current claims for future energy transition, Barber argues, among others, that the solar alternatives propagated since the 1970s must be studied against the backdrop of scarcity and of today’s petroleum-centred society and economy.
Kiel Moe argues that throughout the twentieth century, pedagogy in schools of architecture across North America constructed and maintained a bleak image of the environment as the very source of proprietary equipment. The essay traces this tradition from early curricula and textbooks, through course standardization and accreditation criteria, to the “Environmental Control System“ courses of the 1960s, which adopted the closed-systems thinking popularized by NASA as well as Reyner Banham’s take on mechanical services. Despite pedagogical alternatives offered by Lewis Mumford, James Marston Fitch, and Douglas Haskell, the focus on equipment was reinforced through close ties between industry and academia, leading to a path dependency that continues to dominate architecture curricula in North America.
Jiat-Hwee Chang reconstructs how the air-conditioning industry originated in North America and became such a transformative force in twentieth-century architecture, while also critiquing the industry’s simplistic assumption of a universal standard of thermal comfort. In an effort to construct a more global history, the essay presents two sites, Singapore and Doha, Qatar, as examples of the proliferation of air-conditioned complexes in the Global South in the 1970s and 1980s, that were equipped by American firms or at least drew on American expertise. And yet, Chang explores recent projects to show that, in response to tropical and subtropical warming, these two affluent countries are actually producing hybrid cooling strategies for buildings and public spaces that blend technology and tradition, thereby challenging the air-conditioning dependency.
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This resulting publication, Environmental Histories of Architecture, presents the work of eight researchers who each analyze specific environmental relations, crises, and reforms and demonstrate how society and the environment have been co-constructed, represented, and lived in their respective geographies. While their essays are published independently as chapters (each available for download via the link above), together they cover an expansive range of thinking about how the environment changed, and was changed by, architecture.
Aleksandr Bierig studies the London Coal Exchange, a building that opened in 1849 to house a market where the city’s coal was traded but not distributed. By taking the Exchange as artefact, Bierig examines the moment when coal became a thing—a commodity—and offers an architectural perspective on fossil-fuel history. He draws on a literary analysis of extraction and labour in the mines and an architectural analysis of the display of plant fossils in the Exchange to outline a profound moment in the development of coal’s social and cultural significance. The building’s spatial reach and material expression suggested that fossil-fuel use had begun to unsettle the relationship between human history and geological time, raising haunting questions regarding “ghost acres” that remain with us today.
Nerea Calvillo explores what happens when nature itself, in this case pollen, is deemed a problem, even a pollutant. The essay introduces the pioneering women of Hull-House, a reformist settlement project founded in Chicago in 1889, who conducted extensive socioeconomic surveys that mapped—at least implicitly—the distribution of ragweed in the city, before pollen-induced hay fever had been medicalized and commodified in the United States. Calvillo draws on ecofeminist literature to shape a queer theory of pollution, one that addresses it beyond the architectural scale. Rather than simply revealing and representing pollen as pollution, Calvillo’s focus on the multiscalar politicization of urban ecologies allows for research into practices that intervene in society and nature, care for urban spaces, and are critical of neoliberal greening.
Daniel Barber renders oil (as used to heat and cool sealed interiors) visible in postwar North American architecture by drawing on analyses of petroculture, particularly the road novel as well as other literature, art, and film. Barber uses the Seagram Building in New York (1957) and the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris (1958) to demonstrate how the International Style created buildings that as cultural object and technical systems explicitly relied—for their functionality and aesthetics—on cheap energy, concealed in their façades, floors, and ceilings. Relative to current claims for future energy transition, Barber argues, among others, that the solar alternatives propagated since the 1970s must be studied against the backdrop of scarcity and of today’s petroleum-centred society and economy.
Kiel Moe argues that throughout the twentieth century, pedagogy in schools of architecture across North America constructed and maintained a bleak image of the environment as the very source of proprietary equipment. The essay traces this tradition from early curricula and textbooks, through course standardization and accreditation criteria, to the “Environmental Control System“ courses of the 1960s, which adopted the closed-systems thinking popularized by NASA as well as Reyner Banham’s take on mechanical services. Despite pedagogical alternatives offered by Lewis Mumford, James Marston Fitch, and Douglas Haskell, the focus on equipment was reinforced through close ties between industry and academia, leading to a path dependency that continues to dominate architecture curricula in North America.
Jiat-Hwee Chang reconstructs how the air-conditioning industry originated in North America and became such a transformative force in twentieth-century architecture, while also critiquing the industry’s simplistic assumption of a universal standard of thermal comfort. In an effort to construct a more global history, the essay presents two sites, Singapore and Doha, Qatar, as examples of the proliferation of air-conditioned complexes in the Global South in the 1970s and 1980s, that were equipped by American firms or at least drew on American expertise. And yet, Chang explores recent projects to show that, in response to tropical and subtropical warming, these two affluent countries are actually producing hybrid cooling strategies for buildings and public spaces that blend technology and tradition, thereby challenging the air-conditioning dependency.
Hannah le Roux follows the material flows and corporate geographies of asbestos-cement, a construction material that proliferated globally in the twentieth century. The essay reveals the industrial, academic, professional, and political links between modernity and toxicity: le Roux traces how the Swiss-based multinational Eternit marketed its asbestos products from the 1950s on through the company magazine ac: International asbestos-cement review; how architectural historian Sigfried Giedion placed himself at the service of industry by writing for ac review and by using asbestos-cement in his own home; and how, through the efforts of the United Nations, the material became widespread in the Global South through prefabricated housing. Even after bans in many countries, the lingering presence of asbestos-cement is a form of “slow violence” that suggests the need for a “slower science.”
Isabelle Doucet takes two radical projects, Cedric Price’s Aviary (1985) at the Royal Veterinary College in London, United Kingdom, and Ant Farm’s Dolphin Embassy (1976) in Australia, as two contextual and self-reflexive case studies of possible human-animal relationships. The essay adopts an environmental humanities perspective to conduct an architectural analysis, asserting that even though both projects were ultimately unrealized, architecture was central in their proposed paradigmatic spaces for breeding and encounter. Engaging with the very storytelling methods of Price and Ant Farm, Doucet offers an archival-based tale, framed by scientific and Indigenous knowledge, to acknowledge the meaningful lives of others, humans- and non-humans, for multispecies survival and coexistence in the neoliberal era.
Paulo Tavares develops a postcolonial critique of Empire’s palm house and colonial-era plantations to frame an excavation of the ethno-botanical archive of American anthropologist William Balée. During an interview, Tavares and Balée discuss the plant diversity and formations in the Amazon region, documented by the latter in the 1980s. Through a research-based approach, that incorporates botany into architecture and vice versa, Tavares questions how institutions, both in the natural sciences and architecture, should build their archival collections. This critique is set within the context of Brazilian development policies that destroy Indigenous habitats, plants, and cultures with the backing of states and corporations that profit from rainforest deforestation—in forensic terms a crime against humanity and the environment.
These essays constitute eight episodes of environmental histories of architecture in the making. Beginning with the emergence of industrial capitalism and the new marketplaces of a fossil economy in nineteenth-century England, the series then broadly engages with the urbanization, modernization, and colonization of nature in the early twentieth century; the industrialization of construction and the socio-ecological trends in building materials, processes, and technologies in postwar North America; and finally the societal and environmental changes caused by the globalization and neoliberalization of economy and culture. The final essay, authored by me, offers a survey to situate the series within other larger currents, notably the interpretation and storytelling of environmental history and the environmental humanities; the material history that binds architecture and the environment together beyond energy and climate change; and critical, posthuman approaches to nature.
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