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Hochhäusl, S, Lange, T, et al. 2018. Architecture and
the Environment.
Architectural Histories
,
6(1): 20,
pp. 1–13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.259
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FIELD NOTES
Architecture and the Environment
These Field Notes, on the topic of Architecture and the Environment, elucidate how problems raised in the
environmental humanities have informed architectural history, and in turn, what architectural history has
to contribute to this emerging eld. The short essays explore specic ‘positions’ in the overarching debate,
identifying a radical return to critical theory and the embrace of the fundamentally transdisciplinary
nature of environmental humanities and architectural history. While the positions advocate for a serious
investigation of architects’ texts and ideas on environmental issues, the collection also champions a broader
engagement with Anthropocene questions and proposes to adopt the environment as an intellectual
perspective from which to look upon the world.
Introduction
Sophie Hochhäusl
University of Pennsylvania, US
hochhaus@design.upenn.edu
Torsten Lange
ETH Zurich, CH
torsten.lange@gta.arch.ethz.ch
During the Fourth European Architectural History
Network meeting in Dublin in June 2016, the interest
group ‘Architecture and the Environment’ was estab-
lished. Its members share the ‘environment’ as a central
concern of their work, as subject matter, methodologi-
cal framework, or perspective from which to rethink
architectural historiography. The ‘Field Notes’ published
here gather fourteen positions that confront the immi-
nent environmental challenges as collective intellectual
enquiry, but from varied geographical, historical, and
theoretical standpoints.
The motives and potentials for such a group effort may
be obvious given the environmental urgencies of the pre-
sent moment. Today, most people are familiar with the
intense discussions concerning climate change, climate
chaos, or climate breakdown, as some journalists and
activists such as George Monbiot have suggested we call
it, so as to adequately reflect the magnitude of what is
at stake. Many are also acquainted with debates about
the Anthropocene.1 According to this concept, which is
the subject of the natural sciences as well as the social
sciences and the arts and humanities, we live in a new
geological epoch defined by human activity. In addition
to these public and scholarly debates, millions of people
around the world have begun to experience man-made
climate change and its (after)effects, including human
unsettlement and mass displacements. Developing
effective strategies to confront this predicament presents
a profound challenge, especially in light of ‘the impos-
sibility of enacting the necessary changes within the
parameters of capitalism’ (da Costa Meyer 2016: 1212).
While this thought is daunting, it can also be read as a
call for action. In fact, we argue that architectural history
has as much to learn from the present debate as it has
to contribute to it. The positions presented in these Field
Notes map out four overarching themes that reflect archi-
tectural history’s entanglement with the current environ-
mental debate and its particular disciplinary contribution
to that discourse.
Transdisciplinarity
Arguably one of the most relevant developments to
confront the imminent environmental challenges as
intellectual query for architectural history has been the
emergence of the environmental humanities as a trans-
disciplinary field. The ambition of the environmental
humanities is to bridge the divide between science and
the humanities by establishing conversations among
varied disciplines, including geology, biology, ecology,
environmental history, philosophy, cultural geography,
anthropology, business, law, media studies, art, and design.
Drawing on a unique richness of methods, concepts, and
terms from these fields, the environmental humanities
have greatly contributed not only to the expansion of
knowledge, but also the development of strategies suit-
able for addressing a problem as vast and complex as the
environment. One of its key insights is to understand
humanity as merely one agent in a larger network of the
earth’s living and non-living things.
Many of the contributing authors — including Isabelle
Doucet, Kim Förster, Ross Exo Adams, and Daniel Barber
— present positions that draw on ideas from the environ-
mental humanities and mark a departure from concerns
intrinsic to the fields of art and architectural history.
If we are to take the insights from the environmental
humanities seriously, Doucet notes, we must question
the categories, methods, and concepts through which
architectural historians are accustomed to think, includ-
ing epochs, canons, and oeuvres. Förster suggests that
methods from the environmental humanities further
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the EnvironmentArt. 20, page 2 of 13
encourage us to break through the biases that have fore-
grounded questions of aesthetics or technology in archi-
tectural history. Engaging these propositions requires
careful labour and changing the language we use in
researching, writing, and teaching architectural history
as a transdiscipline.
However, as Adams warns, it is also essential for archi-
tectural historians to critically reflect on the field’s fasci-
nation with the environment and to remain wary of its
potential pitfalls. Especially in the face of rampant aca-
demic capitalism, which has a tangible impact on the built
environment (from campus development to fossil fuel
investment), the increasing marketization of knowledge
predisposes architectural thought to a somewhat narrowly
historicized understanding of environment. Especially if
we want to regard ‘environment’ as a perspective, a grasp
of its historicity as a concept and social construct is funda-
mental. According to Barber, such a perspective offers the
opportunity to participate in a wide-ranging environmen-
talizsation of humanist and scholarly discourses, instead of
merely adding ‘environment’ to a list of sub-issues for the
field to engage in.
Environment as Perspective
To consider environment as a perspective means
developing a way of seeing — to establish and then to
occupy a specific vantage point, from which to look upon
the world. This suggests that, like feminism, Marxism, or
postcolonial studies before it, the environment is at home
in no singular discipline, but enables a broader view that
can inform multiple subjects. This does not mean that the
environment is equally applicable to all topics of study,
but it implies that it has the power to cast almost any
theme in a different light.
Aleksandr Bierig, Kenny Cupers, and Jennifer Ferng are
among the contributors who dare to think which histo-
ries become possible if we were to truly implement envi-
ronment as a perspective. One of the main propositions
these authors share is the need for scrutinizing how the
histories of resource extraction, colonialism, and imperial-
ism are inextricably linked. Drawing on economic history,
Bierig questions the idea that the realms of the artificial
and the natural were ever separate, and argues instead
that architecture has always been part of nature. Cupers
excavates histories that do not take the environment as
given, but that rather recognize its material and concep-
tual coproduction. Ferng urges us to consider the wider
scope of extraction industries, especially in the global
south, which date back at least to the establishment of
pre-capitalist trade networks.
In unpacking the entangled histories of environment,
capital, and extractive economies, these contributors
assert that in acknowledging the environment as a per-
spective, we should pursue ‘intersectional’ approaches
to architectural historiography, to borrow a term from
feminist discourse.2 Such histories would draw together
multiple views and vantage points and would conceive
not only of environmental histories of architecture, but
would ask what (post)colonial, Marxist, or feminist envi-
ronmental histories of architecture might look like. In
their commitment to rendering networks and relation-
ships legible — be they human and non-human, material
and intellectual, tangible and impermanent, scientific and
experienced — the authors echo core intentions of the
environmental humanities, of which architectural his-
tory is, after all, a part. At the same time, they call for a
fundamental critique the universal figure ‘Anthropos’ by
attending to the long history of structural unevenness
and inequality that has underpinned both the idea and
the actual processes of development.
(Re)turn to Theory
One of architecture’s profound capacities is to render the
management of resources visible — the flow of gold, iron,
oil, money and other kinds of capital, goods, or labour.
This idea, which has shaped critical architectural histori-
ography in recent years (Scott, 2016), is strongly informed
by the theories of Michel Foucault, above all his concept
of governmentality (Foucault 2009). It allows us to think
of buildings and cities as produced by ‘knowledge frame-
works and expertise profiles capable of managing popula-
tions by regulating their demographics, health, housing,
[…] employment, social lives and culture’ (Abramson et al.
2012: vii).
The fieldnotes by Ayala Levin, Ginger Nolan and Alla
Vronskaya, Torsten Lange, and Maroš Krivý expose archi-
tecture’s mediating function in the coproduction of ter-
ritory and populations, humans and their environment.
In her contribution, Levin illuminates Laugier’s Primitive
Hut simultaneously as sheltering the body from its sur-
roundings and as an embodiment of resource extrac-
tion. Nolan and Vronskaya invoke Foucault when they
introduce the notion of ‘environmentality’ as a means
for understanding the reciprocal relationship between
the modern invention of ‘humanness’ and the produc-
tion of specific milieus tasked with supporting the opti-
mal development of the human species. Considering an
environmental perspective, Lange looks at ‘household’ as
a political technology for the distribution and reproduc-
tion of resources, bodies, and social constructs, remind-
ing us of such older but no less relevant theories as those
of Max Weber. Finally, Krivý cautions us about the admin-
istrative and institutional apparatuses that manage the
environment, and their approaches to urbanism such as
‘organicism’ and ‘holism’, whose origins lie in the 19th
century.
Far beyond an indebtedness to the debate on
governmentality, which has recently been revised by the
insights of ethnographers and anthropologists (Povinelli
2006), the positions these authors articulate share a
renewed commitment to a rigorous and historically
grounded but speculative theory. While the authors build
on insights from science and technology studies, environ-
mental history, and human geography, they also return to
concepts, themes, and even entire fields of enquiry that
have been important, and indeed intrinsic, to architec-
tural history. We would even go so far as to say that this
particular theoretical approach is something that archi-
tectural historians and theorists can contribute to the
larger debate.
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the Environment Art. 20, page 3 of 13
Architectural Epistemologies of Environment
Certainly, this current moment of opening up the disci-
pline represents but one instance in a much longer his-
tory of architecture’s engagement with environmental
questions. Throughout the 20th century, a great number
of architectural actors — designers, builders, critics, and
theorists — have sought to make sense of the complex
relationship between humans and the environment when
they theorized buildings, technology, landscapes, and ter-
ritory. In fact, we believe that well-known architectural
ideas, especially of the 20th century, anticipated many of
the themes outlined above, although they pose specific
historical and historiographical problems.
Andres Kurg, Sophie Hochhäusl, and Sabine von Fischer
reassess architectural writing and built works from an
environmental perspective. Kurg asserts that studying
environmental debates among practitioners in the Soviet
sphere allows us to account for alterity in global mod-
ernization processes, and to recognize environment as a
horizon of mutual yet different experience. Significantly,
environment operates here simultaneously as a theoreti-
cal and a historical concept that is socially and politically
constructed. Hochhäusl notes the importance of excavat-
ing the political motivations behind social constructions
of environment; growth metaphors, she argues, especially
when it comes to the writing of 20th-century architects,
often masked acts of inscribing economic unevenness and
racialized imaginaries into the built environment.
In a sense, these positions speak to the call to historicize
the concept of environment within architecture in the
face of heightened urgency. With a view towards the work
of Reyner Banham, von Fischer proposes that, especially
in moments that call for action, we should also perhaps
remind ourselves of the ‘urgency to wait’. ‘Suspending
urgency’ may turn out to be one of the more effective
strategies for operating within, and indeed against, the
constraints of capitalism.
Structure and Language
Finally, a word on the structure and language of these
‘Field Notes’. These texts were never conceived as a final
commentary but as a provisional record — a snapshot of a
moment in an ongoing conversation that also highlights
potential avenues for further research.3 We have thus tried
to retain both the heterogeneity and the consensus of the
presented ideas. At times, this consensus will appear in
the form of repetition, as well as overlapping, parallel, and
crossed arguments. Given the rapidly evolving discourse,
we have sometimes deliberately resisted the urge to fully
synthesize propositions into conclusions. The following
texts can be read piece by piece, by theme, across posi-
tions, or in full. Needless to say, each one stands on its own
merit. Along the way, readers may encounter neologisms,
notions of newness, and even buzzwords, all of which point
to a shared excitement for the transformational power of
the questions at hand. Although there are obvious risks in
taking such a position, we believe that there is a beauty in
the spirit of ‘working something out’. After all, neologisms
mean that there is something in the making; repetitions,
we hope, imply that something is taking shape.
I. Transdisciplinarity
Historical Epistemologies of the Environmental Present
Ross Exo Adams
Iowa State University, USA
readams@iastate.edu
It is easy to imagine a scenario in which, shifting our
attention to the concept of ‘environment’, we architec-
tural historians will transform our field entirely. Exposed
to ontologies of ecological science, systems theory, com-
plexity theory, or thermodynamics, the objects of study
inherited from the 20th century will be appraised against
a shifting horizon of concerns: cities, neighbourhoods and
buildings — environments in themselves — will require
new tools and categories of assessment; scale will lose its
graduated linearity; time will become indistinguishable
from form; and contingency will gain its place as perhaps
the only force of history that matters. While epistemolo-
gies like these are seductive, I remain sceptical about
how they may play out in architectural history — not
because of the modernist, liberal imaginaries they aban-
don, but because they imply that we predispose archi-
tectural thought with a somewhat narrowly historicized,
techno-positivist, and often apolitical understanding of
‘environment’.
Indeed, to historicize a concept like environment, it is
crucial to question what it means to our thought in the
present since it is the present that gives urgency to any
particular concept in the first place. Curiously, the pre-
19th century etymology of environment suggests deep
relations to militaristic strategies, notions of danger, and
forms of protection, particularly in relation to city walls —
meanings that may speak more to our contemporary risk
Figure 1: Victor Olgyay, ‘Man as the Central Measure’, dia-
gram published in the first edition of Olgyay (1963: 14).
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the EnvironmentArt. 20, page 4 of 13
society and the neoliberal fixation on securitized urban
‘environments’, not to mention contemporary military-
strategic thinking, than to the more scientific definition
we take as given. While it may be that the 19th century’s
birth of positive sciences coincided with the onset of indus-
trialization, giving rise to a new human-environment rela-
tion, it’s certainly not the first time that this relation has
been transformed, and it would be a fundamental error to
confuse historical interpretation with origination. Instead,
we may find that what the 19th century gave visibility to
was a conceptual inection of environment whose careful
study may open other ways to interrogate this concept in
the present.
This is not to deny the methodological and epistemo-
logical shifts that have already changed the way archi-
tectural history is written vis-à-vis environment. Indeed,
these shifts may be registered less in what we study than
in how we frame our research: the fact that not only are
we compelled today to write histories examining the
forces that produce architecture, but that we also antici-
pate how these histories contribute to explorations out-
side our discipline is arguably an outcome of our broader
encounter with environment itself and the challenges it
poses to 20th-century epistemological frameworks. Given
the transdisciplinarity that environmental questions
invite, we may do well to see disciplines as intellectual
points of departure rather than fixed, bounded realms
of ‘expert’ knowledge. Precisely for this reason, the limi-
tations of building an intellectual edifice around a term
understood solely in its relation to modern science may
become clear.
The Environmentalization of Architectural History
Daniel A. Barber
University of Pennsylvania, USA
barberda@design.upenn.edu
The promise of reframing architectural historical knowl-
edge in light of environmental pressures solicits an
engagement with a number of epochal shifts. It is self-
evident that architecture will look differently now that
there is wide recognition of the impact of fossil fuels —
including those burned to manage the air-conditioned
interiors of modernism — on the planetary climate and
on the future of the species. Narratives and methods
of architectural history offer a potent window into the
environment as a collection of historical agencies, espe-
cially insofar as scholarly engagement with methods
and intentions evident in the built environment offer
compelling evidence of cultural attempts to understand
and shape collective relationships to earth systems. In
other words, architecture has long been an essential site
of conceiving of and enacting social relationships to the
biotic sphere; architectural histories open up compel-
ling opportunities in tracing these relationships and
their effects.
The two greatest methodological challenges of the
emerging field of the environmental history of archi-
tecture are a critical engagement with science and tech-
nology and a continued, though revised, approach to
architecture as media. Broadly speaking, architectural
history has yet to assess the impact of the social construc-
tion of technology on its methodological frameworks.
Technological innovation, especially around sustainabil-
ity, is too often framed as triumphant and unequivocal,
rather than conditioned, complex, and often fraught with
unanticipated consequences. Similarly, the shift in media
theory toward a framework of cultural techniques allows
for more focused analysis of architectural concepts and
ideas as formulating material substrates that elaborate
on historically and culturally contingent distinctions
between interior and exterior, on visual, material, and
conceptual terms. Such histories offer a longue-durée
engagement with buildings as physical, conceptual, and
cultural mediators of the environment. The potential
here is for architectural history to reframe itself as a site
for convening these discussions and exploring their rel-
evance to the ideas, concepts, and figures that drive socio-
environmental change.
Environment and sustainability are ciphers for a num-
ber of ideas focused on rethinking relationships between
political, cultural, and biotic systems. The discourse of
architectural history greatly expands and enriches this
discussion by recognizing that all architectural activity
has registered, or directly engaged, environmental issues
both by professional necessity and as an expression of
cultural desire. Architectural history helps substantiate
the promise of the emerging framework of the environ-
mental humanities: at stake is not the addition to the
canon of a new set of objects but, rather, the integration
of knowledge about environmental conditions and their
relationship to social collectives. Environmental histo-
ries of architecture thus address both the material and
the symbolic means through which the field has medi-
ated discussions of cultural change over the past few
centuries.
Hesitant (Hi)Stories: Whose Environment? Which
(Architectural) Imaginations?
Isabelle Doucet
Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, SE
isabelle.doucet@chalmers.se
Radical thinkers of the environment call for challenging
what Isabelle Stengers refers to as ‘first history’ (2015: 19),
which is defined as thriving on development and mobili-
zation (of people, nature, and resources) fuelled by eco-
nomic growth. Stengers asks us to inhabit a new, ‘second
history’ based on the recognition of the unsustainable
and damaging character of the first. In Donna Haraway’s
words, such inhabiting is a matter of ‘staying with the
trouble’, which involves becoming ‘truly present’ (Hara-
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the Environment Art. 20, page 5 of 13
way 2016: 1); asking, to paraphrase Stengers, what these
ongoing processes oblige us to do (Stengers 2015: 19);
and developing other stories than the ones that are pro-
moted through the logic of the ‘first history’. The ques-
tion thus becomes how historians of architecture and the
environment can write such (hi)stories that are embodied,
responsible, and ‘other’. Can historical accounts be ‘truly
present’ at all?
I would argue, albeit tentatively, that architectural
historians adopt a privileged position from which they
can recall and thus trigger awareness around ‘(first) his-
tories’ of mobilization, justification, and unsustainable
decision-making. Historians of architecture — a projective
discipline and profession — are, moreover, particularly
well placed to uncover counter-struggles and counter-
narratives that have attempted to challenge the seem-
ingly inevitable course of the ‘first history’. They can
thus reconnect with (hi)stories and (utopian) imagina-
tions that tell alternative stories of living with Gaia; sto-
ries that, because they were considered odd, unrealistic,
or inconvenient, went unnoticed, or were silenced. But
simply writing accounts of such counter-stories is not
enough when these remain themselves locked in histori-
ography’s epistemological regimes. Are historians, them-
selves products of ‘first history’, not to ask anew: What do
we look at? What do we include as actors in the history of
the environment?
There is thus a need to question the categories,
methods, and concepts through which historians are
accustomed to think (such as epochs, canons, oeuvres,
geographical relevance, and seminal works), and which
are possibly still locked in the first history. One way
to do such ‘category work’, as Haraway aptly called
it (Gane 2006), is by slowing down, hesitating, and
becoming sensitive to that which we inhabit. For histo-
rians, hesitation is essential for gaining access to those
‘other’ stories, stories of resistance and of difference.
Architectural historians, by engaging with a projective
discipline, are well equipped to challenge the domi-
nance of the ‘first’ environmental history. In doing so,
they contribute to the imagination of other environ-
mental futures. But it requires a laborious, combined,
effort: historiographical category work and the pains-
taking identification and narration of environmental
counter-histories.
Architectural History and the Anthropocene
Kim Förster
Canadian Centre for Architecture, CAN
kfoerster@cca.qc.ca
In the light of anthropogenic climate change, we might
want to reconsider how we narrate (and teach) archi-
tectural history as an environmental history. Coming
from architectural history, geography, sociology, and
cultural studies, I tend to integrate critical concepts
of culture and nature, environment and ecology, with
institutional critique and the sociology of the profes-
sion, to analyze how architecture and the environment
have been coproduced. This idea of coproduction raises
questions with regard to architectural history’s periodi-
zation, its turning points, broader discourses, specific
cases, etc.
Disciplines such as history, geography, and sociol-
ogy have put forth critical historiographic viewpoints
to reflect upon present-day consequences of devel-
opments since the industrial revolution. They did
so by linking earth’s history to human life and the
capitalist mode of production (Chakrabarty 2009); by
analyzing the effects of fossil capitalism on urbaniza-
tion with the shift of power supply from water power
to steam engine (Malm 2016); or by highlighting
the dependence of ideologies of growth on the avail-
ability of cheap energy, resources, labour, food, etc.
(Moore 2015). These takes on the Anthropocene, or
Capitalocene, ‘understood as a system of power, profit
and re/production in the web of life’ (Moore 2017),
barely map out the role architecture has played. It is
in the manifold production of the built environment,
e.g. the naturalization of obsolescence (Abramson
2016), that society’s complex relation to nature
shows itself.
Clearly, the energy question is a critical issue, although
not the only one, and by analyzing the socio-spatial nature
of the environmental problematic, we would first of all
historicize shifts in energy base — from wood to coal, to
oil and gas, to nuclear — and their relation to architec-
ture, the metropolis, and national territory, in relation to
the invention of modern building typologies, materials,
techniques, and technologies. Still, these transformations
must be seen in broader terms of political economy and
colonialism, population growth and food security, biopol-
itics and geopolitics, limits and depletion, scarcity and
austerity, etc.
Moreover, architectural historians should try to
approach unanswered questions by exposing spa-
tially fixed regimes of production and consumption,
but also by highlighting the effects of pollution and
toxicity; or by analyzing the environmental impact of
architecture and urbanism, especially with the Great
Acceleration in the West, as in the East, since the 1950s,
as witnessed in architectural manifestations of pet-
rocultures (Szeman et al. 2017). Finally, we might inves-
tigate new geological stratifications on the basis of
technofossils, in terms of the building material industry
and its reliance on stable, high-energy, at times toxic
materials, such as asbestos, concrete, chemicals, metals, or
plastics.
The task for architectural history then is to
probletamize notions of nature under capital-
ism at different scales, responding to today’s chal-
lenges, such as energy transition, sea level rise, and
extreme weather events, or even aiming for social
and environmental justice, especially in the global
south.
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the EnvironmentArt. 20, page 6 of 13
II. Environment as Perspective
Towards a Natural History of the Articial
Aleksandr Bierig
Harvard University, USA
abierig@g.harvard.edu
It seems clear today that the particular eruptions and
expansions of modernity are inseparable from the adop-
tion of fossil fuels. Demographic growth and urbaniza-
tion, among other accelerations, hinged upon a shift
from organic energy (wind, water, photosynthesis)
to mineral energy (beginning with coal) that gained
momentum around the turn of the 19th century (Wrigley
2010). While the drive toward expanding markets as well
as class and colonial expropriation preceded this energy
transition, those activities, alongside others, were pro-
pelled at ever-greater velocities and scales by a new force
— that is, fossil fuels at the disposal of certain human
societies.
In broad terms, the changing built environment both
reflected and captured motivating sources of energy, as
buildings and infrastructure came to express and per-
petuate these new fuels. These transitions took hold at
different times in different places, and distributions of
political, economic, and energetic power remain uneven.
Nevertheless, studying the built and planned environ-
ment with attention to energy, as many have already
begun, provides a way to reassess the very idea of an
‘artificial’ built environment — a notion which persists
in many of the most thoughtful environmental histories.
Artefacts of architecture and infrastructure are perhaps
the most pervasive evidence of our supposed separa-
tion from nature. Consequently, the re-inscription of this
seeming artifice within a natural history allows us to reas-
sess this divide and, with it, a central paradox of our pre-
sent moment: that we have constructed a natural world
in the process of fabricating an artificial one (Purdy 2018;
Daston 1998).
The work of early modern historians indicates that
establishing where or when capitalism began is a predict-
ably blurry business. For instance, Sheilagh Oglivie shows
17th-century Bohemian serfs behaving as ‘rational’ eco-
nomic actors (Ogilvie 2001) and Fernand Braudel famously
locates the promethean spark of commerce and exchange
long before the emergence of modern industry (Braudel
1984). In other words, ‘capitalism’ is one thing and fossil
fuels are another. If their logics have proved complemen-
tary (Malm 2016), we should explicate how and why partic-
ular combinations of political economy and motive energy
have affected the creation and destruction of buildings
and infrastructure. While the political and social analysis
of architecture remains vital, the history of energy provides
an additional framework that illuminates why certain pat-
terns governing the built environment were able to expand,
intensify, and proliferate. A long history of the relationship
between spatial structures and changing energy regimes
might, in turn, provide examples from the past that point
toward new ways of considering the present and future.
The Environment as Material and Intellectual
Production
Kenny Cupers
University of Basel, CH
kenny.cupers@unibas.ch
Despite its ubiquity in contemporary discourse, the notion
of the environment has yet to be analyzed as a central cat-
egory of thought in architectural history. Environmental
perspectives of both historical and contemporary architec-
ture are currently being put forward, but what is lacking is
an analysis of how environmental thinking underlies the
very emergence and development of modern architecture.
In the course of the 19th century, the professional and dis-
ciplinary field of architecture developed in a constellation
of environmental ideas and practices, which ranged from
natural philosophy and evolutionary biology to settler
colonialism and urban reform. To excavate this constella-
tion requires a historical approach that, instead of taking
the environment as a given, recognizes both its material
and intellectual production.
Our current — North Atlantic — definition of environ-
ment, which entered dictionaries in the mid-19th century,
emerged at the intersections of modern sciences, such as
biology, geography, and anthropology. Yet it was also based
on older, deterministic convictions — such as that climate
determines race, or miasma bring disease. New science
and old conviction were in turn reshaped by practice in
at least two different ways: through the practices of colo-
nial expansion, governance, and resistance, and through
planning and reform efforts in the rapidly transforming
cities and countrysides of the metropole. Such intersec-
tions suggest a close relationship between what are
usually considered to be separate intellectual traditions:
a romantic strand of philosophy focused on the experi-
ence of nature and a much more rigorous, instrumental
Figure 2: Fields of Tulips, Lisse, The Netherlands. Source:
Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands,
2014–2016, Deutsches Museum and the Rachel Carson
Center for Environment and Society, Munich.
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the Environment Art. 20, page 7 of 13
belief in the determining influence of the environment on
human culture and behaviour.
In light of this relationship, the rise of modernism at
the turn of the 20th century might be understood as
the reversal of the deterministic relationship between
humans and their environment, a reversal in which the
environment becomes recognized as being constructed
architecturally and humanity itself is increasingly under-
stood as a geographical factor. Such an argument might
contribute to our understanding of one of the central
paradoxes of modernity, namely that the modern violence
towards nature and humanity that pervades much of
20th-century history, including the history of architec-
ture, can be seen as integral to a vitalist worldview that
understands humanity as an intrinsic part of nature.
(More) Global South, Pre-Capitalist Anthropocenic
Milestones
Jennifer Ferng
The University of Sydney, AU
jennifer.ferng@sydney.edu.au
The Deutsches Museum and the Rachel Carson Centre
for Environment and Society’s exhibition Welcome to
the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (2014–2016)
recently documented what the curators called ‘significant
milestones’, or revolutionary innovations, that have
transformed how mankind has altered the natural envi-
ronment. Their curatorial strategy, which follows Paul
Crutzen’s definition of the Anthropocene, ‘a new geologi-
cal epoch in which human beings have altered the planet’,
is organized into the categories of urbanization, mobility,
machines, nature, food, and evolution.
The Anthropocene is often either exalted for its tech-
nocratic character or condemned as another theoretical
trend that has rehearsed the age-old perils of climate
change. Drawn in comic-strip form, the coal bucket wheel
excavator dating from 1880 shown in the exhibition, for
example, is rendered as a glorified mechanical version of a
shovel (Möllers 2014; Hamann et al. 2014). The shaft drill,
crucial for open-pit mining, is similarly depicted with
retractable pneumatic pistons, topped by a poppet head
that creates cavities underground. That mankind has been
depleting natural resources since the time of the Altamira
Cave is not new. If we are to address architecture’s engage-
ment with the Anthropocene, I view this exhibition as
a pressing call for further critical studies that articulate
earlier modes of natural resource extraction that emerged
outside of Europe and well before the 19th century.
Originating from Australia, Chile, India, Peru, and South
Africa, some of these other environmental histories remain
equally pertinent for European precedents and likewise
demonstrate how the extraction of mineral resources leads
to detrimental effects. The ecological footprint triggered
by mining practices has incorporated everything from
town settlements, regional churches, roadways, and under-
ground tunnels for transportation. Contemporary mining
camps in Australia are even better known as fly-in, fly-out
establishments (FIFO) that form temporary housing cen-
tres for off-site workers, but they often leave behind perma-
nent infrastructure that goes unused for several decades.
In light of projects that identify global practices of mining
in Canada and other countries, we must be more cogni-
zant that these exemplars encompass a broader chrono-
logical and geographical scope that extends across our
shared international empire (Bélanger 2016; Ponte 2016).
Thus, the Deutsches Museum’s exhibition intimates that
there are even more anthropocenic milestones that could
be integrated into our collective chronicle about the Earth
and its future fate. These objects of the Anthropocene, in
fact, represent essential architectural questions that posi-
tion human interventions as an extension of design and
technology. Against ever-expanding global narratives that
touch upon colonial and imperial undertakings, the envi-
ronmental histories from the so-called periphery are no
longer limited by access or geography, but only by the self-
imposed shortcomings of historiographic interpretation.
III. (Re)turn to Theory
Figure 3: ‘The Primitive Hut’, frontispiece of the second
edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture,
1755. Designed by Charles Eisen.
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the EnvironmentArt. 20, page 8 of 13
Urbanism, Organicism, and the History of
Environments as Dispositifs
Maroš Krivý
University of Cambridge, UK
Estonian Academy of Arts, EE
maros.krivy@artun.ee
What are the pre-histories and conditions of the resurgent
neo-organicism of contemporary urbanism? The notion
of the built environment, salient to the development of
urban planning in the late 19th century, highlighted the
irreducibility of the city to architecture. It also anticipated
the non-built environment exceeding the merely physical
aspect to the urban realm, as testified by ways in which
disciplines such as sociology, psychology, ecology, semiot-
ics, and systems theory informed how urbanism was theo-
rized and practised throughout the 20th century. Casting
cities as biological organisms was a common thread in
these otherwise distinct bodies of knowledge.
Politically, 20th-century urban organicism oscillated
between liberal-humanist, fascist, and social democratic
positions, informing such typologies as public parks, sum-
mer camps, and housing estates, and sanctioning distinct
class, national, and racial alliances under the metaphoric
guise of the organism. That organic metaphor’s history has
been replete with disparate meanings: the city as ration-
ally planned and romantically irrational, a cybernetic
brain and a calculated (and computed) uncertainty. It has
informed a plethora of projects, such as Walter Gropius’s
‘integrated planning’, Bruno Zevi’s ‘humanist anti-clas-
sicism’, Jane Jacobs’s ‘liveable urbanism’, Ian McHarg’s
‘designing with nature’, Christopher Alexander’s ‘timeless
way of building’, or Michael Batty’s digital ‘breeding’ of
urban forms.
We might interrogate tensions between these holistic
organicisms and approaches to the urban that are dia-
lectical or otherwise attentive to power, inequalities, and
contradictions, such as those of Henri Lefebvre, Manfredo
Tafuri, and, more recently, Felicity Scott. Moreover, we
might ask what the organicist visions of good, healthy, and
well-tempered environments suppressed and concealed.
Urbanism can be studied historically as an environmen-
tal dispositif, foregrounding physical, institutional, and
epistemic aspects of how power operates through envi-
ronments. While value judgements are inherent to the dis-
course on environment, the disparate criteria (efficiency,
ethics, aesthetics) that underpin those judgements are
rarely explicated as such. Urbanism practised as environ-
mental improvement routinely obfuscates its broader
socio-political contexts and ramifications. Where environ-
mental critique registers contradictions of human action
(urbanization, and more recently the Anthropocene),
those contradictions are routinely resolved at an imagi-
nary level (moralizing discourses that lead to aestheticized
enclaves), thus further intensifying rather than restraining
capitalist development.
A history of the uneasy relationship between urban
‘environmentalism’ and capitalism could extend
beyond Michel Foucault’s well-known investigation of
neoliberalism as an environmental intervention (Foucault
2008). The late 19th-century argument that poor sanitary
environments determined working class vice justified
slum-clearance as well as the social democratic compro-
mise around urban planning. Sustainability, born out
of the critique of Fordism, informed the ‘greenwashed’
architecture of LEED certificates. And in the recent resil-
ient urbanism, the very notion of politics has been ‘envi-
ronmentalized’: the spectre of organicism has returned
under the amorphous, emergent, and viridescent guises
of parametricism, data-behaviourism, and smart cities.
The history of environments-as-dispositifs would illumi-
nate social contradictions and political conflicts intrinsic
to (neo)organicism’s many faces.
Other Home Stories: Troubling the Anthropocenic
Household
Torsten Lange
ETH Zurich, CH
torsten.lange@gta.arch.ethz.ch
‘Environmental behaviour and change begin at home’, we
are frequently told. It might be easy to dismiss such state-
ments as mere platitudes, as modern-day mantras so char-
acteristic of neoliberalism’s obsession with the individual
rather than the structural. Yet what does the imperative
for living sustainable and ethical lives, for maintaining
both one’s own and, by extension, our global household
mean when approached from the perspective of architec-
tural history and the environmental humanities? How can
historical work help to politicize, again, the home? What
conceptual and material practices of dwelling underpin
contemporary ways of living in the global north? What are
the specific disciplinary as well as broader cultural histo-
ries, and what the corresponding geographies, of ‘being
at home’ in the Anthropocene? And what kind of subject
dwells there: Anthropos, the exceptionalist human being?
Home and the concept of dwelling have traditionally
been cast in opposition to capitalist modernity and the
world of production characterized by instrumental ration-
ality and calculative thinking. Rejecting this 19th-century
split between private and public spheres, material femi-
nists in particular have argued that the home, rather than
being separated from the outside world, is in fact entan-
gled with it through a dense web of social, economic,
political, and other relations. Moreover, industrial and
technological developments as well as new social struc-
tures have reshaped the modern home over the course of
the past one hundred and fifty or so years.
To take seriously the questions above, it is necessary to
‘trouble’ (Haraway 2016) taken-for-granted understandings
of home as they persist in our current era of environmen-
tal crisis, and to take a fresh look at the thick materialities
and entangled practices of living across different historic
periods and geographies. This would foster a reading of
ecology that recognizes its etymological meaning as com-
prised of oikos (household), logos (discourse), and nomos
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the Environment Art. 20, page 9 of 13
(management) (Williams 1983: 110–11). Building on the
work of Max Weber (Weber 1978), we might not only want
to interrogate the politics of managing such households
communally and bureaucratically. But we might also want
to reactivate the notion of dwelling as ‘to cherish and
protect, to preserve and care for’ (Heidegger 1997: 96),
beyond romantic contempt for worldly things. In addition,
we should critically engage science and technology as well
as political and economic concerns.
Man, Nature, and the Question of Resources
Ayala Levin
Northwestern University, USA
ayala.levin@northwestern.edu
Like the sub-discipline of human geography, architecture
operates at the intersection of, for example, economy,
culture, landscape, and climate. Architecture, however, is
unique in its capacity to physically intervene in these inter-
relationships. If architecture can be narrated in terms of
its mediating role between man and nature, what are the
specific forms this mediation took in different historical
periods? What notions of man and nature underlay this
mediation? And how, in turn, has this mediation rede-
fined both man and nature reciprocally? This interroga-
tion lies at the heart of the debates over humanism and
posthumanism, or in other words, the question of human
agency in the age of the Anthropocene. The visualiza-
tion techniques — drawings and diagrams — employed
in architectural design can offer a lens through which
to probe the epistemological frameworks at work in the
construction of built environments, and their respective
human subjects, in various historical moments and at dif-
ferent scales.
In the modern Western imagination, as exemplified
in Marc-Antoine Laugier’s ‘Primitive Hut’, architecture’s
basic function is to provide shelter from the elements.
First, this foundational hypothesis calls for a comparative
analysis of the different ‘sheltering’ functions architecture
provided in various historical moments and in differ-
ent regions, Western and non-Western. Such an analysis
will include questions about the identity of the subjects
or things in need of (or having the right to) shelter;
what or whom they need sheltering from; and to what
ends. Second, the preventive charge of the term ‘shelter’
obscures architecture’s role in the conquest of nature
via the exploitation of its resources. In Laugier’s tale, the
environment is a hazard (sun and storms) that humans
need protecting from and that at the same time provides
the resources (trees) to do so. It is the act of architectural
design that defines one as a problem and the other as the
solution. I therefore suggest that in order to fully account
for architecture’s mediating role in the construction of
the environment — i.e., its role in defining natural ele-
ments as hazards or resources — we need to study it as a
political-aesthetic apparatus for the identification, order-
ing, and management of resources.
Building the Ineable: Human-ness and the
Reication of Environmentality
Ginger Nolan
University of Southern California, USA
vgnolan@usc.edu
Alla Vronskaya
Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
avronskaya@iit.edu
Seemingly apparent and palpable, the category of the envi-
ronment is nevertheless elusive. While the environment
could be said to comprise everything under the sun, it does
not exist as a precise, definable object of enquiry delimited
by either spatial or categorical boundaries. Although the
environment has long been invoked in the interests of archi-
tecture’s own disciplinary self-legitimization, most notably
in discourses of climate and sustainability, what remains
less examined is how architecture has mediated between
the omnipresence and non-existence of the environment.
In translating abstractions into built form, architecture per-
forms the work of reification. It thus works toward concre-
tizing and circumscribing a complexity — the environment
— that would otherwise remain ineffable. It does so through
recourse to another ineffable complexity: ‘the human’.
The epistemic emergence of environmentality — that
is, the emergence of the environment as a rubric through
which the world is comprehended — is inseparable from
the emergence of humanness (and vice versa). Both derive
largely from Darwinist discourse, which postulates that bio-
logical species evolve in response to their natural milieu.
As humanity was reconceptualized as a species within the
animal kingdom, the question arose: What sort of environ-
ment would best suit particular social groups, races, and
genders of human beings, encouraging their optimal per-
formance, survival, and even evolution? The environment
was thus conceived as a climatic, biological, psychological,
and perceptory milieu, whether at the scale of natural eco-
systems or at the scale of such man-made environments as
architectural enclosures, laboratories, and the virtual spaces
of audio-visual media. Reciprocally, the human appeared as
the semiotic and psychological subject requiring the exist-
ence of such a thing as the environment. The entwined con-
structs of the human and the environment thus appeared at
the nexus of scientific objectivity and cognitive subjectivity.
For much of the 20th century, architects’ interest in the
environment was directed not so much toward analyzing
the environment per se, but rather toward defining the
human: its ambit, biological structures, proclivities, cogni-
tive aptitudes, and how these could be better governed by
environmental design. An assessment of this history helps
not only to understand the heuristics used by architecture
in reifying the environment, but also to expose the epis-
temic underpinnings tacitly supporting ‘the environment’
that are constantly produced by architecture and archi-
tectural discourse. It was through the alembic of architec-
tural thought that the environment could be distilled into
something recognizable as the human, while the human
could be rendered as environmental.
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the EnvironmentArt. 20, page 10 of 13
IV. Architectural Epistemologies of Environment
The Environment Is Social, Is Political: About Core
Houses and Envirotechnical Regimes
Sophie Hochhäusl
University of Pennsylvania, USA
hochhaus@design.upenn.edu
In his 1930 essay ‘Was ist Modern?’ the Austrian designer
Josef Frank posited that modern life was characterized
by diversity, heterogeneity, and above all change over
time, and that architecture, too, had to account for these
qualities (1930: 133–35). In the 1920s, in a related effort
to plan for change, a group of architects set out to design
modern houses that would grow into their surroundings
over the years. The proposed architecture aimed at adapt-
ing human habitation to the environment, and designers
referred to their ideas as core houses, growing houses, or
even natural architecture.
I came to the study of the environment through these
architectural projects and, later, through the texts of
scholars in science and technology studies (STS). While
these two fields of enquiry seem to be distinct, they also
share important concerns and insights that are relevant to
the present discussion on the environment. Among major
concepts in contemporary STS scholarship, the idea of
envirotechnical landscapes seems critical for architectural
discourse, since it theorizes designers’ long-held fascina-
tion with ‘physical hybrids of ecological and technological
systems’ (Pritchard 2010: 13). Highlighting the fact that
such landscapes are socially constructed and therefore
political, STS scholar Sara Pritchard reminds us that enviro-
technical regimes — bureaucratic and civic forms of power
— administer, alter, and potentially resist the expansion
and shaping of envirotechnical landscapes.
As architectural historians turn to the environment,
this concept of envirotechnical regimes is critical, so as
not to overlook the exclusionary and racialized histories
that underpin some of the writings and projects of 20th-
century architects about discussions of land, landscape,
and particularly the ground. While the idea of construct-
ing homes as core houses, for example, allowed residents
to build homes in phases over time, thus expanding the
scope of their material and economic possibilities, natural
architecture — while based on a similar premise — aimed
at connecting inhabitants through common agricultural
labour to the ground. While the former tried to account
for change and multiplicity in modern life, the latter,
diametrically opposed to it, advanced racialized bio-
logical narratives through the construction of housing
landscapes.
In embracing ‘environment’ as a perspective, there-
fore, more histories that elucidate regimes of power are
needed. Such an endeavour would necessitate taking to
heart the STS mandate of further uncovering how social
inequalities are historically produced through the con-
struction of buildings, cities, and landscapes. It might
imply a political re-interrogation of our discipline’s
tropes and terms, allowing us to address unresolved
themes, such as processes of marginalization and how
they become material through design and construction.
But it could also shed light on more hopeful narratives,
such as those envisioned by Frank, that illuminate the
heterogeneous multiplicities and agencies that also
characterize modernity.
Environment and Modernization under State Socialism
Andres Kurg
Estonian Academy of Arts, EE
andres.kurg@artun.ee
The recent study of the history and culture of the late
Soviet period has been characterized by a move away from
the previously perceived exceptionality of the communist
bloc towards both analyzing the connections between
the Cold War adversaries and viewing the Soviet Union as
equally ‘complicit’ in the modernization processes of the
post-war decades. Environment is one of the terms that
allows us to study the unfolding of these modernization
processes in a more nuanced way, against the previously
dominant approach, while at the same time acting as a
historical and theoretical concept.
Figure 4: ‘The New Surrounding Environment’. Cover of
L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui/Sovremennaya Arhitektura,
of 1969, when the French journal was published in both
French and Russian.
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the Environment Art. 20, page 11 of 13
From a historical perspective, we can follow the ways in
which the professional and public discourse about envi-
ronment became ‘visible’ in the Soviet Union from the
1960s onward.
In architecture, the parallel French and Russian edition
of l’Architecture d’aujourd’hui/Sovremennaya arhitektura
devoted its 1969 issue to the ‘New Environment’. In strik-
ing photographs, the issue demonstrated vast changes
modernization had left on the landscape; it thus intro-
duced environment’s relevance for predominantly object-
centred architectural discourse. Official Soviet doctrine,
however, saw these criticisms as the work of pessimistic
bourgeois theorists who denied socialist control over all
spheres of life, including the biosphere, which involved
the adaptation of nature to satisfy man’s needs. In other
fields, discourse about the environment was fuelled
by translations of critical Western authors, such as the
1974 translation of The Closing Circle: Nature, Man and
Technology, by Barry Commoner. This book introduced
the concept of the ecosphere to the Soviet public and
analyzed the environment as a system where ‘everything
is connected to everything else’, which consequently
spurred active polemics in environmental psychology
(Commoner 1974). According to the Soviet view, the task
of architecture and design was to provide a ‘harmonious
objective world’, leading to the formation of the ‘objective
environment in the interests of the creative needs of the
human being’ (RGAE f. 9480/9/2026). The official answer
to environmental deterioration thus lay in comprehensive
planning, in controlling not only production, but also
consumption and human needs.
New research on the theories of the environment in
the Soviet context could, however, attempt a leap beyond
the analysis of the official rhetoric or of the transfer from
West to East. Taking such an approach would be a way of
accounting for the different global modernization pro-
cesses in the socialist bloc. These differences were medi-
ated, among other things, by the collective ownership of
land and organization of production, collective and state
farming, the particular version of the consumer society —
the ‘underproduction of use-value’, to use the words of
Ernest Mandel (Mandel 1962) — and the domination of
the military-industrial complex. Critical histories of this
kind, which go beyond the exoticization of the socialist
environment as either shabby or cool, or beyond declara-
tions of this environment’s abnormality or extraordinari-
ness, would be highly welcome.
Suspending Urgency
Sabine von Fischer
ETH Zurich, CH
svfischer@arch-agent.org
With green policy, energy research, and sustainable design
topping the charts of funded research in architecture and
engineering, the urgency of environmental issues is hardly
in question. For architectural historians, the challenge
reaches further than green-washing formerly environmen-
tally oblivious narratives. Designating the environment as
an object of study does not mean that we must react to
the eco-frenzy of the present. On the contrary, it allows us
to slow down. If we conceive of architectural history as a
history of the built environment (rather than as just a his-
tory of buildings as objects), then we can more easily see
that we must look deeper, rather than plunging in to fran-
tic problem-solving at the risk of causing new problems. ‘Il
est urgent d’attendre’ — it is urgent to wait — a Red Cross
associate with decades of experience in disaster relief told
me in 2005, when teaching our group of potential future
water and sanitation engineers.
Not every historian’s life, however, was timed for wait-
ing. The most tragic fate in this sense afflicted Reyner
Banham, who in 1984 revised and amended his 1969 The
Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. After the oil
crisis of the 1970s, he anticipated that his new thirteenth
chapter on passive solar gain would rescue his technologi-
cally driven logic and bring it into a third industrial age. In
his revised portrayal of the well-tempered environment,
solar energy would eventually replace fossil fuels, the
abundance of which he previously had taken for granted.
This attempt to revise his perception of modern architec-
ture as based on the management, and to a lesser degree
the consumption, of energy coincided in the 1970s with
the growth in society of an environmental conscience.
Had he lived and waited until the 1990s, he could have
written a post-oil-crisis narrative of solar gain that would
not only incorporate the window as a solar device but
would also involve other procedures and processes in
society at large. Despite his hapless timing, Banham nev-
ertheless provides a role model for any historian making
an effort to formulate possible solutions because of his
enthusiasm for new technologies and, even more impor-
tantly, by his engagement with the everyday world.
Methodologically, disaster relief and architectural his-
tory share the challenge of operating on varying scales.
Large problems are tackled with small tools: pipes, tents,
and water tanks that need to be installed; essays and ideas
with words and images that need to be contextualized.
Both fields are confronted with vast questions of long-last-
ing consequence, while the range of momentary action
is limited. Both must go beyond formal appearances and
address real problems in terms of processes, systems, and
scenarios. This involves methods other than the mono-
graphic study of distinct buildings — methods that can
encompass larger geographic regions and timeframes.
The specificity of our present-day engagement with the
environment seems to lie in the unprecedented tensions
of scale. In the midst of resolutions to act, we can remind
scholars of the urgent need to wait.
Notes
1 The etymological and conceptual origins of the term
‘Anthropocene’ remain a matter of dispute. Neverthe-
less, the Dutch atmospheric scientist Paul J. Crutzen,
alongside biologist Eugene F. Stoermer, is usually cred-
ited with having formally coined the term, despite him-
self pointing to a longer history of ideas that stretches
Hochhäusl et al: Architecture and the EnvironmentArt. 20, page 12 of 13
back to the late 19th century, e.g., to Italian geologist
Antonio Stoppani’s ‘anthropozoic era’ (Crutzen 2002:
23). While scientific approaches continue to domi-
nate discourse on the Anthropocene, there has been
increasing engagement with the concept beyond the
scientific community, and within the arts and humani-
ties in particular (Davies & Turpin 2014; Turpin 2014).
Not only has the term come under scrutiny from
contemporary theorists such as Donna Haraway, for
whom the concept of ‘Anthropos’ as chief agent is
both inappropriate, due to its universalizing tendency,
and unhelpful for conceiving ways out of the current
predicament. Instead, she and others advocate rigor-
ous, critical, as well as creative speculative modes of
thinking beyond the traditional humanist paradigm
to account for complex multi-species and non-human
entanglements (Haraway 2016; Stengers 2015). There
have also been calls for appropriating the term as a
common, transdisciplinary ‘project’ that might chal-
lenge us to think and act differently in the world, as
for example in ‘The Anthropocene Project’ at Berlin’s
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, initiated in 2013 (Renn &
Scherer 2015).
2 The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined in the late
1980s by the American critical race scholar and activist
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (Crenshaw 1989).
3 It is important here to mention the many other ini-
tiatives that have emerged in recent years, parallel
and in relation to our own: Jennifer Ferng organized
‘Mining the Environment: History and Aftermath’ for
the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and
New Zealand (SAHANZ) in 2016, and, together with
Lauren Jacobi, is co-chair of the forthcoming ses-
sion ‘Land, Air, Sea: Environment in the Early Mod-
ern Period’ at the Annual Meeting of the Society of
Architectural Historians in 2019. In 2017, Maroš Krivý
organized the symposium ‘Architectures, Natures and
Data: The Politics of Environments’ at the Estonian
Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Daniel Barber conducts
an ongoing project called ‘Environmental Histories
of Architecture’, and he organized the symposium
‘Structural Instabilities’ at the University of Penn-
sylvania in 2018. And Kim Förster is curator of the
Multidisciplinary Research Project ‘Architecture
and/for the Environment’, funded by The Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation at the Canadian Centre for
Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, 2017–2019, to which
Daniel Barber, Aleksandr Bierig, and Isabelle Doucet
have contributed, among others.
Acknowledgements
These Field Notes have been initiated, edited, and intro-
duced by Sophie Hochhäusl and Torsten Lange. We thank
all the contributing authors of this article for their work
and their patience throughout the entire production
process.
Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
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