Field Notes: Architecture and the Environment (original) (raw)
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Architecture and the Environment
Architectural Histories, 2018
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 field. The short essays explore specific '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.
Environmental Histories of Architecture
Environmental Histories of Architecture, 2022
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.
Contemporary Perspectives on Environmental Histories of Architecture
Over the last two centuries, the way architecture related to the environment has drastically changed regarding how nature, or the natural world has been not only imagined by humans, but used and abused. This elective will focus on the origin of environmental issues, both the shiny utopias and the dark sides, through a transdisciplinary perspective, on issues which have emerged since industrialization and colonialism and are currently becoming problematic. In times of climate change and global heating, architecture's historical relationship to the environment, in all its complexities and contradictions, will be seen as contested and conflictual, with the environment not only being a passive backdrop, but an actor in its own right. Starting from the hypothesis that architecture and related disciplines and professions, by creating environments, extracting knowledge from and exerting power upon nature, the course will highlight certain episodes, beginnings and ends, also ruptures, when architecture's relation to the environment has been transformed, having become seen as part of the problem, yet presenting itself as contributing to a solution, too.
Undisciplined Knowing: Writing Architectural History through the Environment
Environmental Histories of Architecture, ed. Kim Förster (Montréal: CCA, 2022), 2022
Kim Förster surveys and unfolds three key issues for the architectural humanities: energy and climate; materials and toxicity; and more-than-human and entangled histories. Such narratives of the environment have thus far only played a minor role in architecture and architectural histories, which are still strongly influenced by nineteenthand twentieth-century notions of innovation, growth, and progress. But beyond mourning or garnering hope in the face of current climate and biodiversity crises, it will be crucial in the years ahead for architecture to productively cope with loss and actively approach a building transition. Taking environment as both a research subject and a category of analysis, this concluding chapter frames Environmental Histories of Architecture by sketching prospects for future research and pointing to new perspectives on social relations to nature.
Architectural Theories of the Environment: Posthuman Territory
Construction Management and Economics, 2013
As architects and designers, we struggle to reconcile ever increasing environmental, humanitarian, and technological demands placed on our projects. Our new geological era, the Anthropocene, marks humans as the largest environmental force on the planet and suggests that conventional anthropocentric approaches to design must accommodate a more complex understanding of the interrelationship between architecture and environment Here, for the first time, editor Ariane Lourie Harrison collects the essays of architects, theorists, and sustainable designers that together provide a framework for a posthuman understanding of the design environment. An introductory essay defines the key terms, concepts, and precedents for a posthuman approach to architecture, and nine fully illustrated case studies of buildings from around the globe demonstrate how issues raised in posthuman theory provide rich terrain for contemporary architecture, making theory concrete. By assembling a range of voices across different fields, from urban geography to critical theory to design practitioners, this anthology offers a resource for design professionals, educators, and students seeking to grapple the ecological mandate of our current period.
2019
Conservation and energy retrofit issues in the second half of the 20th century architectural heritage. Responsible approach based on the analysis of the relationship between architectural language and technology. Attention to detail, materials, and original construction techniques may lead to design proposals which attempt to respect the intentions of its authors, preserving the features which are holders of cultural values. Numerous architectural works from the second half of the 20th century, having a recognized cultural value, turn out to be quite problematic when observed in the scope of today’s unavoidable principle of environmental responsibility. Though representing an energy “issue”, they are at the same time a “high-level witness” in the context of architecture, whose original form of expression, language, and perception must be preserved as intact as possible. This paper critically presents three interventions on architectures in Turin by Domenico Morelli that allow us to ...
Sustainability and The Architectural History Survey
Architecture and urbanism have engaged sustainability as an action-oriented objective through the practice of green design and sustainable urbanism, which have several iterations. Architectural history has yet to produce a significant body of work in response to environmental discourses that are currently dominated by sustainability. The architectural history survey – when taught from an environmental history perspective – can serve the purpose of understanding not just sustainability, but the relationship of architecture and urbanism to the environment through history. I address the question, how can sustainability, a 1980s paradigm, be addressed in the teaching of the architectural history survey that ranges from prehistory to contemporary times? Sustainability is a dominant contemporary paradigm of environmentalism produced through economic development discourses of environmental management. I argue that the architectural history survey can provide opportunities to engage environmental histories in unearthing and disseminating ecological histories of architecture and urbanism. The architectural history survey – when taught from an environmental history perspective – can serve the purpose of understanding the environmental discourses that have informed sustainability historically, across different times and cultures. I propose that teaching architectural history within the larger field of environmental history is one way through which sustainability, as an environmental management paradigm, can be grasped, defined, and critiqued. Environmental history is one of the fastest growing fields of history, and is not a subdiscipline of history but a metadiscipline, given its scope and inclusivity. Writing architectural histories within the metadiscipline of environmental history is emerging as a new way of producing architectural histories. The architectural history survey taught from an environmental history perspective can contribute to an understanding of fundamental concepts about architecture and cities within the environmental discourse and therefore position the idea of sustainability historically.
Not Out of the Woods: Preserving the Human in Environmental Architecture
Environmental Values, 2005
The North American environmental movement has historically sought to redress the depletion and degradation of natural resources that has been the legacy of the industrial revolution. Predominant in this approach has been the preservation of wilderness, conservation of species biodiversity and the restoration of natural ecosystems. While the results of such activity have often been commendable, several scholars have pointed out that the environmental movement has inherited an unfortunate bias against urban environments, and consequently, a blind spot to ways in which densely populated built spaces can serve to enhance rather than degrade efforts to achieve sustainability. After exploring this concern we argue that environmental architecture can serve as a counterbalance to this bias, focused, as it is, on the ways in which the construction and organisation of built spaces for humans can help or hinder the pursuit of environmental priorities. But if environmental architecture is to take this role then it must be understood in a broader context, one which does not exclude other moral, political and aesthetic values in the production of human environments. We will highlight several examples of how environmental architecture has combined success and failure at taking a broader view of environmental questions, with a specific focus on one green skyscraper that may be good for the natural environment but not necessarily for the human environment of the city.