Environmental Histories of Architecture
Editor Kim FörsterManaging Editor Claire Lubell
Copy Editors Ruth Jones, Lucas Freeman
Contributors Aleksandr Bierig, Nerea Calvillo, Daniel Barber, Kiel Moe, Jiat-Hwee Chang, Hannah le Roux, Isabelle Doucet, Paulo Tavares, Kim Förster
Designer Tessier A
Programming Rosen Tomov
Rights and Reproductions Stéphane Aleixandre
Production Management Anaïs Andraud
Common Access Digital Objects
Common Access Digital Objects
Environmental Histories of Architecture
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Aleksandr Bierig, “Building on Ghost Acres: The London Coal Exchange, circa 1849”
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Nerea Calvillo, “Toxic Nature: Toward a Queer Theory of Pollution”
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Daniel Barber, “Modes of Concealment: Architecture, Oil, and Historical Method”
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Kiel Moe, “The Equipmental Tradition: Architecture’s Environmental Pedagogies”
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Jiat-Hwee Chang, “The Air-Conditioning Complex: Histories and Futures of Hybridization in Asia”
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Hannah le Roux, “Circulating Asbestos: The International AC Review, 1956–1985”
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Isabelle Doucet, “Interspecies Encounters: Design (Hi)stories, Practices of Care, and Challenges”
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Paulo Tavares, “Architectural Botany: A Conversation with William Balée on Constructed Forests”
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Kim Förster, “Undisciplined Knowing: Writing Architectural History through the Environment”
Aleksandr Bierig, “Building on Ghost Acres: The London Coal Exchange, circa 1849” 
Environmental Histories of Architecture: An Introduction by Kim FörsterNote: This project will be released in chapters starting in October, 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 concept of the environment—has yet to be reconsidered in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions. The pragmatic, 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 beyond 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 environment, complicate understandings of architecture and history, and challenge assumptions of modernization and path dependency. In these ways, as highlighted in the concluding essay, the publication suggests sustainable trajectories for architectural thought and action that can overcome dominant narratives of inevitability and apocalypse.
These essays were produced as part of Architecture and/for the Environment, the third research project (2017–2019) of the Multidisciplinary Research Program, organized by the CCA with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project—developed by Kim Förster (CCA Associate Director, Research, 2016–2018) with advisors Daniel Abramson, David Gissen, and Imre Szeman—examined unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable, contradictions and ambiguities in architecture’s environmental history.
