TY - JOUR
T1 - Architecture and the Environment
AU - Hochhäusl, Sophie
AU - Lange, Torsten
N1 - Funding Information:
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). 2The 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.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s). All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.5334/ah.259
DO - 10.5334/ah.259
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85100209549
SN - 2050-5833
VL - 6
SP - 1
EP - 13
JO - Architectural Histories
JF - Architectural Histories
IS - 1
ER -