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—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.