Architectural History and the Environmental Humanities: A Call for an Expanded Approach
In fall 2021 I was invited to teach a new course for the Environmental Studies program at Holy Cross called “Introduction to the Environmental Humanities.” Although I had already taught a number of courses cross-listed with Environmental Studies, as a scholar of early modern architectural and urban history, proposing a brand-new course to inaugurate the study of the Environmental Humanities felt like something of a stretch. And yet, as I came to realize, my work has multiple connections to environmental questions, both through my professional background in architecture as well as my study of architectural preservation in early modern Rome. Moreover, I was fortunate to have attended a remarkable NEH City-Nature seminar in 2017 organized by urban landscape historian Thaïsa Way, urban ecologist Ken Yocom, and literary scholar Richard Watts at the University of Washington that provided an invaluable introduction to key issues.[1]
When I agreed to contribute a course, I knew this would be a chance to develop an area that I found interesting, but I had no idea about the many other benefits it would bring in its train. I not only rediscovered the pleasure of interdisciplinary work and collaborative scholarship but also gained new perspectives on my own field, in particular related to architecture and issues of place. Perhaps most importantly, it offered an opportunity to explore difficult questions that define some of the most urgent ecological and social challenges our society faces today.
What is the study of the Environmental Humanities? Environmental Studies programs have long attracted the attention of students and scholars who want to better understand the environment that we inhabit today and to improve the environment in the future. Although traditionally based in the natural sciences, in recent years there has been growing attention to the ways that humanist areas enhance our understanding of our relationship with the natural world. The field of the Environmental Humanities answers this call: while acknowledging that environmental issues requires scientific analysis, the study of the environment cannot be separated from basic human experiences and cultural interpretations. For architectural scholars, the Environmental Humanities also connects with an established tradition of studying architecture in terms of environmental design. Above all, Environmental Humanities draws critical attention to the central importance of social justice concerns, exploring the political and often problematic implications of environmental issues for society. The emergence of the Environmental Humanities shows how the integration of humanist modes of thought with environmental problems can generate a more sophisticated and conceptually sensitive approach to these vital concerns.
“The stories that cultures tell themselves about their beginnings also affect the ways they think about and interact with the environment as they transform it to meet their goals.”
While the study of the Environmental Humanities has been largely driven by scholars in fields such as literature, political science, sociology, and anthropology, my experience demonstrated that the study of the built environment—and in particular, the study of architectural and urban history—offers a unique vantage point into environmental problems. While the study of architectural history draws connections to multiple disciplines, the study of the history of the built environment as a whole—from the consideration of specific building details to the development of the urban realm over time—also intersects with key questions of environmental change and social justice raised by the most critical challenges of our contemporary moment, including Global Climate Strike and Black Lives Matter. The Environmental Humanities urges us to foreground connections with these pressing social and political issues.
The Environmental Humanities course that I developed focused on three key themes: 1) foundational narratives; 2) nature and the city; 3) social and environmental justice. Our exploration of these different areas not only opened up significant points of connection with these larger discourses but offered compelling new and alternative insights into the study of the history of architecture and urbanism as practices tied to place.
The discussion of foundational narratives in the class explored how the stories that cultures tell themselves about their beginnings also affect the ways they think about and interact with the environment as they transform it to meet their goals. For example, the story of Genesis in the Old Testament has established familiar and enduring conceptions of nature for the western world: from God’s awarding Adam and Eve dominion over creation, to the establishment of the Garden of Eden, to the narrative of Noah’s rescue of the animals from the Flood. Such narratives however can be developed by comparing them to other foundational narratives. Alongside Genesis, we also read Robin Kimmerer’s account of Turtle Island, the foundational narrative of the indigenous people of the Potawatomi Nation, an Algonquian-speaking Eastern Woodlands tribe. The Turtle Island narrative offers a striking contrast with various aspects of Genesis: for example, it centers not on the creation of Adam but on the figure of Skywoman, and it is not humans who rescue the animals, but rather the animals who rescue Skywoman, thus making it possible to establish human life in the world. Rather than establishing human dominion over nature, this narrative presents humans as indebted to non-human nature for their existence. Such foundational narratives then inform the ways that future generations understand and relate to their environments.
Comparing how these different foundational stories negotiated nature opened up critical questions for the history of architecture and urbanism, such as the way that various cultures use buildings to transform the world, and thus to create place. Human structures are never placeless—they always emerge from and interact with the natural environment. Given this, what specific attitudes about the natural world can be gleaned through the study of how different people use materials and the landscape to create the built environment? How do these foundational narratives inform attitudes toward gender and other identities, and how are these attitudes then rendered permanent by building? As the Turtle Island narrative suggests, the investigation of the human relationship to nature also requires reflecting upon the non-human world more broadly: for example, how do our buildings communicate our understanding of the animal kingdom? Might the built environment offer an opportunity to interrogate the more-than-human? Architectural historians commonly examine spiritual practices and holy texts as sources that shape religious buildings. But we can do still more by considering how these same built environments convey deep-seated cultural ideas about the different facets of the natural world, and how structural forms perpetuate these beliefs over time.
Our second topic, focused on the city-nature binary, drew upon a rapidly growing body of rich and provocative scholarship, including work on urban political ecology and the intersection of landscape and infrastructure. We began by exploring alternative ways of understanding the conventional city-nature binary that still informs many of our beliefs and expectations in the western world. By exploring these questions in terms of the history of the built environment, and challenging the commonplace idea that the urban built environment is inherently “unnatural,” we not only furthered our examination of the cultural origins of these beliefs, but we also came to more fully understand how definitions of the city and that of nature are never mutually exclusive. On the contrary, both of these terms—nature and city—are dependent on one another as complex, fluid concepts that assume different values and significances in different places and at different times. Given the rapid urbanization of the globe, where the majority of the human population is now concentrated in steadily expanding urban centers, it is clear that it is ever more critical for us to acquire a better understanding of the way that nature is present and has agency in urban environments.
As Thaïsa Way and I argue in our introduction to the JSAH roundtable “Rethinking the Urban Landscape” (forthcoming September 2022), thinking about nature and the city help us to rethink the ways we study architectural and urban history as practices of place. Architectural historians still tend to think about buildings as isolated objects, skimming over the study of the surrounding landscape in a way that implies a building could be sited anywhere. However, the study of nature and the city emphasizes that buildings engage a complex dialogue with the non-built environment, and this in turn encourages us to think about buildings as parts of more extensive “urban landscapes.” Such “urban landscapes” represent a vibrant, dynamic, and interconnected network of human and more-than-human interventions that are always in the process of becoming. Historical evidence provides ample opportunity to investigate how different cultures have conceived of this complex relationship between the built environment and the natural world at different times, and this in turn encourages us to develop a broader and more nuanced way of thinking about our situation and position as inhabitants of an urbanizing world.
“Many architectural historians have taken steps to … address global materials. And yet in practice it often means that we simply incorporate examples of non-western architecture into our existing frameworks.”
Our third topic addressed social and environmental justice, the final and most important part of our course. Our discussion of foundational narratives included thinking about the distinctive notions of wilderness that emerged in the United States. As we read an excerpt from Roderick Nash’s landmark book, Wilderness and the American Mind, we found that this in turn led directly into a discussion of environmental justice. We began to understand how the distinctively American philosophy of wilderness that took form in the years following the closing of the frontier in the United States exalted one particular (and perhaps even “unnatural”) form of nature, the spectacular landscapes preserved by the US National Park system, while in turn stigmatizing and devaluing another kind of nature, the uncelebrated presence of nature that subsisted in poor inner-city environments. Thus, we could begin to re-imagine the celebration of the American wilderness as not only reinforcing the traditional city-nature binary but also contributing to further social polarization. By the same token, this argument, with its identification of different kinds of nature—the idealized nature preserved in the national parks, versus the unidealized nature that flourished in low-income urban areas—highlighted how the use of nature can be used to benefit or harm different communities, such as the disposal of toxic waste in primarily African-American communities. The reordering of the environment in this way, with the creation of an idealized nature for powerful elites while forcing undesirable byproducts onto those who are powerless, is not only inherently unjust but also serves to strengthen and sharpen prejudice and social division. By studying nature and the city, these lessons took on new and powerful resonance with students, in ways that the narratives as isolated stories might not.
As we worked through these problems together, students learned how the environmental justice movement directly intersects with the history of architecture and urbanism. Architecture itself is a reordering of the environment to suit the social and political objectives of specific interested individuals and communities—the very act of building a simple wall on the land creates a spatial hierarchy that dictates human opportunities and behaviors. Throughout history, humans have used buildings to reorder the environment and to translate social values and hierarchies into physical and irrefutable form as they transform the environment to create place. In my latest book I examined the creation of the Ghetto in Renaissance Venice: what does it mean to consider this episode in terms of environmental justice? The construction of the Ghetto represented a reordering of the environment that both limited freedoms and sharpened social distinctions: it marked the Jews as foreigners who did not deserve the same natural benefits and inalienable birthrights (the freedom of movement, for example) that belonged to Venetians outside the Ghetto. My book explored the curious impact of this process upon the human sensory apparatus, where the construction of the built environment also constructed of human sensory understandings. For example, the Jews came to identify the distinctive sounds and smells of the Ghetto—the same sensory stimuli that outsiders regarded as most alien—as defining their identity. The cramped urban environment of the Ghetto thus also worked to “naturalize” the artificial social construction imposed upon the Jews.
This summer I visited Simone Leigh’s installation, Sovereignty, at the Venice Biennale, a wonderful and arresting work that suggests how the prompt of the Environmental Humanities might invite us to write a new history of architecture (Figures 1-6). Although primarily a sculptor, Leigh’s intervention at the Biennale involves a strategic architectural transformation of the pavilion itself, wrapping the original neoclassical building with thatch roofing supported by wooden piers that evoke the design of a West African palace. Leigh’s architectural intervention provides a fascinating twist upon history, drawing parallels with the reconstruction of indigenous buildings from the French colonial empire for the landmark 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. These African palaces, with their planar surfaces suspended above a grid of regular piers, had a powerful impact upon modernist architects such as Le Corbusier who attended the exposition, and who drew upon these models to shape a new vision of modern architecture.
Figure 1. Simone Leigh, Façade (thatch, steel, wood), 2022. U.S. Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by author.
Figure 2. Simone Leigh, Façade, 2022, exterior detail. U.S. Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by author.
Figure 3. Simone Leigh, Façade, 2022, exterior detail. U.S. Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by author.
Figure 4. Simone Leigh, Façade, 2022, supporting structural framework. U.S. Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by author.
Figure 5. Simone Leigh, Satellite (bronze), 2022. Forecourt of U.S. Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by author.
Figure 6. Simone Leigh, Sentinel (bronze), 2022. Interior rotunda of U.S. Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by author.
Leigh’s intervention makes a delicate but also incisive commentary upon this characteristic process of architectural borrowing. As visitors approach the structure, its brick walls and classicizing decorative profiles come into view behind the West African façade, exposing the original United States pavilion building designed to emulate a classic American landmark, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Monticello’s design drew in turn upon the work of the prominent Venetian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. By allowing for the simultaneous presence of West African palaces, Monticello, and Palladio’s buildings, each profoundly rooted in specific sites, Leigh reveals the history of architecture and its unique position in the landscape to be a complex palimpsest of ideas, values, and realities. Her skillful architectural composition highlights unexpected points of intersection and overlap, revealing African history, heritage, and landscape to be inextricably embedded within both classical and modernist European architectural traditions.
In “Architectural History and Architectural Humanities,” Dianne Harris notes the need for architectural historians to find ways to communicate with broader audiences. As Harris notes, we encounter buildings every day, and thus many people find the study of the built environment of innate interest. However, our emphasis on specialization means that even historians, our closest academic colleagues, often have a strangely outdated understanding of the field of architectural history. Given that the architectural history survey course provides one of the most fundamental modes by which we communicate with general audiences, many architectural historians have taken steps to redesign such courses to address global materials. And yet, while this is a highly commendable venture, in practice it often means that we simply incorporate examples of non-western architecture into our existing frameworks, thus continuing to isolate buildings from their environments. The structure of the narrative remains unchanged as we present architectural history in its most traditional guise—a linear sequence of building traditions that unfolds over time but that is severed from place and site.
Here we might consider how Leigh’s subtle design for the United States pavilion, with its emphasis not on linear sequence but on the overlapping and merging and intersection of different worlds and environments converging at a single site, provides an inspiring model for architectural historians. Her magical evocation invites us to consider how the themes of the Environmental Humanities, including but not limited to foundational narratives, city-nature dialogue, and issues of social and environmental justice, could enrich and expand our approach. Certainly, as we seek to rewrite the history of architecture from a global perspective, we need to do more than simply perpetuate existing modes of thought. On the contrary, we need to aim for a greater intellectual and structural reorganization that aspires to the narrative richness and complexity of Leigh’s installation. Rethinking the history of architecture along the lines of the multivalent themes raised by the Environmental Humanities offers one way for us to move toward this goal.
Notes
[1] Thanks to the session organizers, presenters, and participants for their inspiring contributions that stimulated so many new and exciting ideas.
Citation
David Karmon, “Architectural History and the Environmental Humanities: A Call for an Expanded Approach,” PLATFORM, August 8, 2022.
