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.

This publication is released in chapters starting October 2022.

Click here to download chapters in PDF or ePub format.

Click here to read the introduction by Kim Förster.

With Environmental Histories of Architecture, the CCA launches an open-access publishing model to circulate the ideas generated through its research programs. These essays were produced as part of Architecture and/for the Environment, the third 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.

Editor: Kim Förster
Managing Editor: Claire Lubell
Copyeditors: Ruth Jones, Lucas Freeman
Contributors (in publication order): Aleksandr Bierig, Nerea Calvillo, Daniel Barber, Kiel Moe, Jiat-Hwee Chang, Hannah le Roux, Isabelle Doucet, Paulo Tavares, Kim Förster
Graphic Design: Tessier A
Programming: Rosen Tomov

Published by the CCA and distributed open access by Library Stack.
This publication is made available according to the terms of the license CC BY-NC-ND.