Meat and dairy products are ubiquitous ingredients in the globe’s diet. However, the buildings that transform living beings into commodities are usually hidden from the public eye. The architecture of factory farming may seem anonymous and banal, and yet it is made possible by sophisticated technologies and practices of biosecurity. How was the design of intensive animal farming promoted and applied to a great number of species throughout the twentieth century? Sofia Nannini investigates the history of this invisible architecture, which has sustained the great acceleration of our species in the last two centuries and has imposed our dominion on billions of non-humans.

Sofia Nannini is an architectural historian who specializes in the relationship between building materials, society, and culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bologna. She is author of Icelandic Farmhouses: Identity, Landscape and Construction (1790-1945) (Firenze University Press, 2023) and of The Icelandic Concrete Saga (JOVIS Verlag, to be published in 2024).