abstracts

ENVIRONMENTS

“Designing with Nature: An Environmental Historian’s Perspective”
Michael J. Rawson

What does it mean to “design with nature?” Architectural historians might look for answers in the design principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement, or the writings of Ian McHarg, or the requirements for LEED certification, each of which would suggest a different answer. Environmental historians, however, would set the question in a broader context and argue that we are always designing with nature, even when we think that we are not. But if we are always designing with nature, whose nature are we designing with? The answer to that question is deeply rooted in the past and important to understanding the intersection of environment and design today.

“Insulating Modernism”
Kiel Moe

This talk articulates the historical—and often paradoxical—development of modern insulation practices. My primary claim is that no other concept has persistently distorted our understanding of energy and environment more than the seeming innocent idea of insula—to isolate, set in a detached condition—the Latin etymological root of insulation. While the concept of isolation is very clear, it is thermodynamically impossible in the context of buildings. Buildings, in the strictest thermodynamic terms, are non-isolated energy systems. This historical preoccupation with isolation is particularly revealing in the context of North America as it explains how and why a steady-state understanding of heat transfer— as exemplified in the now ubiquitous R-value concept—could serve as a proxy for the actual, transient heat transfer behavior of buildings. The focus on isolation and autarky persists—largely unquestioned—into the twenty-first century in context focused, ironically, on building performance and sustainability. This talk uses the scientific, material, and design history of insulation practices to discuss the respective roles of isolated and non-isolated perspectives on energy in architecture.

“Land by Proclamation”
Catherine Ingraham

I will talk about some of my recent work on property and architecture, focusing on various terms that seem self-explanatory on the surface and have been much discussed in architecture, landscape architecture, and environmental history: land, territory, property, ground, site, and space. I have been trying to give more precision to the simultaneous difference between and interchangeability of these terms.  Added to this will be a curve ball—neuroscience—in order to import a concept that is back in play, mainly, conceptions of experience.   This will help define a writing (and perhaps a theoretical) conundrum as well: one is marching down a line of thought, gathering disciplinary ideas and demonstrations to one’s
cause/theme, when suddenly the writing wanders (or falls) off its track into the bush.  What to do?  Brave the high wire act required to make both track and bush part of the project?  Haul things back to the proper discourse?  Abandon the track for the bush?

 

INSTITUTIONS

“Cruel Habitats”
Felicity D Scott

This talk will focus on “Habitat: Towards Shelter,” an architectural exhibition staged for Habitat: The United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, which took place in Vancouver in 1976.  Architecture, as a discipline, was largely a marginal concern at this “world conference” dedicated to managing a much-feared global crisis born of demographic shifts as the rural poor migrated to urban slums.  What, after all, could architecture do in the face of a humanitarian emergency born of millions of destitute persons “swarming” into cities in the Global South, and bringing with them few resources?  Answering this question was the motivation for an architectural competition and its recasting as an exhibition, both of which, as I hope to demonstrate, did not leave the conception, or the reception, of architecture untouched.  Establishing a role for architects within the emerging apparatus of global environmental governance did not prove quite as easy as promoting technical and aesthetic or even economic solutions to sheltering the urban poor and it is in the eruption of a political space into a supposedly neutral technical one that, I hope to demonstrate, architecture received a new valence.

“Market, Corporation, Association”
Daniel M. Abramson

Markets, corporations, and associations represent three institutional formations in capitalist development.  They also illustrate diverse ways in which institutions and architecture interact.  How to design, organize, and control markets?  How does a corporation accommodate and represent itself in building?  When capitalists associate together what impact upon architecture?  This paper looks at three institutions of capitalism – market, corporation, association — and some of their architectural ramifications in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.  The specific focuses are, first, upon the Bank of England, including its pioneering stock market and renowned architect John Soane, and, second, upon the Chicago-based National Association of Building Owners and Managers, whose 1920s obsolescence studies possessed deep resonances in twentieth-century architecture and urbanism.   In the end, general relations between capitalism and architecture are illuminated by these institutional perspectives.

PRACTICES

“The Power of Law and Money: Two Stories from the History of Practice”
Jay Wickersham

This presentation defines practice as the web of social relationships between the architect and all the other actors who participate in creating buildings: clients, builders, assistants, engineers, investors, regulators, neighbors, inhabitants. Law provides a lens for examining these relationships in terms of counterbalancing rights and duties, lines of authority and power, and flows of money.  Two emblematic stories from my research show how law and money have shaped practice. During Charles Bulfinch’s career in Boston between 1794 and 1817, he won recognition as one of America’s first professional architects. He also went bankrupt twice and was ultimately jailed for debt – while serving as Boston’s police superintendent. I will describe the relationship between his financial failures and his professional success.  In the 1970s, the then-prevailing conception, embodied in the AIA ethical code, of the professional architect as an apolitical expert, sheltered from economic competition, came under attack from the political right and left. I will describe the antitrust lawsuits brought against architects and other professionals, and their far-reaching impact on how architects practice and get paid.

“Profession, field, art world, STEM occupation: the sociological mooring of architectural practices.”
Magali Sarfatti Larson, Professor Emeritus, Temple University and University of Urbino.

The great diversity of what people who have the right to call themselves “architects” actually do seems impossible to include under one label. The identity of the architectural profession is challenged by this diversity. Assuming that “profession” must mean something like a community of expert workers considered as relative equals by outsiders, some authors propose to abandon this inadequate notion, to the detriment of architecture schools. Writers like Garry Stevens and Paul Jones propose to call architecture “a field,” after the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. However, they avoid a comprehensive analysis of the whole, and ignore the relations of power that define the structure of a field. Their notion of architectural practice is as traditional as can be: architecture is what elite architects do and what cohorts of critics and interpreters decide it is. The social space in which the notable and noticed kinds of architectural practice exist is an extremely restricted field that appears to bear little relation with other kinds of practice and other kinds of architects. I would argue that this conception of architectural practice is sociologically wrong, and also unable to pose the most significant questions about a society’s multiple relations with the built environment.