“It’s Simple: Histories of Architecture and/for the Environment”

This afternoon conference at Columbia GSAPP is co-organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and the Society of Fellows / Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. 

Speakers include:

Introductions by Reinhold Martin, Columbia University, and Mirko Zardini, CCA
Daniel Barber, University of Pennsylvania
Aleksandr Bierig, Harvard University
Nerea Calvillo, Warwick University
Jiat-Hwee Chang, National University of Singapore
Isabelle Doucet, Manchester University
Hannah le Roux, University of the Witwatersrand
Kiel Moe, McGill University
Paulo Tavares, Universidade de Brasília
Response by Meredith TenHoor, Pratt Institute
Panel moderated by Meredith TenHoor and Kim Förster, CCA

Some profit from climate change, but many more suffer its consequences. It’s that simple; any history of anthropogenic planetary transformation is therefore also a history of inequality, injustice, and struggle. 

Arguing that architecture needs an environmental history, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) has organized, with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the multidisciplinary, collaborative research project “Architecture and/for the Environment.” But what should this history look like? Around whose priorities should its objects of inquiry be defined and assembled? What truths should it seek?

As a part of the CCA’s research project and in conjunction with the Buell Center’s “Power: Infrastructure in America“ research initiative, this afternoon event will offer new directions and agendas for environmental histories of architecture that combine a planetary perspective with an assertion that national centers of power, particularly those in the United States, continue to hold outsize influence and responsibility. This event follows the CCA public seminar on June 9, “It’s Complicated,” during which Mellon researchers and invited scholars interrogated paired concepts of Energy/Power, Control/Systems, Body/Exposure, and Post-human/Nature. 

With “It’s Simple,” the CCA and the Buell Center propose that there are few winners and mostly losers in the Anthropocene, and that architectural—indeed environmental—historiography must begin by acknowledging this fact. Though the narratives might be complex, the imperative is simple. 

This afternoon event is preceded by a pop-up display organized by the CCA on the fourth floor of Avery Hall entitled ‘You Must Choose Between Oxygen or Wealth.’ Shown from October 8–19, it will highlight the CCA’s recent efforts to examine environmental issues through distinct, yet interlinked curatorial approaches. The display’s title is taken from the artist Douglas Copeland’s Slogans for the Twenty-First Century.