The Polytechnic

Posted by Karin Jaschke, 22.11.08

Invitation to debate:

ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY AND ECOLOGY
This post aims to launch a debate on the need and conditions for rethinking architectural history in relation to the environmental question.
The idea is that a working group or network might emerge from this, should there be enough interest. Perhaps it will be called ECHO, Ecological History of Architecture Group.

I have written down some notes, questions, and quotes related to my own emerging views on the issue, not to direct the debate but as a starting point.

If you want to engage in a conversation about a more environmentally aware architectural history, click on ’submit comment’ at the bottom of this page and add your thoughts.

GENERAL NOTES
Economic, political, and socio-cultural issues, and indeed fundamental ethical and philosophical questions, are at the heart of the environmental crisis that the world is facing – and vice versa. Whether this connection be thought through dialectical, systemic or ‘fluid’ models, the relationship between natural and human environments and behaviours needs to be at the centre of our attention. Arguably ecological models may themselves be useful tools in achieving this and repositioning historiography.

The incentive for initiating a debate about the link between these issues and architectural history comes from my HT teaching, a number of recent conferences (Designs on the Planet 1+2, Changing the Change, 360 Degrees, and AHRA/Agency), and our call for papers for Design Philosophy Papers (check out the post on the main site.)
The sustainability debate is still mainly technology focused and historians and theorists are the obvious candidates for steering the debate in different directions, amongst other things more political ones.

I propose to use the term ’sustainability’ to refer to the general debate on the issues in question, and ‘ecology’ with regard to a future historical practice. ‘Ecology’ has the conceptual potential of bridging the nature-culture divide and comes with a number of well-defined and arguably useful attributes such as emergence, adaptability, and resilience.

WORK THAT ALREADY ENGAGES WITH ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
> writings about environmental thinking and practice in architecture (John Farmer’s Green Shift, Volker Welter’s book on Patrick Geddes, Peder Anker’s work on Bauhaus members)
> environmental histories (William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis)
> historical/theoretical works that contribute to the debate in indirect ways (Alberto Perez-Gomez, say)
> attempts at theorising sustainable architecture (Susannah Hagan’s Taking Shape, Warwick Fox’s Ethics and the Built Environment) and a host of other, related works (Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook, Viljoen and Bohn’s Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes reader) that are not historical but may inform the debate
> what else is there? what would a bibliography for an ‘ecological history of architecture’ include?

Are there any historical works that have taken this further, from choice of subject matter and perspective to more fundamental, philosophical and methodological shifts? Is there a point in more radically questioning current history writing and teaching?

SOME OF MY QUESTIONS:
• what would a non-anthropocentric architectural history look like?

• what would it mean for architectural history to go beyond binary conceptions of nature/culture, body/mind, organic/inorganic, built environment/natural environment etc.?

• what would a deep ecological architectural history be: can we envisage a fundamentally different perspective on the built environment (and its production and inhabitation)?

• what can systems thinking do for architectural historiography, if anything?

AND SOME GENERAL QUESTIONS
• why would architectural historians want to engage with this subject?
…for ethical reasons: to provide a framework for a reorientation of architectural practice?
…to write ‘better’ histories: ecological approaches may help to develop more appropriate historical understandings of architecture?

• which philosophical and scientific ideas might provide a framework for rethinking historiography from an ecological view point?

• can we learn from previous efforts to fundamentally reposition historical enquiry (feminist and postcolonial histories?)?
…would this just mean to re-label existing historical practices?

• what can we learn from other disciplines: their approaches, methods and disciplinary questions, with regard to sustainability (history, environmental history, archaeology, geography)?

• what’s in an ecological architectural history for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching? Perhaps a shift in emphasis, or perhaps a more radical change in approach?

For instance the History of Art and Architecture course at UCSB makes a point about its “architecture & environment emphasis: The history of architecture is much more than a history of styles, materials, and constructions. It also explores social, cultural, and political realities, and it asks questions of gender and ethnicity. Foremost, however, it is the history of humanity’s interaction with the environment which is the focus of the emphasis Architecture & Environment. Whenever and wherever architects, engineers, and planners design and erect houses, places of business, office and industrial buildings, neighborhoods, and entire towns and cities, they interact with the physical environment. Architecture often stands at the center of public regard and debate, especially when at stake are such issues as urban growth, preservation of the countryside, revitalization of inner cities, the future of historic districts, sustainable living, and the provision of affordable housing.
The Architecture & Environment emphasis allows one to explore how human beings have positioned themselves spatially in relation to the environment at various cultural and historical moments. … The Architecture & Environment emphasis is structured around three core areas: architecture, urbanism, and cultural landscape. Three primary paths of inquiry are pursued: production of space; environmental aesthetics; as well as design, conservation, and preservation analysis. A distinct feature of the emphasis is the weight placed on interdisciplinary approaches, in which the student takes elective courses that touch significantly on the study of historic and contemporary architecture in its wider setting. Such courses are offered by the participating departments of Anthropology, Art, Classics, Environmental Studies, Film and Media studies, Geography, History, Religious Studies and Sociology.”
(http://www.arthistory.ucsb.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=72&Itemid=168)

SOME QUOTES, TBD.
> “An ecological history begins by assuming a dynamic and changing relationship between environment and culture, one as apt to produce contradictions as continuities. Moreover, it assumes that the interactions of the two are dialectical. Environment may initially shape the range of choices available to a people at a given moment but then culture reshapes environment responding to those choices. The reshaped environment presents a new set of possibilites for cultural reproduction, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination. Changes in the way people create and re-create their livelihood must be analysed in terms of changes not only in their social relations but in their ecological as well.”
(William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, New York, 1983, 13-14, quoted in David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, 27)

> Excerpt from an article by the ANU-based (Australia) ‘Ecological Humanities’ group:
“The ecological humanities works across the great binaries of western thought. We work in a time of rapid social and environmental change, and are committed to cross-cutting the divides that impede our understanding and action. This commitment has a parallel in our work toward social and ecological justice and the future of life. Those of us settler society scholars have another ethical imperative here: to be responsive to Indigenous people’s knowledges and aspirations for justice. The ecological humanities thus engage with connectivity and commitment in a time of crisis and concern.
Open any newspaper or magazine on any day of the week and you will find stories that discuss some aspect of global environmental crisis. The concept of crisis alerts us to the existence of major changes which are running out of control. Most scholars assert that the driving forces in out of control processes are primarily social and cultural, although it is also true that environmental processes can turn into runaway systems driven by their own internal dynamics. Major ecological change, much of it in crisis, is situated across the nature/culture divide. Our academic division between arts and sciences compounds the problems of that divide, inhibiting the work we need to be doing. So too, does the ranking of knowledge systems that places western science at the top of an epistemological ladder; it impedes our capacity for knowledge sharing within fields of plural and diverse knowledges.
While the divisions are pervasive, the possibilities for convergences took a quantum leap in the twentieth century. Major shifts in thought were achieved on each side of the science - humanities divide; many of these shifts are in intellectual tandem, making the work of cross-cutting these divides more obviously necessary, and at the same time offering grounds for greater interest and comprehension. The major shift is from atomism to connectivity (Mathews 1993), and thus from a belief in certainty to acknowledgement of and creative work with uncertainty (Prigogine 1996). I will briefly summarise these shifts, starting with the work of Gregory Bateson who, in his enormously influential career went back and forth across the divide of arts and sciences, but who started his academic life in my home discipline of anthropology. The new ecology starts with this fundamental assertion: that the unit of survival is not the individual or the species, but is the organism-and-its-environment. It follows from this that an organism that deteriorates its environment commits suicide (Bateson 1973: 436; Harries-Jones 1995: 66). The further implication is that being is inherently, inescapably, and necessarily relational. An ontology of connectivity entails mutual causality: organism and environment modify each other. Relations between organism and environment are recursive, meaning that ‘events continually enter into, become entangled with, and then re-enter the universe they describe’ (Harries-Jones 1995: 3).
Amongst ecologists, whose training is principally in the fields of science, the shifts in thinking are revolutionary: from concepts of climax and equilibrium to concepts of pervasive disequilibrium; from concepts of objectivity to concepts of intersubjectivity; from visions of deterministic prediction to an awareness of fundamental uncertainties such that predictions must be probabilistic (Ciancio & Nocentini 2000). Inherent in this shift is a decentering of the scientist. Frank Egler is reported to have said that ‘ecosystems may not only be more complex than we think, they may be more complex than we can think’ (quoted in Dietrich 1992; 110). This view represents a fundamental shift: from the proposition that incomplete knowledge is an obstacle to be overcome, to the proposition that incomplete knowledge is a condition of any participant in a living system.
The shift in ecology has its parallels in social sciences and the humanities. Critical social theory, in part under the stimulus of feminist theory, entails shifts from universal knowledge to situated knowledges, from monoglossia to heteroglossia, from centred hierarchies to decentred networks, and from structure to motion. Prigogine’s summation of the shift is equally pertinent right across the spectrum of western knowledge paradigms: the shift is ‘from substance to relation, to communication, to time’ (quoted in Midgley 1992:41). The parallels and convergences show us that across the arts/science divide there exists a common ground of radical change with which we can engage.
Furthermore, the humanities and social sciences are increasingly dedicating a portion of their scholarly agenda to the environment. Linked with disciplines, this enlarged agenda gives us environmental economics, environmental politics, environmental anthropology, environmental philosophy, and environmental history, to name a few. Each of these sub-disciplines is making significant contributions to the full arena of how we understand environments, how we understand society, history, democracy, and the future; how we may understand humanity more fully, and how we may intervene in environmental crisis in order to secure a more stable and habitable future. They ask, in short, how we may avoid committing suicide through failure to enact the worldview shattering knowledge that the unit of survival is the organism in recursive and mutually constitutive relationships with its environment.
A major guiding theme is connectivity. The imperative of learning to think about and with connectivity can be operationalised as an imperative to enlarge the boundaries of thought and to enlarge thinking itself - to enhance our ability to think in dialogue and, perhaps, in empathy with others. In line with Hannah Arendt’s (1961) concept of enlarged thinking as thought that takes place in an intersubjective mode, I suggest that enlarged dialogue opens possibilities for inter-cultural, inter-species and other conversations. […] ”
(Deborah Bird Rose and Libby Robin, ‘The Ecological Humanities in Action: An Invitation’, Australian Humanities Review, Issue 31-32, April 2004. For full article and references see
(http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-April-2004/rose.html)

> A snapshop from a book by anthropologist Tim Ingold:
“… the study of skill demands a perspective which situates the practitioner, right from the start, in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of his or her surroundings. I call this the ‘dwelling perspective’. Humans, I argue, are brought into existence as organism-persons within a world that is inhabited by beings of manifold kinds, both human and non-human. Therefore relations among humans, which we are accustomed to calling ’social’, are but a sub-set of ecological relations.”
(Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, New York: Routledge, 2000, 5)

Karin Jaschke, University of Brighton
k.jaschke@brighton.ac.uk