Image: Charles O'Rear, Hoover Dam on the Colorado River (1972) (EPA/ Dcumerica)

ARC3316H F
Instructor: Hans Ibelings
Meeting Section: LEC0101
Thursday 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Modern architecture is inseparably linked with the Industrial Revolution. In almost every history (almost, to keep room for the unknown) the emergence of modern architecture is tied to Western/European industrialization. Industrially manufactured materials such as iron, steel, reinforced concrete, glass, asbestos, and plastics have made architecture modern.

The European Industrial Revolution set planetary warming in motion, led to a large-scale resource depletion, and caused an unprecedented environmental decline. As Amitav Ghosh has pointed out in The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, the Industrial Revolution is also entangled with Western colonization: ‘The factor that gave the carbon economy its decisive shape was not the provenance of the machines that ushered the Industrial Revolution.… What determined the shape of the global carbon economy was that the major European powers had already established a strong … military and political presence in much of Asia and Africa at the time when the technology of steam was in its nascency … From that point on, carbon-intensive technologies were to have the effect of continually reinforcing Western power.’1 Embedded in the thinking that emerged during the Industrial Revolution is the idea that growth equals progress. But it has become increasingly clear that progress (for humanity) has resulted in an unparalleled environmental deterioration (of the planet), and that uncontained growth is unsustainable as it leads to what Thomas Hylland Eriksen has called ‘overheating’, 2 runaway processes which affects architecture, cities, landscapes, and infrastructural mega projects as well.

This seminar examines how climate and ecological crises compel us to rethink architectural histories (and architecture), and to find ways of writing about modern and contemporary architecture in the light of planetary warming. It requires a ‘neural plasticity’, to rewire patterns and networks in the profession’s collective memory.

This elective is an exploration of what a planetary warming history of modern architecture could entail. It consists of lectures, discussions of a number of readings, and student presentations related to the three assignments in this course. For the assignments and presentations students are asked to give their interpretations of three projects: a conventional highlight of modern architecture seen through a planetary warming lens; a project from outside the canon that deserves to be included in a planetary warming history; and a project that is usually considered to be too large to be seen as architecture, urban planning, or landscape architecture.

Notes

1. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016), 108.

2. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (London: Pluto Press, 2016).