The increasing association of ‘environmental’ issues with the climate crisis and sustainability tends to overlook wider issues linked to the broader concept of ‘environment(s)’ and its interdependence with human nature.
Potential topics include:
- How architecture has been affected by climate change (from pre-history to the present day).
- How the relationship between architecture and the natural world has been theorised over time.
- Design approaches that address the relationship between architecture and its surrounding ecology (e.g. ‘touching the earth lightly’).
- The relationship between architecture and meteorology / climatology.
- The role of culture and technology in shaping architecture’s response to climate.
We invite individual paper submissions that address the issues/topics above, or one of the thematic sessions below.
Adapting Modern Environments: Navigating Climate Challenges in 20th-Century Architecture
Convenor(s): Özgün Özçakır(Middle East Technical University), Mesut Dinler (Politecnico di Torino)
As the climate crisis intensifies, historic environments are increasingly susceptible to extreme weather events, rising temperatures, and environmental degradation. Concrete has played a defining role in shaping the built environment throughout the 20th century as the most widely utilized manufactured material globally. However, its extensive use has resulted in significant environmental consequences since as its primary component, cement is a major emitter of carbon dioxide. Thus, 20th-century architectural and urban developments have an undeniable impact on the contemporary climate crisis. Ironically, the buildings and sites constructed during this period, now recognized as modern architectural heritage, also remain highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change despite having contributed to its progression.
This session examines how climate-resilient design strategies can be integrated into modern architectural heritage while safeguarding their historical and cultural significance, inviting papers that critically analyse how the built environment negotiates the tension between continuity and change in response to climate pressures. The session aims to address the following key questions:
- What are the advantages and obstacles of function-specific design (form follows function) in shaping climate-adaptive conservation approaches of modern heritage?
- What role do governance structures play in shaping climate action strategies for modern environments?
- What are the interventions (from micro-interventions to macro-interventions) that enhance climate adaptation in modern heritage?
- What lessons can be drawn from international examples of climate-responsive transformations of modern heritage?
- By fostering interdisciplinary dialogues and engaging with global policies and practices, this session seeks to advance discourse on the impacts of environmental entanglements on modern environments.
- It will explore how 20th-century heritage can be strategically adapted to address climate uncertainties while maintaining their heritage values.
Format: In person paper session
Biogenic Architecture: New Aesthetics of Time and Place
Convenor(s): Clare Olsen (California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo), Brian Osbon (California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo)
Deep concerns about architecture’s culpability for environmental degradation and impacts on human and nonhuman health have led some to question the ethics of contemporary construction methods. As an alternative to entrenched industrialized systems, biogenic materials offer a path towards lower embodied energy and carbon drawdown while engendering a host of benefits from aesthetic to economic. Yet transitioning to a biobased built environment requires negotiating social and political hurdles. This session invites contributions that examine how biogenic materials shape the environmental imagination, particularly through the lenses of time and locality as structuring forces in architectural thought and practice.
Dominant capitalist timescapes are often restless, productivist, and progress-driven, subordinating care and maintenance to the logic of speed and efficiency. Biogenic materials, however, resist this model. They require attention to cycles of growth and decay, acknowledging temporal rhythms that exceed human intervention. At the same time, bio-based materials evoke questions of time as embedded knowledge and practice. Unlike industrial materials designed for permanence and obsolescence, biogenic materials are often dependent on localized knowledge, seasonal availability, and continuous upkeep. What does it mean for architecture to embrace an ethos of temporal entanglement, where materials demand an ongoing relationship with their environment?
Similarly, to fully benefit from biogenic materials requires resisting the ease, speed, and economy of globalized supply chains. Sourcing biogenic materials locally involves learning about natural and agricultural land management strategies and harnessing the knowledge of local farmers and craftspeople to realize healthier harvesting and construction practices. Stronger connections to regional material suppliers allow architects to participate in stewardship and care for the environment, while enabling local economic autonomy. Over time, investment in biogenic material supply chains means nurturing place-based connections, self-sufficiency, cooperation, decentralization, and conservation. How might a shift towards local biogenic materials in architecture cultivate new aesthetic and economic sensibilities?
Format: In person paper session
Environments of Transition: Rethinking Urban Form and Architecture After Oil
Convenor(s): Asma Mehan (Texas Tech University)
This session critically examines the role of architecture and urbanism in the transition to post-oil societies, focusing on how shifting environmental, economic, and cultural paradigms are reshaping urban forms and spatial practices. The legacy of oil-dependent development—manifested in sprawling infrastructure, resource-intensive urban planning, and rigid architectural models—presents unique challenges as societies move toward sustainable, post-carbon futures.
Focusing on the conceptual and material implications of these transitions, this session invites contributions that explore themes such as adaptive reuse, energy-conscious design, rethinking urban mobility, and the reconfiguration of human-centred environments in the wake of oil’s decline. Special attention will be given to the interplay between global energy transitions and local architectural practices, with case studies ranging from mid-sized cities like Lubbock, Texas, to transnational networks shaping architectural responses to environmental crises. The round-table format is designed to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, combining insights from architectural history, environmental studies, and urbanism. The session aims to provoke critical discussions about the responsibilities of architects, urban planners, and policymakers in shaping sustainable, equitable urban futures beyond oil.
Format: In person paper session
Environment and its Disciplinary Crossroads: New Approaches to an Old Challenge
Convenor(s): Christina Pech (University of Oslo)
Art historians in the 19th and early 20th centuries were often also architectural historians and, not uncommonly, polymaths. Their vocation was inherently multidisciplinary, and their objects of study extended well beyond the art object to engage with, for instance, the form and constitution of mountains—John Ruskin was famously also a teleological geologist—to the social conditions of the city, as seen in Aby Warburg’s interventions in Hamburg. Although often based on formal aesthetics, the aim was extrinsic to the work of art; questions of meaning, memory, human emotions, and ethics drove their investigations.
Today, the discipline of art history is undergoing fundamental transformations under the influence of Environmental Humanities. Ecological entanglements of artistic practices are being explored, and transdisciplinary approaches are increasingly called for. In light of this turn, the session examines the disciplinary permutations of art history, architecture, and urbanism. Unlike in the 19th century, today’s academic landscape is marked by the disciplinary categorization brought about by modernism. Despite significant post-war expansions of the field (such as ‘new art history’) and notable increases in artistic explorations of architecture and urban phenomena, architecture and urbanism have, generally, remained weak within many art history departments. The session highlights disciplinary history and asks whether bridging these divides might enrich contemporary inquiries into environmental urgencies, nature, and climate.
The session invites papers addressing disciplinary and historiographical questions, whether through theoretical reflection or empirical case studies of pedagogies, institutions or specific scholars. What roles have architecture, landscape, and urbanism played—past and present—within art history? What significance does representation hold in our understanding of the environment? How can transdisciplinary aesthetics cross localised and situated expertise? Can the environment(s) provide this fruitful interface; might its conceptualisation generate new forms of design?
Format: In person paper session
Past, present and future of the Middle Landscape
Convenor(s): Nicolás Mariné (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Diego Toribio (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
This session aims to explore the concept of the Middle Landscape, an idea first put forward by American academics in the 1960s as an attempt to overcome the duality between the natural and the human as absolute aesthetic models in the design of the environment.
Today we understand that human activity and environmental forces are inseparable, yet popular culture and many international institutions continue to reinforce the division between nature and artifice. It is therefore necessary to reflect on the inescapable consideration that we inhabit and construct a middle landscape, and how this consideration influences our possible futures. Furthermore, it is important that this notion be subjected to critique and updating, as the divide between the natural and the artificial has currently widened with the growing divide in our societies between the physical and the virtual. A tessiture that adds complexity to what a middle landscape might be.
This session questions the currency of the concept and its influence in architecture, urbanism, landscape architecture, spatial planning and landscape ecology. Papers should propose theoretical and analytical explorations of the concept of the Middle Landscape (how it has been understood, how it has evolved, how it needs to be conceived today…) or present case studies based on or related to the concept of the Middle Landscape (past, present or future). The aim is to study practices and projects, built or not, whose interpretation allows a debate on the current validity of the concept of the Middle Landscape. The discussion following the selected presentations will focus on how the concept has been handled, how it is currently perceived and what potential it offers.
Format: In person paper session
The Ecologies of Aid and Activism
Convenor(s): Maryia Rusak (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
The 1970s, also known as the decade of “development,” witnessed not only an unprecedented flow of capital to the Global South but also a steady stream of technical specialists and advisors. Western-educated architects and engineers were contracted by the Ministries of Works to complete large-scale housing, healthcare, and educational projects. However, these “developmental” ventures often fell short of their ambitious goals. The post-1968 generation of architects working within networks of foreign aid grew increasingly disillusioned by the apparent disconnect between local problems and technological solutions imposed from abroad. With experience in low-cost construction in the Global South, upon their return, many questioned the detrimental Western over-reliance on environmentally harmful building technologies and explored alternative paths forward. Exacerbated by the 1973 oil crisis, this architectural activism merged the critique of the expansionist industrialised capitalism of the Global North with growing environmental concerns. This panel is particularly interested in how the experience of architecture within different ecologies and networks of foreign aid contributed to and impacted the rise of environmental activism of the 1970s. Envisioned case studies might range from investigations of the experience of individual architects and singular projects to broader shifts in architectural discourse and the creation of new publications, activist organisations, and educational programs informed by a different relationship between architecture and the natural world. The panel is particularly interested in the reciprocity of ideas transfer and ways in which architectural practitioners faced the growing environmental challenges on either side of the globe. In doing so, the panel aims to expand the understanding of the environmental activism of the 1970s and provide a new perspective on the role of architects in nascent environmental discourse. It welcomes contributions that explore the networks and perspectives within the Global South and highlight the agency of the previously overlooked actors and groups.
Format: In person paper session
Towards a Cosmological Turn in Architecture
Convenor(s): Dulmini Perera (University of Limerick), Samuel Koh (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
This session proposes to discuss the role of cosmology in architectural practices, as a means of addressing questions of continuity and change. Cosmology refers to understandings of the universe—including ideas about its structure, its constituent elements, and the processes which govern it. Far from neutral descriptions of reality, cosmologies are inherently political forces, shaping human action by situating it within broader narratives of past, present, and future. In this sense, cosmologies are not only intrinsic to patterns of continuity (such as in forms of tradition), but are the foundational source of new meanings, practices and institutions.
Historians of architecture have demonstrated the longstanding connection between cosmologies and architectural practices (such as in ancient, medieval and Renaissance cultures). Today, however, architectural thought is largely assumed to be driven by technological rationality, disconnected from cosmological concerns. While numerous disciplines, such as science and technology studies (STS), philosophy of technology, and political theory have begun to recognise the contemporary power of cosmologies, particularly in shaping colonial and environmental conflict, architecture has been slower to do so. At the same time, some of architecture’s most active discourses are deeply informed by cosmological concerns, even if not explicitly acknowledged as such. Established architectural discussions in phenomenology and postcolonial theory, as well as philosophical perspectives such post-humanism and new materialism, engage with a range of cosmological themes (such as ontology, epistemology, and temporality).
This session proposes to explore the value of a renewed focus on the role of cosmology in architectural and spatial practices. Some of the questions it asks include:
- How might attention to cosmology’s role in architectural practices help broaden discussions about change beyond the frameworks and concepts of Western technoscience?
- How might a cosmological awareness help to navigate the tensions inherent to discussions of continuity and change (such as those connoted by concepts of preservation, tradition, innovation or repair)?
- How can a recognition of cosmological plurality help to destabilise dominant narratives of architecture’s role in planetary crises, and how might these narratives be creatively transformed?
- How can modern societies overcome political barriers to translating non-Western and non-Modern lifeworlds into new paradigms for spatial practice and urban theory?
- How can architecture’s material sites, objects, and practices uniquely inform cosmological analyses, and help to develop stronger theories about change in architectural ideas and practices?
Format: In person paper session