Forms of Environmentalization, Paper Presentations

Forms of Environmentalization is the 2024 doctoral symposium presented by the students in the PhD in Architecture program at Columbia GSAPP. Submissions by current doctoral scholars across the globe question the emergence of the environment as object of policy, design, and identity.

The symposium intervenes in current scholarship on environmental catastrophe that obscures the way in which constructions of the environment and cultural notions of depletion or equilibrium were co-constituted. Amidst concerns for the climate crisis, Forms of Environmentalization disrupts the presentation of the 1960s-70s as the apotheosis of environmental consciousness, extending these mechanisms of thinking well before and after the “environmental turn.” Forms of Environmentalization proposes that the history of “the environment” can only be understood through the tools used to make it legible.

Rather than seeking an underlying definition of “the environment” within design practices, this symposium employs “environmentalization” to trace the conditions of possibility that enabled the concept to be taken as a given by the second half of the twentieth century. By critically addressing the construction, instrumentalization, and weaponization of “the environment” in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Forms of Environmentalization questions how the ontological proliferation of the term has positioned spatial milieus as a tool to be both tamed and constructed.

April 5th, 2024, Symposium Keynote, 5PM Fayerweather 209

       Peter Galison, “Contested Visibilities in the Anthropocene” (Harvard University)

April 6th, 2024 Fayerweather 209

Opening Remarks 10:00

Media (10:15-12:15)

       Anirudh Gurumoorthy (University of California, Los Angeles)

       Kate Heller (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

       Anny Li (Harvard University)

       Sarah Wheat (University of Michigan, Ann Harbor/Freie Universität Berlin)

       Respondent: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Art History

Lunch Break (12:15-1:00)

Conflict (1:00-3:00)

       Melanie R. Ball (University of Texas, Austin)

       Angelika E. Joseph (Princeton University)

       Kelly Leilani Main (University of California, Berkeley)

       Alican Taylan (Cornell University)

       Respondent: Maura Lucking, Buell Postdoctoral Fellow

Model (3:00-4:30)

       Hugo Betting (Harvard University)

       B. Jack Hanly (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

       Jia Weng (Yale University)

       Respondent: Reinhold Martin, GSAPP

Closing Remarks 4:45

Forms of Environmentalization is generously sponsored by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Organized by Lasse Rau and Nicolay Duque-Robayo, students in the Ph.D. in Architecture Program at GSAPP.

Image credits: Lucas Reif