“Environment dates from [the early nineteenth century], in the sense of surroundings, as in environs (fw environner, F – encircle, rw viron, oF – circuit); it was extended, as in Carlyle (1827): ‘environment of circumstances.’”
As part of his 1976 encyclopedic work Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams obliquely introduced the term “Environment” under the entry for the history of “ecology.” In his view the use of the term, dating to the nineteenth century, only commenced with the rise of “concern with the human and natural habitat” of environmentalism. Williams’ historiographical reading of the term obscures the way in which constructions of the environment and a cultural notion of depletion were co-constituted. As with the history of the economy as an object of power, measurement, and policy in the 1930s, 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—chiefly towards the ecological cause. By critically addressing the historiographical construction, instrumentalization, and weaponization of “the environment” in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Forms of Environmentalization aims to question how the ontological proliferation of the term has subjectivized spatial milieus as a tool to be both tamed and constructed.
Keynote Lecture by Peter Galison, Harvard University.
Organized by Lasse Rau and Nicolay Duque-Robayo, students in the Ph.D. in Architecture Program at GSAPP.
