FOOTNOTES ON CLIMATE
The urgency of climate change—its emerging, far-reaching effects on life on Earth—demands a matching urgency in thinking about how to address those effects architecturally, progressing existing work in areas like resiliency, adaptability, carbon footprints, materials use, and eco-friendliness. But such a moment also asks that we think more broadly about how we conceive of “climate” in the first place. As thinkers like Paul Edwards have noted, it is primarily through models, sensing technologies, visualizations, and collations of data that we have come to know climate—it is, in other words, a thing we assemble. Historical and epistemic, we shape it using inherited ideas about air, ocean, rock, ice, weather, and other environmental conditions that have long shaped our engagement with the natural world and each other. Knowing that climate is a constructed notion, how might we rethink it and its attendant implications for our broader understandings of the world and our ways of building and being in it?
This reading list is offered not as a survey of the field or even a syllabus of sorts, but as a collection of documents (historical and contemporary, scholarly and speculative, governmental and activist, scientific and science-fictive) that ask us, each in its own way, to consider again how climate intersects with architectural ideas. These entries are largely drawn from the footnotes of our recently published collection of essays titled Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, and are loosely categorized according to a set of themes that emerged in the process of editing the book. The wide-ranging intelligence of the book’s contributors—and their still further-ranging interests in the histories, theories, and practices that confront the problem of climate—is gathered here in the form of footnotes, offered in anticipation of thoughts, conversations, and texts yet to come.
1. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012). 1
2. Neil Brenner, ed., Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Berlin: Jovis, 2014). 2
3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222. 3
4. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” The International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Global Change Newsletter 41 (May 2000): 17–18. 4
5. Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 5
6. Earth Charter Commission, “Earth Charter,” 2000. 6
7. Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 7
8. Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home (The Holy See: Vatican Press, 2015). 8
9. James Hansen, Testimony Before the U.S. House Energy Committee, 1988. 9
10. Matthias Heymann, “The Evolution of Climate Ideas and Knowledge,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, vol. 1, issue 4 (July/Aug 2010): 581–597. 10
11. Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction, and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 11
12. Paul James and Manfred B. Steger, “Levels of Subjective Globalization: Ideologies, Imaginaries, Ontologies,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 12 (2013): 17–40.12
13. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).13
14. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225–248.14
15. James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2007).15
16. Reinhold Martin, “Horizons of Thought,” in Mediators: Aesthetics, Politics, and the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 99–120. 16
17. W. Patrick McCray, The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 17
18. Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, July 19, 2012. 18
19. Fred Scharmen, “The High Frontier, the Megastructure, and the Big Dumb Object,” paper presented at the 101st ACSA Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 2013, http://apps.acsa-arch.org/resources/proceedings/indexsearch.aspx?txtKeyword1=%22Scharmen%2C+Fred%22&ddField1=1.19
20. Gayatri Spivak, “Imperative to Reimagine the Planet,” in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 335–350. 20
21. Jennifer Wenzel, “Planet vs. Globe,” English Language Notes, vol. 52, no. 1 (October 2014): 19–30.21
22. Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1993–1996).22
23. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).23
24. United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development,” 1992. 24
1. Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1991). 1
2. Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).2
3. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 3
4. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (New York: Verso, 2016).4
5. Hans Günter Brauch, Úrsula Oswald Spring, et al., eds., Facing Global Environmental Change: Environmental, Human, Energy, Food, Health, and Water Security Concepts (Berlin: Springer, 2009).5
6. Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990). 6
7. Denis E. Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 7
8. Alex de Waal, “Sudan, the Sahel, the Sahara: The 99% Principle,” Les Dossiers du CERI 3 (Summer 2013).8
9. Jodi Dean, “The Anamorphic Politics of Climate Change,” e-flux journal 69 (January 2016). 9
10. Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy C. Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).10
11. Jennifer Gabrys, “Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 32, no. 1 (2014): 30–48.11
12. Peter Galison and Caroline Jones, “Unknown Quantities,” Artforum, vol. 49, no. 3 (November 2010): 49–51.12
13. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).13
14. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Picador, 2015).14
15. Adrian Lahoud, “Nomos and Cosmos,” e-flux journal 65: SUPERCOMMUNITY (May/Aug 2015).15
16. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).16
17. Curtis Mayfield, “Underground,” on Roots, Capitol Records, 1971. 17
18. Brett Milligan, “Landscape Migration,” Places Journal (June 2015).18
19. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2011). 19
20. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015). 20
21. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).21
22. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).22
23. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).23
24. Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2012).24
25. Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister, Projective Ecologies (New York: Harvard University GSD and Actar Publishers, 2014).25
26. Birgit Schneider and Thomas Nocke, eds., Image Politics of Climate Change: Visualizations, Imaginations, Documentations (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript-Verlag, 2014). 26
27. Richard Sennett, “Why Climate Change Should Signal the End of the City-State,” the Guardian, October 9, 2014.27
28. Rebecca Solnit, “Are We Missing the Big Picture on Climate Change?” New York Times Magazine, December 2, 2014.28
29. Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline: Colonialism as Climate Change in the Negev Desert (Gottingen: Steidl in association with Cabinet Books, 2015).29
30. Paige West, Conservation is our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).30
1. Emily Apter, “Planetary Dysphoria,” Third Text, vol. 27, no. 1 (January 2013): 131–140. 1
2. J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962; repr., New York: Liveright, 2013). 2
3. Stan Cox, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) (New York: The New Press, 2012). 3
4. Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Changed Planet (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011).4
5. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).5
6. Heather Davis, “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures,” Philosophia, vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 231–250. 6
7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” in 8A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia8, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 7
8. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966).8
9. Cherian George, Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation, Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990–2000 (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2000).9
10. Richard Grusin, ed., The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).10
11. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949; repr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 11
12. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Victoria, Australia: Re.press, 2008). 12
13. Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 13
14. Philippe Rahm, Météorologie des sentiments (Paris: Les Petits Matins, 2015).14
15. Peter Sloterdijk, the Spheres Trilogy: Bubbles, Globes, Foams, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011–2016).15
16. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). 16
17. Julianna Spahr, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).17
18. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 18
1. Stan Allen and Marc McQuade, eds., Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2011).1
2. Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).2
3. Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London: The Architectural Press, 1969; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 3
4. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publishing, 1992).4
5. Siegfried Ebeling, Space as Membrane, trans. Pamela Johnston and Anna Kathryn Schoefert (London: Architectural Association Publications, 2010). 5
6. Billie Faircloth, Plastics Now: On Architecture’s Relationship to a Continuously Emerging Material (New York: Routledge, 2015).6
7. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969; repr. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2008). 7
8. David Gissen, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).8
9. Sabine Höhler, Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960–1990 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015). 9
10. Catherine Ingraham, Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition (London: Routledge, 2006).10
11. Janette Kim and Erik Carver, The Underdome Guide to Energy Reform (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015).11
12. Laura Kurgan, Close-Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2013). 12
13. Lucy R. Lippard, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West (New York: The New Press, 2014).13
14. Kiel Moe, Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy (London: Routledge, 2013).14
15. Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty, Ecological Urbanism (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010). 15
16. Felicity D. Scott, Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York: Zone Books, 2016).16
17. Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).17
18. Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2015).18
19. Paulo Tavares, “General Essay on Air: Probes into the Atmospheric Conditions of Liberal Democracy,” 2008, http://www.paulotavares.net/air. 19
20. Arjen Oosterman, et al., eds., Volume 37: Is This Not a Pipe? (2013).20
21. WORKac, 49 Cities (2009; repr. New York: Inventory Press, 2016).21
Footnotes on Climate is a project of the Avery Review and Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, issued on the occasion of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, May 2016.
Editor
James Graham
Managing Editor
Caitlin Blanchfield
Contributing Editors
Alissa Anderson
Jordan H. Carver
Jacob Moore
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Neil Donnelly
Sean Yendrys
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die Keure, Bruges, Belgium
The Avery Review
A digital periodical of critical essays on architecture
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Special thanks to Dean Amale Andraos, Janet Reyes, Steffen Boddeker, Gabrielle Printz, Jesse Seegers, Manuela Lucà-Dazio, and Lars Müller.