Environmental Histories of Architecture presents the work of eight researchers who each analyze specific environmental relations, crises, and reforms and demonstrate how society and the environment have been co-constructed, represented, and lived in their respective geographies. While their essays are published independently as chapters, together they cover an expansive range of thinking about how the environment changed, and was changed by, architecture.

In Chapter 7, Isabelle Doucet takes two radical projects, Cedric Price’s Aviary (1985) at the Royal Veterinary College in London, United Kingdom, and Ant Farm’s Dolphin Embassy (1976) in Australia, as two contextual and self-reflexive case studies of possible human-animal relationships. The essay adopts an environmental humanities perspective to conduct an architectural analysis, asserting that even though both projects were ultimately unrealized, architecture was central in their proposed paradigmatic spaces for breeding and encounter. Engaging with the very storytelling methods of Price and Ant Farm, Doucet offers an archival-based tale, framed by scientific and Indigenous knowledge, to acknowledge the meaningful lives of others, humans- and non-humans, for multispecies survival and coexistence in the neoliberal era.

Author: Isabelle Doucet

Editor: Kim Förster

Managing Editor: Claire Lubell

Copyeditor: Ruth Jones

Other contributors: Aleksandr Bierig, Nerea Calvillo, Daniel Barber, Kiel Moe, Jiat-Hwee Chang, Hannah le Roux, Paulo Tavares, Kim Förster

Graphic Design: Tessier A

Programming: Rosen Tomov

Published by the CCA and distributed open access through Library Stack.

This open-access publication is made available according to the terms of the license CC BY-NC-ND.

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