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 2, Nerea Calvillo explores what happens when nature itself, in this case pollen, is deemed a problem, even a pollutant. The essay introduces the pioneering women of Hull-House, a reformist settlement project founded in Chicago in 1889, who conducted extensive socioeconomic surveys that mapped—at least implicitly—the distribution of ragweed in the city, before pollen-induced hay fever had been medicalized and commodified in the United States. Calvillo draws on ecofeminist literature to shape a queer theory of pollution, one that addresses it beyond the architectural scale. Rather than simply revealing and representing pollen as pollution, Calvillo’s focus on the multiscalar politicization of urban ecologies allows for research into practices that intervene in society and nature, care for urban spaces, and are critical of neoliberal greening.

Author: Nerea Calvillo

Editor: Kim Förster

Managing Editor: Claire Lubell

Copyeditor: Ruth Jones

Other contributors: Aleksandr Bierig, Daniel Barber, Kiel Moe, Jiat-Hwee Chang, Hannah le Roux, Isabelle Doucet, 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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