Conceptualising Environment(s): Continuity and Change

Generously supported by the British Academy, the 2025 Architectural Humanities Research Association international conference aims to highlight the critical contribution that humanities-driven studies can make to the intersections between subjects as complex and inter-disciplinary as architecture and environment(s). The conference will explore the multiplicity of meanings behind the term ‘environment’, and how these are used and interpreted in architecture and related disciplines, both in contemporary practice and in historical precedents. An ‘environment’ fundamentally describes a relationship: between an object (or subject), and something that surrounds it (from the French environer: ‘to surround, encircle, encompass’). We can only define our environment – what surrounds us – by assuming an understanding of who and what we are. While contemporary scholarship in disciplines including philosophy, science, sociology, history of science and geography explore humanity’s impact on the natural world, architects and planners are tasked with the unique responsibility to alter environment(s), with (or without) knowledge of how to work with (or overcome) constraints associated with these uncertainties.

Engaging with individual and societal human needs as well as the physical world and natural resources, architecture must respond to highly technical requirements but can also embrace creativity and convey aesthetic considerations. In this context, the study of architecture can demonstrate how closely interrelated different fields of knowledge and distinct areas of human activity are. With the accelerating advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is now more important than ever to recognise the critical role of the human factor in architecture, as it is anticipated that architecture as a profession will be significantly challenged by AI. Within this context, and by considering the complex connections between architecture and the various meanings and roles of ‘environment(s)’, the conference aims to draw attention to the limitations of technologically-driven innovations and how these can be balanced out by retaining human attributes at the centre of new explorations.

The particular focus on the topic of ‘environment(s)’ reflects several current scholarly developments, as represented in the three principal strands of the conference:

Strand 1. ‘Natural Environment(s)’: the increasing association of ‘environmental’ issues with the climate crisis and sustainability tends to overlook wider issues linked to the broader concept of ‘environment(s)’ and its interdependence with human nature.

Contributions are invited to address:

• How architecture has been affected by climate change (from pre-history to the present day).
• How the relationship between architecture and the natural world has been theorised over time.
• Design approaches that address the relationship between architecture and its surrounding ecology (e.g. ‘touching the earth lightly’).
• The relationship between architecture and meteorology / climatology.
• The role of culture and technology in shaping architecture’s response to climate.

Strand 2. ‘Human-centred Environment(s)’: long-established philosophical and psychological definitions of the human have linked it to its ‘environment(s)’, whereas contemporary scientific and technological advancements, like neuroscience, are furthering the two-directional influences between the two, and emerging indigenous cultures studies challenge West-centric epistemological models.

Contributions are invited to address:

• How architectural design, including architectural education practices, can benefit from the multiplicity of interpretations and acknowledgements of multi-layered diversities in attempted definitions of individual humans. [The strand is open to contemporary projects that experiment with new interdisciplinary methodologies in order to navigate the complex associations between the human and architecture.]
• How new readings of the reciprocal relationship between humans and their environments can inform the design of environments that nurture human health and wellbeing. [Papers and other submissions relating to healthcare architecture, especially mental healthcare environments, are particularly encouraged.]
• How historical studies can embrace the increasing multiplicity of available tools for our readings of humans’ relation to their environments (whether based on Western scientific or technological advances, or on better understandings of alternative epistemologies, such as those of Indigenous cultures), so as to re-visit, re-examine, and potentially re-interpret past practices and their physical traces.

Strand 3. ‘Controlled Environment(s)’: architecture and town planning have long been employed as part of spatial governance apparatus. The emergence of research and debates about the ‘built environment’ in the course of the twentieth century further highlighted the reciprocal relationship between architecture and political, societal and technological developments, and their effect on human (and) nature.

Contributions are invited to address:

• Architecture’s role in administrating the environment for the state / capital/ power.

• Environmental imagination and its architectural / artistic relevance.

• How the notion of the environment(s) fuse (use and abuse?) knowledge in the humanities and sciences, in particular for political, economic or even military ends.