Histories of the Present, Practices of Transformation: A Manifesto

Climate change. Pollution. Environmental injustice. Construction emissions. How do and should architectural historians engage with this present? What is the role of history (and the historian) in confronting present-day ecological crisis? Following Kristina Spohr Readman’s “history of the present” (2011), this paper forms a manifesto, outlining new politics and practices of architectural history. To locate a “third ecology” for the future, we argue, requires situating history and the present not as dichotomous but within an evolving, dynamic relationship located at the crossroads of architecture and environmental justice. We diagnose the present as a critical moment for exploring how historians can analyze relationships between architecture and the “climatic turn.”

Bios

Jennifer Mack is a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and Associate Professor and Docent at KTH. Broadly, Mack’s work links architectural history and anthropology to investigate culture, politics, and ecology in the built environment. Mack’s book, The Construction of Equality (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), received the Margaret Mead Award in 2018. She has co-edited the anthologies Rethinking the Social in Architecture (Actar, 2019) and Life Among Urban Planners (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Mack is a member of the editorial boards of Thresholds and Human Organization and an Associate Editor of Housing, Theory and Society.

Helena Mattsson is Professor of Theory and History at KTH School of Architecture. Her research deals with the 20th-century theory on welfare state architecture and contemporary architectural history with a special focus on the interdependency between politics, economy, and spatial organizations. She has recently published the monography Architecture and Retrenchment: Neoliberalization of the Swedish Modell across Aesthetics and Space, 1968-1994 (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023). She is currently working on a project on women and radical bureaucracy. She is part of the group Action Archive and a member of the editorial board of Journal of Architecture.