Architectural history, planning history, and the environmental perspective: a report from Iceland

Over the last decade, architectural history has responded to the climate crisis by strongly integrating environmental topics into its research agenda. The change has been so dramatic that it can be referred to as a paradigm shift within the discipline. The article reviews research tendencies in the environmental history of architecture by discussing the papers presented at a conference organized in Reykjavik in 2023 and several recent publications. The introduction of environmental perspectives in architectural history appears to call into question consolidated ways of understanding its relationship with planning history. Cities are no longer seen as an essential field of analysis to achieve meaningful generalizations in architectural research; many recent works privilege, on the contrary, the investigation of the flows and movements linking individual buildings to processes taking place at a global or planetary level. The paper discusses the question from three interrelated perspectives (the scales of observation, the articulation of temporalities, and the public role of historians). It argues that the environmental turn affecting many fields of the humanities open the way for rethinking patterns of cross-disciplinary collaboration.