"Land Air Sea: Architecture and Environment in the Early Modern Era posits that the long Renaissance and eighteenth century are vital for understanding how many of the concerns present in current debates on climate change and sustainability were already developed in earlier centuries. Traversing three physical and intellectual domains, Land Air Sea consists of case studies that examine how questions of sustainability were formulated and addressed in early modern architecture and the built environment. With respect to emergent technologies, indigenous cultural beliefs, natural philosophy, and political statecraft, the book aims to transform our modernist conceptions of what buildings are by studying early modern approaches to human impacts on the habitable world"--
Land Air Sea positions the early modern era as a key historical period where the merger of natural and human histories offers new evidence for understanding the built environment as an holistic system that existed well before todays climate crisis.
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Notes on the Editors
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Climatic EffectsEnvironmental Genealogies before Contemporary
Crisis
Jennifer Ferng and Lauren Jacobi
Part 1: Land
1 Land, War, and Castles: The Management of Landed Wealth
Katie Jakobiec
2 The Paradoxical Colosseum: A Mesocosm for Early Modern Rome
Kristi Cheramie and Robert John Clines
3 Flood Mitigation, Territory, and Time: Girolamo di Pace da Prato in Early
Ducal Florence
Caroline E. Murphy
Part 2: Air
4 Sleeping under the Hazardous Dome of the Sky
An Intertextual Study of Representation of Corporeality in Seventeenth
Century Architecture and Poetry of Safavid Isfahan
Mahroo Moosavi
5 Forced Air: Artificial Power and Environmental Control in
Eighteenth-Century Britain
Aleksandr Bierig
6 Cosmogenic Histories: Aboriginal Observations on Catastrophe and Climate
Jennifer Ferng
Part 3: Sea
7 Left on Shore: Iron and Fish in the North Atlantic
Christy Anderson
8 Sea Levelling: Britains Early Modern Port Infrastructure as Environmental
Context
William M. Taylor
Bibliography
Index
Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Sydney. Her recent books include Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks (2021) and Drawing Climate: Visualising Invisible Elements of Architecture (2021). She received her Ph.D. from MIT.
Lauren Jacobi was Associate Professor in the History, Theory and Criticism division of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Her first book is The Architecture of Banking in Renaissance Italy (2019). She is pursuing a Master of Divinity at Yale University.
