Professionalizing the Environment: Architecture and Regulation in the Age of Ecology

This lecture considers the rise of the American environmental movement as a drive of changes in professional-managerial expertise, and how architects responded to a growing list of controls over land use and development with new design tools and techniques of persuasion. Placing architects at the heart of debates over the fate of the built environment, the lecture examines how aesthetic judgment, computational software, and bureaucratic regulation converged to remake both the products and practice of architecture. Following federal legislation, designers modeled the consequences of their projects and argued for them before regulators, courts, and the public. In tracing this history, the lecture recasts the environmental professional as a figure of mediation between developers and activists, science and art, whose legacy shapes today’s debates over expertise and environmental protection.

Bio: Jack Hanly is an environmental historian of architecture, urbanism, and landscape. His research examines how the design disciplines came to manage the environment as a professional domain over the 20th century. Jack is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in Environmental Humanities at Yale University, where he is working on a public history of New Haven’s environmental past, and will be teaching the Wellesley College Department of Art in the spring. He received his PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture from MIT; he also holds a Master of Environmental Design from the Yale School of Architecture and a BA in Environmental and Urban Studies from Bard College.