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

This lecture considers the rise of the American environmental movement as a driver of changes in professional-managerial expertise. As federal, state, and local land-use controls proliferated, architects increasingly worked beyond the design of individual buildings, developing new design tools and techniques of persuasion in response to public pressure on development. Interdisciplinary experts — what I call “environmental professionals” — came to mediate disputes over the fate of the built environment, modeling the consequences of real estate projects and arguing for their ecological fitness before courts, regulators, and the public. Tracing how aesthetic judgment, computational software, and bureaucratic regulation converged to remake both the product and practice of design, 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.