Art & Architecture vs. Environment: Failure, Redesign, and Innovation in the Early Modern Iberian World

The history of the early modern Iberian world is strewn with stories of architectural ambition and engineering innovation that seek to defy, overcome, or restructure extant environmental conditions. Land-reclaiming and flood-controlling projects represent a major thematic in this period, from Regi Lagni in Naples to the desagüe of Mexico City, as do seismic-responsive architectures such as the famous Earthquake Baroque in the Philippines and Guatemala, and as well as post-earthquake architectures in Sicily and Lisbon. Early modern architecture and engineering is often characterized by new boldness of ambition in responding to, attempting to overcome, or intending to change environmental conditions, it often yields cycles of loss, failure, and reiteration, until new technics are achieved.

This panel seeks to learn from stories of architectural and infrastructural failure, innovation, and redesign, especially as it relates to practices of colonialism, from across the Iberian world. We invite papers that seek to complicate the narrative of architectural domination on the land and landscape and search for cases that focus on moments of disjunction and defeat in the face of environmental factors, and the struggle to respond.

Papers may examine the consequences of incomplete knowledge of landscapes, ecologies, and materials, and the cases under consideration may be architectural works that were unfinished, hypothetical, never realized, or rebuilt after confronting natural disasters and misunderstandings of ground conditions. We also welcome papers on artworks representing knowledge of materials and environments; moments of disaster, engineering, and rebuilding; or changes in understandings of nature and environment.