The session is chaired by Sofia Nannini (Politecnico di Torino) and Víctor Muñoz Sanz (TU Delft) as part of the 2026 European Architectural History Network (EAHN conference) in Aarhus, Denmark.
Animal based products are everywhere: on our supermarket shelves, in our skincare routines, or in the shoes we wear. Yet the scale and quality of the places where those products come from are far from our collective imagination or set in some form of idealized countryside. Industrial livestock farming is a pervasive planetary phenomenon. Scientists warn us that factory farming crucially contributes to the climate emergency: the breath and flatulence of cows warm the planet; monocultures of animal feed crops drive deforestation, biodiversity loss, and challenge the livelihoods of many; overcrowding increases zoonotic risks to human and non-human health. At the same time, in Europe and beyond, farmers are protesting in defense of what they consider their culture and mission to feed the world.
Caught in the middle, the lives and deaths of billions of non-human animals annually continue occurring in buildings which are little known, if not wholly invisible. Somehow, the history of these buildings, with their layouts and technologies, is also opaque and often disregarded by architectural historiography, with a few exceptions (Garric 2014; Alsayer 2021). Conversely, since Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command (1948), many studies have focused on the architectural, urban, and social history of the slaughterhouse and of the packing industry (Cronon 1991; Vialles 1994; Young Lee 2008; Pachirat 2013; Pacyga 2015).
From sixteenth-century Palladian villas to today’s concentrated feeding operations, Western architecture has evolved along the entanglements between humans and domesticated animals – mostly cattle, pigs, poultry, and horses.How do we conceptualize an architecture of animal farming – when we are dealing with a blend of technologies, animal bodies, ideal abstractions, and dirty realities? The architectural history of intensive animal farming is scattered among different geographies, actors, and institutions – and it is often a history without architects. Who has designed these spaces since the industrial revolution – architects, engineers, veterinary doctors, agrarian experts, or also the animals themselves? Which zootechnical elements or typologies date back to pre-industrial times and attest to a longue durée of rural and farming practices? What was the architectural impact of the animal welfare debate, sparked in the 1960s with the publication of Animal Machines by Ruth Harrison (1964)?
While animal farming and its environmental impact has been the object of attention in anthropology, geography, STS, environmental humanities, and the arts, investigating this architecture and its paradoxical and multifaceted global histories is now more urgent than ever (Schrepfer & Scranton 2004; Blanchette 2020; Piazzesi 2023; Wadiwel 2023). This session welcomes case studies on the architectural history of animal farming at a global scale, with a preference for papers that present original archival investigations and that shed light on the industrialization of rural practices that occurred in the past three centuries. Key questions we would like to address in this session include, but are not limited to: what are the models, technologies, building materials that most contributed to the industrialization of animal agriculture? What have been the key institutions, companies, professional figures, and geographies in this history? To what extent have farming practices been technologies and instruments of Western colonialism (Fischer 2015; Specht 2019)? How have societal and cultural ideas on ‘the animal’ and welfare influenced the architecture of industrialized farming? What has been the role of human and non-human labor in the spatialization of factory farming?
With this session we aim at increasing our knowledge and awareness on animal farming, in order to promote a deeper understanding of the Anthropocene and its alternative definitions – most notably, the Thanatocene, or the era of massive global death (Bonneuil/Fressoz 2016). If the future is closely dependent on our capacity of historical analysis, research into the history of industrial farming may suggest new modes of positive and responsible coexistence and allow the architecture discipline to participate in the search for more livable other worlds.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted directly to the chairs (sofia.nannini@polito.it, V.MunozSanz@tudelft.nl) by September 19, 2025, along with the applicant’s name, email address, professional affiliation, address, telephone number and a short curriculum vitae (maximum one page).
References
Alsayer, Dalal Musaed. 2021. “Chicken of Tomorrow and Farm of Today: The Chicken, the Farm, and the Greenhouse.” In On Foraging: Food Knowledge and Environmental Imaginaries in the UAE’s Landscape, edited by Faysal Tabbarah, Dima Srouji, and Meitha Almazrooei, 48–59. Abu Dhabi, UAE: Warehouse 421.
Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London/New York: Verso.
Cronon, William. 1991. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton.
Fischer, John Ryan. 2015. Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai'i. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Garric, Jean-Philippe. 2014. Vers une agritecture: Architecture des constructions agricoles (1789-1950). Bruxelles: Mardaga.
Pachirat, Timothy. 2013. Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Pacyga, Dominic A. 2015. Slaughterhouse: Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Piazzesi, Benedetta. 2023. Del governo degli animali. Allevamento e biopolitica. Macerata: Quodlibet Studio.
Schrepfer, Susan R., and Philip Scranton, eds. 2004. Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History. New York/London: Routledge.
Specht, Joshua. 2019. Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Vialles, Noilie. 1994. Animal to Edible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. 2023. Animals and Capital. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Young Lee, Paula. 2008. Meat, Modernity and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse. University of New Hampshire Press.
