Call for Papers: Environment in Architecture’s History and Architecture in Environment’s History

Jan 22, 2025 - Jun 01, 2025

CALL FOR PAPERS
International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA)
Special Issue: Environment in Architecture’s History and Architecture in Environment’s History

Guest editor: Esra Akcan
Thematic volume planned for: 2027
Abstract submission deadline: June 1, 2025

One may misleadingly infer from the data on the built environment’s responsibility in causing climate change that architects have not paid attention to climate. To the contrary, however, there is hardly any other criterion as ordinary and as omnipresent as climate in architectural design. A forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture will address the intersection of geopolitical and ecological concerns in architecture and explore the multidirectional and multilateral relations between the three words in its title—architecture, history, environment. Articles will evaluate architecture’s role in climate change by writing not only the history of architecture with respect to climate but also the history of climate due to architecture.

From the writings of Vitruvius to guidebooks on corporate environmentalism, references to environmental regulation and considerations of the sun and the wind, the heat and the cold, rain and snow, have been regular inputs for designers of buildings around the world. Established historians have provided a large spectrum of definitions for climate, ranging from a criterion to be controlled to one that inspires difference: Johann Winckelmann’s climate determinism has long shaped the Euro-American notions of beauty and artistic superiority; Bruno Taut has critiqued climate imperialism in Japan and Turkey; Reyner Banham has offered a history of western modern architecture as a chain of technological inventions that move towards a seamless closed interior; Ken Frampton has critiqued this chain as a trivialization of cultural heritage; and Daniel Barber has endorsed midcentury climatic modernism by foregrounding the façade as the mediator between the interior of a building and the climate of its exterior. This issue of IJIA will build on this discourse, but pay particular attention to architecture’s accountability for climate change over time. It particularly calls for contributions that critically analyze historical examples when concerns over climate were complicit with colonialism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, or religious fundamentalism. Given that climate has served as a proxy for nation and race for much of the modern and colonial periods, this special issue calls for a layered understanding of the intertwinement between social, global and environmental issues in architectural history.

The issue hopes to provide a layered global and planetary history that extends the narrative beyond the recent ones on the colonization and decolonization of the world due to the British, French, and Spanish empires. Though helping to right earlier accounts and expose the entanglement of modernity, capitalism, and coloniality, these studies still exclude large portions of the world. Their accumulated outcome ignores differences between lands before and after they were colonized by either of the European imperial powers, and modernity’s other dark sides, including environmental degradation caused by national partitions, religious divides, or ethno-centrism.

Contributors are encouraged to submit rigorously researched articles that acknowledge the unity of the earth’s ecosystem while engaging the unique challenges of places traditionally associated with the ‘Islamic world’. Authors might submit or analyze architectural projects that come to the realization that the division of the global ecosystem into nation-states produces environmental damages, and those that envision ways of multispecies co-living. The special issue hopes that place-based – but not place-bound – historical analyses will contribute to the writing of global and planetary histories of modern architecture in a way that responds to call for understanding geopolitical and ecological issues together.

Welcome are theoretically engaged articles that demonstrate the important role of history writing in the intersectional matters of global peace and environmental sustainability, and in bringing societies to a confrontation with the relation between political and ecological harms of the past. Questions addressed by contributors might include:

1. How can historians evaluate architecture’s role in planetary crises by writing about climate in the history of architecture in such a way that architecture’s role in the history of climate (climate change) is also revealed?
2. What are the buildings and large-scale projects that expose the intersections between political and ecological harms?
3. (When) is climatic modernism complicit with colonialism, fascism, ethnocentrism or religious fundamentalism
4. (How) does the division of the global ecosystem into nation states accelerate ecocide?
5. What has been the relation between climate, race and nation as social constructs?
6. (How) is global warming and global war related?
7. What have been the consequences of the dismissal of local wisdom and conscious production of ignorance in climatization during colonization and nation-state formation?
8. A lot has been written about the role of architects and planners in damaging or improving the environment and biodiversity. What is the role of nonhuman actors in damaging or improving the cites that humans built?
   

Articles offering historical and theoretical analysis (Design in Theory; DiT) should be between 6000 and 8000 words. Those on design and practice (Design in Practice; DiP) should be between 3000 and 4000 words. Architecture, urban, landscape or art historians, architects, urbanists, landscape architects, climate scientists, wildlife biologists, botanists, anthropologists, and geographers whose work resonates with the topic of this special issue are welcome to contribute discussions that address the critical themes of the journal. Collaboratively authored articles are also welcome. Contributions are welcomed from individuals at any stage of their careers, and advanced graduate students are encouraged to submit proposals.

Please send a title and a 400-word abstract to IJIA Assistant Editor Dana Katz at IJIAclimate@gmail.com by June 1, 2025.

Authors of proposals will be contacted by July 1, 2025, and may be requested to submit full article drafts for consideration by January 30, 2026. All submissions will undergo blind peer review, editing, and revision. For detailed author instructions, please consult https://www.intellectbooks.com/international-journal-of-islamic-architecture.