ARC3324HS
Instructor: Aleksandr Bierig
Meeting Section: L0101
Thursdays 3:00-6:00 p.m.

What are the acceptable limits of altering nature towards human ends? This course will consider the intellectual and material history of “designing nature” by exploring the ideologies and practices that have shaped efforts to reconfigure natural systems to meet the demands of political economy.  

On one hand, we will explore those ideals—central among them, the notion of “improvement”—that underpinned and justified designs on the natural world. In doing so, we will consider how modern concepts of growth, premised on the relentless exploitation of nature, can be traced back to ideas founded in the early modern period (c. 1450–1800), primarily in Europe. Associated with the rise of modern engineering and science, this ideology was based around a belief that, by virtue of new tools and techniques, humans might become—as René Descartes famously envisioned—the “master and possessor of nature.” Within this framework, places and peoples understood as too close to the natural world—from landless peasants in rural Europe to Indigenous peoples across the Americas—could be justifiably dispossessed and replaced in the name of “improvement” and “civilization.” On the other hand, we will explore how such ideas manifested in practice, through historical case studies taken from environmental, landscape, engineering, and architectural history. From the remapping of territory and the establishment of plantation ecologies, to the rerouting of waterways and the large-scale harvesting of energy, these projects demonstrate the persistence of the ideologies of designing nature and their destructive intensification through the course of modern history.  

Throughout, we will explore how nature came to be seen as a resource, and examine how concepts of ingenuity, labor, value, abundance, and scarcity inflected thinking across the interconnected realms of natural philosophy, political economy, engineering, and architecture. Designing Nature will be taught in parallel with a seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and students in both courses will collaborate by sharing research and findings throughout the term.