DocTalks is a series dedicated to ongoing investigations by doctoral, postdoctoral, or early-career researchers into the expansive entanglement of architecture and the natural environment. These sessions are meant to create an intercollegiate cohort of scholars who workshop writing, share research findings, and experiment with methodological tools while engaging with the vision and investigations of the Ambasz Institute.
These Doc Talk sessions are intended for scholars or architecture history and theory, but scholars in related fields and the general public are welcome to attend.
Environmental Design and the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–42
Speaker
James Fortuna, University of St. Andrew
As a flagship program of the New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was one of several federal agencies that turned to the natural and built environment to promote sociocultural homogenization between the First and Second World Wars. This talk investigates the CCC’s role as an agent of national transformation and considers the links between the New Deal’s treatment of the American landscape and its promotion of a new, more pluralistic national identity.
While historians of the interwar United States are quick to note the social and environmental significance of the CCC, the cultural role of this program remains largely overlooked. Specifically, relevant scholarship has neglected to address the architectural output of this program and the way it related to the New Deal’s broader sociocultural initiatives. With camps in every state and overseas territory, the CCC reconfigured much of the American landscape and deployed a regionally diverse blend of vernacular architecture, all while fostering a mythologized sense of cultural heritage from coast to coast. In order to better understand both the role and rationale behind the design of these CCC buildings, this talk will turn to several extant structures across California, Connecticut, Florida, Oregon, and West Virginia. In evaluating these case studies, it will become clear that these buildings acted as key vehicles of the unifying message that drove the New Deal and its many so-called “alphabet agencies” from the depths of economic depression to a state of preparedness as the country headed toward global war. Accordingly, this talk considers the Corps’ role in the New Deal’s construction of popular historical consciousness and draws attention to the frequent interactions between a diverse range of urban-born enrollees and rural populations before concluding with a timely discussion of the legacy and ultimate fate of these structures. How, if at all, should they be preserved? Whose responsibility is it to decide? What value might they hold in the 21st century US?
James Fortuna is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and an adjunct assistant professor at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida. His research interests lie in the cultural, diplomatic, and spatial history of 20th-century Europe and the United States, with a particular focus on the public architecture of the interwar period and its relationship to the construction of national identity. He is especially interested in instances of creative or ideological transfer between states and the spaces or places in which this might have occurred. He also explores the extent to which various interpretations of cultural heritage came to influence the reimagined built environments of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the New Deal USA. Before coming to St. Andrews, he completed a master’s degree in history at the University of Cambridge.
Respondent
Maryia Rusak, ETH Zurich
The Transformation of a Natural to a Built Environment for the Working Class Between the 19th and 20th Centuries in Madrid: “Esto no es fantasear. Esa Ciudad Lineal, … no es, no, una utopía”
Speaker
Alice Pozzati
Madrid, Spain, 1894: Arturo Soria y Mata (1844–1920) founded a joint stock company to build from scratch a prototype city for the future, the linear city. Soria y Mata, while not a technician, was interested in the city’s problems. Observing Madrid, he identified the dystopia prevalent in 19th-century metropolises: housing hyperdensity, sanitation issues, and lack of access to public services and vegetation. The design of the new linear city was primarily aimed at the working class, which suffered the most from the consequences of 19th-century urbanization. Soria proposed to solve the issues of the complex urban system by founding a new city that would break away from the urbe inherited from the past, both formally and physically. Soria was an entrepreneur and managed to build a city surrounded by a “green setting” mirroring his ideals. To accomplish this, Soria defined the proportion between the built environment and nature: only one-fifth of the blocks could be built on, while the surrounding areas were reserved for gardens.
The linear city, in contrast to the crowded, dirty, and unhealthy Madrid of the late 19th century, was rich in trees and bushes, which were the guarantors of physical and moral hygiene. The linearists blamed the long-established cities for detaching from the natural sphere in a vision typical of the 19th century. This vision idealized the hygienic countryside as a perfect place where people could live healthily and happily, free from the challenges of urban living. To realize his project and incorporate the landscape into the city, Soria used an opposite and complementary communication strategy: a house organ was founded, and a promotional event was organized, both in 1897. It was during the event that thousands of trees were planted by the participants, which transformed a barren and unpopulated area into a green and thriving environment.
Alice Pozzati, ArchPhD, is a fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America (Columbia University, New York, spring 2024), with a research project titled “Golpe de muerte. The growing city / the dying city. The footprint of a city that (almost) disappeared: the Ciudad Lineal in Madrid.” She was a research fellow at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, for a project on the establishment of the Turin School of Architecture in the early 20th century (post-doc, 2023). She got her PhD in 2022 with a thesis titled “From Theory to Practice. Madrid’s Ciudad Lineal, the project of an entrepreneur, Arturo Soria y Mata” (supervisor Annalisa Dameri, PhD in architectural and landscape heritage, Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino). Since 2014, she has been engaged in the field of historical-archival research for the analysis of urban transformations (18th–20th centuries) in Turin and Madrid. She is included in the roll of scholars of the Politecnico di Torino qualified to carry out teaching activities (disciplinary sector: architectural history and urban history). She is an adjunct professor of the course “The context of both the construction and the architectures of the 20th century” as part of the master’s program ARURCOHE. Architectural and Urban Contemporary Heritage (History of Architecture and the City module, academic year 2023/24, fall 2023 semester).
Respondent
Marcela Aragüez, IE University, Madrid
This event was made possible through a generous gift from Emilio Ambasz. The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment is a platform for fostering dialogue, promoting conversation, and facilitating research about the relationship between the built and natural environment, with the aim of making the interaction between architecture and ecology visible and accessible to the wider public while highlighting the urgent need for an ecological recalibration.