ABSTRACT
This contribution advocates for more literal descriptions and pedagogies of architecture. To do so, it presents a terrestrial description of the Seagram Building: how humans and nature interacted with the thin crust of the planet through its architecture. Architecture reorganizes nature and society, core and periphery in particular ways that today demand overt attention and new methods of description. Given the environmental, social, and political realities that confront architectural pedagogy in the storms of this century, we need alternative descriptions of building and architecture as terrestrial activities that help us imagine how to maximize the impact of architecture on its environment in the most positive, generative, and architectural ways possible. To this end, the contribution mixes construction ecology, material geography, and world-systems analysis to help articulate the terrestrial activities that engender building generally, and more specifically the modes of unequal ecological and economic exchanges, environmental load displacements, and regimes of underdevelopment. Unless architects and architecture faculty begin to describe buildings as terrestrial events and artifacts, architects will—to our collective and professional peril—continue to operate outside the key environmental dynamics and key political processes of this century.
