Edited by Meredith TenHoor and Jessica Varner
Toxics. Toxins. Toxicants. Toxicity. These terms slip in and out of architecture, design, and urban planning discussions, shifting between scientific, medical, legal, and social meanings. But what does the history of toxics reveal about the history of architecture? From nineteenth-century arsenic-laden wallpaper to present-day chemical sensitivity–inducing formaldehyde, increasingly industrialized building practices have created both new products and new modes of consumption, production, regulation, and disposal. Over the last one hundred years, building materials have become increasingly composite—made by cutting, mixing, extrusion, cross-lamination, and even nanomaterial microscopic manipulation. These processes can covertly introduce toxic substances into the architectural spaces we inhabit. How should we narrate histories of dangerous materials that so often evade our consciousness, governance, and control? How do we understand the corporeal, environmental, and social responsibilities architects assume or reject under these evolving material conditions? Finally, how do we account for the methodological and practical challenges of writing about untraceable substances, mapping inaccessible supply chains, or navigating legal restrictions on material archives? Writing histories of deleterious building materials offers an opportunity to understand how the differences between nature and artifice, production and consumption, business-as-usual and environmental justice, and the toxic and nontoxic are produced and perpetuated.