Designed to protect and propagate exotic plants from around the world, the nineteenth-century glasshouse was a topos for environmental concerns. While historians have pointed to the confluence of glasshouse horticulture and the rise of environmental thought in architecture, how and why these transfers took place is not well understood. In On the Horticultural Origins of Victorian Glasshouse Culture, Dustin Valen examines how gardening informed architectural production in nineteenth-century England by transmitting Victorian science into building culture. He explores how gardening periodicals and books served as vehicles for environmental and scientific thought, and how “artificial climates” made by horticulturalists were reinscribed in debates over human health and transformed into “medical climates” in architecture. Bridging these disciplinary boundaries, the glasshouse played a key role in the emerging environmental paradigm in architecture by crossbreeding building practices with scientific knowledge and illustrating how mechanical solutions could be applied to living problems.

The diffusion of modernist principles in Canadian building and planning occurred through many channels, but among these the Architectural Research Group of Ottawa and Montreal played a crucial role. Formed in 1938 to conduct research into postwar reconstruction, the group produced articles, radio addresses, and exhibitions in an effort to nurture modernist sentiment across the country. For these young architects, the federal government’s commitment to replanning and rebuilding postwar Canadian cities presented them with an opportunity to intervene in the future of Canadian practice. They decried the “backwardness” of conservative practitioners while promoting the ideas of a European avant-garde and orchestrating numerous transatlantic exchanges. This article discusses the group’s role in politicking for architectural and urban modernism, as well as the contributions of some of its key members. It shows that Canadian professionals were not simply passive receptors of international modernism but played an active part in shaping these ideas during the immediate postwar period, and that Canada’s federal government played a unique role in accelerating this process by allowing modernist architects and planners to operate within and through a number of government-sponsored agencies.

Engagé en 1949 par l’Université McGill pour donner le cours sur l’histoire de l’architecture moderne, l’architecte natif de Montréal Hazen Edward Sise (1906–1974) prôna à ses étudiants et étudiantes les vertus du modernisme et leur décria le retard de l’architecture canadienne. Formé dans l’atelier de Le Corbusier et engagé dans la guerre d’Espagne, son expérience immédiate du mouvement moderne et ses opinions politiques influèrent grandement sur son enseignement. Faisant écho à une poignée d’historiens modernes novateurs dont la représentation tautologique du passé cherchait à revitaliser l’architecture du XXe siècle, Sise enseigna l’histoire comme une forme d’instruction pratique, ambitionnant ainsi la transformation de l’architecture canadienne au travers de ses futurs praticiens

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This essay explores how nineteenth-century environmental technologies rendered climates mobile through an examination of a British-led mission to the Niger River in West Africa in 1841. To protect white sailors from the tropical African climate, expedition authorities invited Scottish ventilation engineer David Boswell Reid to consult on the design of three iron steam ships. Using a centralized air intake connected to a wind sail, Reid created a pressurized plenum below deck whose air he medicated by treating it with chemicals. The Niger mission exemplifies how Victorian ventilating practices were informed by unilineal theories of progress in which climate served as a key index for measuring animal, vegetable, and human progress. Regions of the globe with climates similar to Britain’s were considered ideal for colonization. Tropical climates, however, were thought to have damaging effects on European bodies. Climate was also blamed for impeding the rise of civilization. Drawing on medical journals and reports, this essay discusses nineteenth-century ventilating practices in terms of their relationship to the tropical anxieties of their time. It posits climate control as an ecological mission within the broader project of British imperialism, and shows how Western ideas about thermal comfort emerged through a discursive entanglement with racial anthropology and imperial interests in the torrid zone.