Toward an Ecocritical History of Early Modern Architecture: A View from the Netherlands and the Dutch Colonial Empire

What were the ecological dimensions of architecture in the early modern world? And what does it mean to investigate the architecture of early modernity (c. 1400-1800) from an ecological perspective? This paper proposes an initial response to both questions.

Building on recent methodological reflections in art history, I take stock of a growing body of ecologically-oriented scholarship on the architecture of early modern Europe and its planetary networks. I ask what researchers in this field can learn from architectural historians of other world regions and time periods, as well as fields of the architectural humanities that embraced ecological questions earlier. Considering evidence from the early modern Netherlands and Dutch colonial empire—including terraforming, resource management, and plantation architecture—I propose principles for studying ecological valences of early modern architectural culture. Finally, I outline distinctive skills and insights that historians of early modern architecture might contribute to broader discourses in environmental humanities and ecological sciences and indicate questions that remain open to this nascent field.

Elizabeth J. Petcu is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and a scholar of the intersections of art, science, and ecology in northern Europe and the early modern world. Her book, The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation, was published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press through a grant from the Graham Foundation. She is currently completing a second book, Dürer’s Uncertainty: From the Constraints of Measurement to the Power of the Unknown, with a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a recent Visiting Scholar in Cambridge’s Department of History of Art (’25-’26), Petcu serves as Associate Editor of Renaissance Studies and the Renaissance Society of America’s Field Representative for Environment and Ecologies.

Online Registration here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/86a4be8e-b3bc-452f-aa15-93d807f0fc9a@49a50445-bdfa-4b79-ade3-547b4f3986e9 (https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/86a4be8e-b3bc-452f-aa15-93d807f0fc9a@49a50445-bdfa-4b79-ade3-547b4f3986e9)

Description supplied by the event organiser.