Toxics

Organized by
Meredith TenHoor
Jessica Varner

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Niagara County home, near Love Canal, abandoned after eighty-one chemicals, including benzene, were found present in the suburb.

UPI photograph, 1981.

Introduction

Mattering Toxics and Making Toxics Matter in Architecture and Landscape Histories • Meredith TenHoor & Jessica Varner

Materials: From Pipes to Pipelines

Workers’ Bodies and Plywood Production: The Pathological Power of a Hybrid Material • Janet Ore

“With-On” White: Inconspicuous Modernity with and on Aesthetic Surfaces, 1910–1950 • Ingrid Halland & Marte Johnslien

Grounds: Lands and Legacies

Unknowing Wastelands in Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum • Lisa Uddin

Thinking Like a Gulch: Pacific War Heritage, Settler Lands, and Subsurface Toxic Uncertainties in Oʻahu • Desirée Valadares

Life: From Bodies to the Embodied

Women in the Scrap Heap: Tetanus, Scrap Metals, and Women’s Labor in the Era of the World Wars • Peter H. Christensen

Pipes, Provision, Profits, Privatization: The Materials of Water Infrastructure in Nineteenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica, and London, England • Jonah Rowen

What does the history of toxics reveal about the history of architecture, and what can the history of architecture contribute to histories of toxics? By narrating histories of materials that so often evade our consciousness, governance, and control, we can understand the corporeal, environmental, and social impacts of architecture and landscape.