The Material Culture of Wind: Architecture, Landscape, Heritage
Towers are buildings indissolubly associated with notions of sight, site, and scenery. Since antiquity, their vertical structure could mark control over a territory, drawing attention on isolated portions of land. For instance, in the case of lighthouses or through the placement of flags, raised architectures may signal the presence of human settlements, safe havens, or danger. Throughout the globe and across time, tower-like buildings have also played a fundamental role in measuring and manipulating the natural power of wind, functioning as anemographs or monumental weathervanes, passive cooling systems, and windmills.
Cultural and art histories have previously focused on concepts of atmosphere(s) (Gernot Böhme), clouds (Joseph Imorde), wind iconography (Alessandro Nova), and the relationship between architecture and climate (Daniel A. Barber). However, a more radical assessment of the agency of wind in shaping natural and built landscapes has yet to take place. Wind, i.e. the natural movement of air, is, by definition, an immaterial and impalpable physical force. However, wind architecture reflects the material culture of this natural element, testifying to its manifestation, the observable modifications it brings to objects and landscapes, and its relation to notions of mobility and motion (kinesis).
Combining historical, anthropological, and environmental approaches, my project considers the agency of wind in shaping architecture in a broad transhistorical and transregional perspective. Case studies include, among others, the Tower of Winds in the Roman Forum of Athens from ca. the second century BC, the windcatchers (bâdgir) of Yazd (from the Safavid period onwards), the eighteenth-century windmills of Kinderdijk, and the salt evaporation ponds of Trapani and Paceco in Sicily, which are first documented in antiquity and are still active today. The project examines such case studies as the result of the interactions between natural resources, humans, and habitats, thus considering both the aesthetics and functional aspects of architecture as products of complex (eco)systems, overcoming monodirectional and binary relations between human and non-human forces.
In its second part, the project then looks at the intervention of international bodies, such as UNESCO (in Kinderdijk) and WWF (in Sicily), and their practices of preservation, heritagization, and policy making in some of the aforementioned sites. In doing so, it explores how wind architecture negotiates the construction of a place’s cultural identity and processes of musealization. What political role do institutions (such as governments, NGOs, and museums) play in crafting local identities through narratives on natural and built landscapes? What is their ethical stance? And how can the study of technologies of the past inform contemporary ecological approaches to architecture? In raising such issues and envisioning an ethico-ecological approach to art and architectural history, this project provides the first scholarly account of the material culture of wind.
