Yale Architecture Forum
Irene Cheng
“Inhuman Agency”: Tending to Asbestos
As pervasive as it is reviled, asbestos today conjures a plethora of ready associations–to withering disease, as well as costly and dangerous remediation–a problem so omnipresent and ominous that the simplest response is often to leave it intact and mask it. It may seem incongruous then to encounter this ambivalent material of modernity in Bernard Maybeck’s iconic Arts & Crafts building, the First Church of Christ Scientist in Berkeley, completed in 1911. Although he initially intended to clad the building in wood, the architect later specified asbestos panels, no doubt motivated by the material’s turn-of-the-century reputation as a miraculously fireproof substance. How does the presence of asbestos complicate our understanding of Arts & Crafts–a style of architecture most often celebrated for its proximity to nature, material honesty, virtue, and celebration of labor and craft? This talk investigates the asbestos tiles in the church in order to not only offer a revisionist reading of the Arts & Crafts movement, but also to think about architecture’s mineralogical and ecological dimensions. Violently extracted from the ground, processed and added to cement to form a fireproof composite, asbestos contributed to a cladding that was simultaneously earthy and industrial, protective and pernicious. An analysis of this miracle mineral and its corporeal effects offers a vivid demonstration of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls geology’s “inhuman agency,” inviting reflection on the intimacy of the lithic and the human.
Irene Cheng is an associate professor at the Cooper Union. An architectural historian and critic, her research explores the entanglements of architecture, culture, environment, and politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cheng is author of The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, and co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present and The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century. She is currently working on a book that explores the political ecology of Arts and Crafts architecture, as well as a related collaborative project called the Materialities of Empire. Cheng has previously taught at Columbia University, UCLA, and the California College of the Arts.
Architecture Forum is a PhD-led symposium jointly organized by the Departments of Architecture and History of Art, providing an inclusive platform for scholars to present and debate new research on the history of the built environment.