Dockside Landings and Threshold Spaces: Reckoning Architecture's Place in Marine Environmental History

Abstract

For centuries, American architecture and, more broadly speaking, American cultural landscapes, have been both instruments and emblems of the modern environmental temperament that Europeans brought to the New World. This legacy—one where North American settlement has simultaneously used architecture to mythologize relationships with the continent's natural endowments and to exert economic and political dominion over them—would appear to be a fundamental component of the matrix that has driven the continent's environmental history. Yet most of the field's scholarship does not situate architecture, nor use it adequately as source material, in a manner commensurate with this standing. This essay is a call to invigorate the nexus that links marine environmental history with our broadest definitions of what constitutes architectural history—in short, giving due consideration to the subtle and overt ecological standing of built environments. To advance marine environmental history from this vantage point, fisheries architecture needs to be scrutinized as environmental threshold (conduit, portal, flow) and environmental agent (ecologically dynamic, transformational). This discussion first explores a number of issues that seek to clarify how we might place buildings, boats, infrastructure, and cultural landscape more centrally in our work. Such perspectives, shaped by gradual strides in architecturally driven approaches to marine contexts, empower environmental history's capacity to reckon visually and spatially how architecture geographically organizes fisheries on land and water.