Session Chairs: Sofia Nannini, Politecnico di Torino and Víctor Muñoz Sanz, TU Delft
With origins in mid-nineteenth-century France, the scientific discipline of zootechnics transformed animal husbandry into an industrial practice. Merging veterinary science, genetics, chemistry, and rural knowledge, zootechnics has been a multifaceted field for bio-technological experimentations. Controversially, it has been instrumental in the realms of animal exploitation, ethical challenges, and environmental degradation. Throughout its development, zootechnics has produced a specific and complex built environment, which we call zootechnical architecture . This architecture is a transnational and multiscalar phenomenon that connects traditional barns to larger feeding operations, human and non-human labor, through a web of technologies, expertise, and practices that have spread globally via colonial, commercial, and scientific networks. This panel seeks to make a fundamental step towards a still unwritten architectural history of zootechnics, by mapping recurrent typologies and technologies, notable actors and institutions, and by mobilizing print and archival sources.
We invite papers that focus on the architecture of industrial animal farming from the establishment of the zootechnics (as coined by Adrien de Gasparin in the late 1840s). We are interested in papers that merge architectural history with animal, environmental, and social histories. We invite papers that focus on land animal species (cows, pigs, poultry, sheep, goats, etc.) and that critically explore the species-specific relations between farmed animals and architecture. Ultimately, the panel seeks to address one urgent question: How do we write an architectural history of the zootechnical industry, paying attention to both human and animal labor and agency?
Abstract submission deadline: 8 June 2026
For more information, please visit https://sah.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/SAH-2027-Chicago-Call-for-Papers.pdf.