 Welcome. Welcome everyone in the room and welcome everyone on the screen. My name is Luccia Lais. I'm an associate professor of architecture here at Columbia and I'm the director of the Bureau of Center. Welcome to Birbengland Coal, the sixth in our conversations on architecture and land in and out of the Americas, which is a series that began last January. I'll actually stand. This is for you. Before we begin, let me just mark for you that the last in our event will be early next spring of February 3rd, which is a Friday. We will host Rana Banda, the legal scholar from the University of British Columbia and the author of Global Lives of Property, who will be in conversations with Columbia's brain-owned naval law. The series to remind us all, and what we will still settle in, began as a way to tell our non-objectivizing histories of land to heed the kind of call on the part of indigenous scholars and activists and their allies, that land and lands are not a thing. They are a relationship. And the plural in our title, and this is that, the Americas is a way to, in a way, provincialize the phrase that gives the Bureau of Center its title, American architecture, the study of American architecture, in two ways. First of all, to remind ourselves that the United States is a hemispheric relation on this American continent. And also to remind ourselves that there are several Americas always in the United States. So today we have convened a panel of historians. As you can tell by the fact that we have reconvened the room as a seminar style. And they will take us away from the Americas to the Command Center of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. And the subject we've asked them to address is coal. But coal is, in fact, an avatar for two historical factors that kind of lurk behind any discussion of land, not only in this form, but in political discourse and academic discourse which are energy and capital. So today we'll hear about a moment when fossil fuels first get implicated with very specific landed relations. Specifically the political theory that we know well, that liberalism, that freedom is property and property is the mixing of labor into land. So this so-called mixing, as we will hear today, took on metabolic proportions in the 19th century. And our two speakers are on the forefront of writers on architectural history who are learning from and contributing to the history of capitalism. Not shown today, but present, is our respondent, Jonathan Levy, who is on the Zoom, and he is also well acquainted with the relation of architecture. For those of you who are here for the buildings and the architecture, lest you think that we're only going to hear a small episode of the history of British architecture. Rest assured, I would encourage you to think rather that we're about to hear about the beginning of a kind of remarkable vertical and horizontal unfolding of property relations or landed relations, that architects continue to have to deal with today. So just to remind you, about a month ago in this room we had a group of a panel of anthropologists and landscape architects who reminded us that every time anything has to be built, first somebody has to dig very deep into the ground and retrieve a column of soil that is called a geological survey, but it's also a 200-year history of social relations and settlement and resource extraction. In fact, a week later we had a panel of architects who are trying to build horizontally novel ways in Latin America and they reminded us that any kind of horizontality is only ever earned at the cost of appropriating or using the tools for adjudicating private property. So today we'll hear about the beginnings of that horizontal and vertical extension. So, and on a personal note, it's the first great pleasure on my part to bring together three scholars whose writings I admire and you will see they all have a talent for the short pithy formulation and I've always wondered what they would each think of each other's work and we say to each other, so here they are, sorry but I've done it and now you're all here together. So we are, they're going to give academic conference style papers, 20 minutes with slides and papers, they have shared each other's work in writing a longer draft and so I'll just introduce them and then we'll go straight one from the other and then there'll be questions at the end. So, without further ado, Alec Biric, Alexander Biric is a Harper Schmidt fellow and collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago. He writes on the built environment, the natural environment in relation to political economy and I'll shorten your bio. He's currently working on a book project on the London Coal Exchange and its manifold extensions. Zaynep Chalke-Alexander is an architectural historian in the Art History Department. She is the author of Kinesthetic Knowing, the co-editor of Design Techniques and Writing Architectural History and the editor of Grey Room, a member of Aggregate and she's working on a book titled, intriguingly titled, Imperial Data and Architectural History. And Jonathan Levy who is joining us either from Milan or Chicago or the airport, one of those, he's right there. He's a historian of economic life and of the United States at the University of Chicago where he's a member of the History Department, the Committee on Social Thought. He's currently the faculty director of the Law, Letters and Society program. He's the author of basically a number of books and articles that have become landmarks in this sort of new historiography of capitalism. I just mentioned too the very beautiful book, Freaks of Fortune, which is about risk in the 19th century and more recently the kind of heavy tome, I would say. Ages of American Capitalism is true in the United States. So I'm very happy that they're joining us and thank you all for joining as well and let's give them a round of applause. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Gia. I don't know what to say, it's a real privilege to share some of your great special moments with so many colleagues and friends. So I'd like to begin by reflecting on today's title, Building Land Coal. So while at first glance the relationship between coal and land might seem strange for you in arbitrary, in fact the connection between the two is a persistently in the history of philosophy. As I'll try to share over the next few minutes the conceptual relation between coal's extraordinary power and the absent land that power can be said to represent can be traced back to a very early moment in its history. More broadly, and as many people here will be very familiar with, the surplus energy of coal provided away for the societies that consumed it to transcend previous limits to growth. This thesis is most dervially associated with the late historian, E. A. Wrigley, famously drew a distinction between the conventional organic economy constrained by what could be extracted from natural sources of power like wind, water, soil, and wood. And the new mineral economy introduced by coal use which drew upon the mine sources of heat that held more energy than any collection of living forests could possibly contain. Another way to put this is in the terms of ghost acres which is an estimation of the land required to grow enough wood to match the energy provided by fossil fuels. The building on Wrigley's work, the historian Kenneth Cameron showed that by 1820 the inputs of both fossil fuel and colonial exploitation since the Britain's economy drew upon around 30 million ghost acres roughly equivalent to two extra Britons of Epsom land shown here in the diagrammatic form eating and fueling the smaller island. Remarkably, the history of the calculation between coal and land goes back much further still. Perhaps the most important book in the history of fossil fuel, among the many other insights in this 1865 coal question economist William Stanley Juddins wrote that he had quote, calculated from the known produce of continental forests in the comparative heat producing values of timber and coal that forests of an extent two and a half times exceeding the whole area of the United Kingdom would be required to finish even a theoretical equivalent to our annual coal produce. Perhaps the key word here is theoretical. Hull's surplus energy was so significant already in 1865 that it pushed Jebons' unsparing calculations into an entirely imagined realm, one whose effects could only be grasped by conjuring theoretical land in immense scale. The rest of my talk today goes back much further still to the first century of intensive coal use, where consumption was still limited to England and in large part to the nation's central metropolis, London. The text I will focus on today are by two late 17th century authors, the famous botanist and theorist John Evelyn and the lesser known writer Timothy Norris. Evelyn responded to the most infamous consequence of London's early experiment of fossil fuel, this pervasive pulse movement. But Evelyn and Norris put forward ambitious schemes to repair the city's atmospheric pollution, but their approaches were very different. But Evelyn's well-known scheme proposed a spatial solution to physically displace smoky industries outside of the city, Norris outlined a material solution, a scheme to restore what was the primary source of London's fuel. So if Evelyn's plan is well-known as a formative example of environmental urban planning, there's Norris's scheme, I will argue, that shows more clearly how the fossil fuel city presented new problems that were less about the appearance of space than about the composition of a new fossil fuel urban metabolism that had social, spatial, and temporal consequences. Before exploring these obvious, I'd like to briefly outline the context in which their ideas emerged. Early modern London, to repeat, was the planet's first coal-fired city. While mineral coal had long been used in England for specialty purposes, it was only after urban wind prices began to rise around the year 1600 that coal was adopted as a more general fuel. The appearance of this unusual long-distance trade in the bulk commodity was made only possible by the accidental existence of naturally occurring water areas that the mines in the north and the urban centre in the south show clear. Once coal made it to the metropolis, large industrial consumers like breweries, glass makers, soap boilers, and brick makers used large amounts of fossil fuel in spectacular fashion. But by 1650, if not earlier, the greatest share of coal was used in fossil crates as historian William Covert has recently shown and outlined in this statement. The larger effects of this local energy transition were a wide range. The whole rights historian Derek Keane co-court in Medellin, London with a virtually unlimited source of energy to support its physical growth. Coal allowed for the production of building materials like brick, glass, and made iron and unprecedented scales, as well as providing a fuel to a larger population that could have ever been supported otherwise. In short, before Britain built on its coast takers, London did. Another consequence of London's coal use, of course, was smoke. In the considerable scholarship on London's pollution, historians and literary scholars have cast coal smoke as a hallmark of the city's early modernity, prefiguring a more general condition of urban life in modern periods. But before the 19th century, London's pollution was a peculiar local condition. It was unlike anything else in the world. And it also emerged from a set of regional peculiarities. The city lies in the Thames River Valley, shown here, the regional liquidity that provides the topographical setting for a phenomenon known as temperature inversion, which coal there becomes trapped in this warm air. In the absence of pollution, this creates a lingering fog. But in London, atmospheric mist combined with the sulfur in particular matter released from burning vitaminous coal, which is the type most commonly found in the mines in North East England that supply this pollution. In addition to visible pollution, this mixture creates the compound sulfur dioxide and acid that curates surfaces of all kinds. This is what both New England and especially Norse identified when they described how smoke had insinuated itself in the materials within the process, dissolving its surfaces in connective tissues. London smoke, New England speculated, caused more decay in one year than what happened in an entire century in the clean air of the countryside. Norse wrote how iron became in a few years eaten and moulded with rust and a stone was eaten away to the very bone. So piercing is this smokey rope that it works itself to twist the joints of bricks and eats up the mortar so that was fresh and beautiful 20 or 30 years ago that looked like the old decay. This registration of an accelerated decay is at the centre of my argument. The visions of London's polluted air were the most marked aesthetic register of the local environmental change introduced by fossil polluters. They occluded another and perhaps more telling indication this was dumped wearing away of the city's stone mortar, iron and fabric. This rapid material disintegration was difficult to capture. It did not merely affect the eyes and the lungs but it disrupted the reliability of time itself. As we will see, there is Norse more than New England who dwelled on this problem and through it was drawn towards his radical replanning of material bases in a fossil fuel city. Comparing their two imperatives in turn offers a different view of the conceptual implications of coal, smoke, space and time. What pollution ultimately meant for the direction on the gate to see it. So, John Evelyn's 1661 pamphlet from the Fugium is greatly seen again as the foundational text of the environment under the planning. And his proposal was again to repeat spatial both in its final form and also in its impetus. He began his text by recounting a scene he had witnessed at London's palace at Whitehall where a wave of smoke filled and dusted the entire royal court. It was this violation of the body of the recently restored king that set his pamphlet in motion and his attention then extended to other living bodies. After encountering the city's pollution visitors to London find a universal alteration in their health. In the city's churches he lamented barking and skidding since then. In response, Evelyn wanted to remove the column to propose that the factories and warehouses that clog the riverside in the centre of the city should be displaced five or six miles distant from London into and beyond the poor eastern and metropolis as shown in this dramatic map. Here's the city where he wants to move up. So, though he was wrong to single out these industries as mentioned, as he accused the content likely gutted through more the vast majority of co-use, Evelyn's aim, anticipating later acts of industrial rezoning, was to sever the visible co-dependence of the city in its dirty pure. His proposal imagined in short a spatial segregation of production and assumption. These ideas ultimately resonated with Evelyn's enduring belief in the political importance of architecture and urbanism. This is the monarchy had been restored a year before. As has been argued by historians, including William Cavill and Mike Jenner, Evelyn imagined how physical appearance would reflect political power. Reinstating a smokeless urban order would give credit to the king's restored position. So, like Evelyn, Timothy Norris wrote in the action to the city's work. 30 years later, how much it changed in devastating fire in a deposed city. In response, Norris proposed planting a forest that would surround the metropolis in order to re-instate the slower fuel of wood. Instead of space, Norris's solution to smoke would unfold in both its material composition and by extension urban timing. A return from coal to wood promised to return the city to a more manageable pace. What had led him to the solution? Compared to the well-known Evelyn and Norris building, Norris was clear. He was a preacher and minor landowner who probably never lived in London, and his essay appeared unexpectedly at the end of the treatise on agricultural improvement. Despite appearances, I think it was precisely this unusual context that helps explain Norris's proposal and raises a number of unsettling implications about planning and conservation in this way. So, if Norris bought Campania Felix for text, it offered 15 chapters of advice about the intertwining of social material relations and the agricultural estate. While I don't have time to go into the full substance of his arguments, the book showed particular attention to the social hierarchy of the agrarian world. In Norris's worldview, the landowner, tenant farmers, and poor landless cottagers each have their appointed place. This order was not stable rather shifting intricate. It depended on fragile incentives of Norris. Social hierarchy was expressed in material form, and he advised that the landowners should carefully calibrate their designs of things like fences, ditches, or houses in a way that might conserve the existing social order. Perhaps the most striking evidence of his position appeared in the other essay that was attached to the book, an essay of a country house. Historians of architecture and landscape architecture have mentioned this word, placing it from rural seats from Vero to Paladino. But this context misses Norris's bizarre and possibly satirical argument. In the essay, he laid out the design of this countryside manner in thousands of words of elaborate detail. From the width of the main staircase, the number of windows on the upper story to the layout of three separate gardens. In the final two pages, he suddenly undermines what it had taken 40 pages to build. While a grand project like the country house might first appear divinely inspired, he not reminded readers of the biblical texts Ecclesiastes, and it's warning that some of you are not academics. All such delights are vanity compared with what is to be durable and solid. So against the extravagant villa, which expressed the power of the landowner perhaps a little too overtly, Norris claims by extolling the virtues of a little well-designed house would be kept. The virtuous modesty of the landlord with the body in his restrained home became a middling structure another instrument to keep the rural world important. Norris was interested therefore in problems of spatial and material design, and particularly in how such designs affected social relations that would play out over time. This tendency reappeared in his essay on the Bill of London, where Evelyn had diagnosed a visually and spatially disordered world. Norris recognized how Coles had given rise to a set of recursive, spiraling relations that unfolded over time. As mentioned earlier, this was made most evident in the physical fabric of the scene. Coles' energy had allowed for the fabrication of more solid things than ever before, rendering London newly solid and brick-mortared glasses. But Norris revealed how Coles' smoke ate away at the things it had helped produce within the frame of the city. At least, Coles had enacted dense, intensive feedbacks of creation and destruction what Coles gave smoke took away. This led to his radical proposal to replace Coles' work and the text he worked through the material requirements of this plan. What quantity of wood he asked was needed to serve the occasions of some vast city and how vast was London in reality? How much coal did the city actually bury? Historians have noted that these questions placed Norris' texts within the history of political arithmetic, then like John Grunt and Gregory King and first venture to capture London in England in numerical form around the same moment. A statistical estimation was not the point of Norris' essay. War striking was the way in which, just like in his analysis of the design of the agricultural estate or the unfolding consequences of coal pollution, he followed his reasoning forward and backwards translating between urban population fuel use and woodland meals in the kind of ecological concatenation of camps each of them forming the next interchange. In the end, he projected that a managed forest around the perimeter of the metropolis, about 60,000 acres of land well planted would be able to provide enough fuel for the city's needs. We can compare this to William Morgan's 1682 map of London here placed on top of a map of modern London which indicated the built-up area of the metropolis at this time occupied roughly 2,000 square acres. So in other words, the forest Norris imagined would have extended to an area of land nearly 30 times larger than the city itself. Superimposing this territory over a satellite image of modern London shows that it would have taken up the same space as the whole of the present-day city while only providing enough firewood for 5% of the population. Norris's counter geography of fuel aimed to reinstate wood, but in fact he ended up revealing a decisive surplus energy that coal had been shaping London. His project showed in effect how unnatural the metropolis had already become. Norris's counterpoint of wood and coal revealed that the issue was not spatial as in the London's proposed industrial displacement as it was temporal the way of managing change over time. The city's fuel was not just another commodity or raw material rather it served as a regulator for the whole social and natural system. In the end Norris had proposed a scheme of what we would now call decarbonisation. But this concern wouldn't utopia reveal what such schemes of material deceleration threaten. It's difficult to get rid of smoke without getting rid of fire and getting rid of fire. The rest of his text Norris tried to fill in the gaps that his design seemed to leave open to show that a well designed fuel supply could provide all the power that coal did without its cost. But what his attempts to justify this design actually revealed was that wood now required a utopian scheme merely to maintain the structures that coal had put in place. What finally emerges from these spiraling interactions between London's fuel and its social material and spatial management was something very different. Norris revealed coal's challenge to posteriority. This can be grasped in closing by once again comparing coal and wood the density of fossil fuel versus the problems raised by woodwood management. The preeminent English language historian of early modern would use Paul Ward as argued that specific problems raised by tending to forests led to the consideration of long horizons of time. Foresting wood from this happening took several years and some tree species could take decades or even human lifetimes to reach maturity. As Ward summarizes, when you planted a tree, you were planting a head. Forest management necessarily raised questions about how a society might provide for its future which in turn led to issues of governance and regulation. In his brief and incisive discussion of Norris' text in his recent book, the invention of sustainability Ward calls Norris the last of the wood projectors of the 17th century arguing that, as in on the fuel of lemon, occupied a quote transitory moment between a longer tradition of projecting natural output and the then emerging methods of political arithmetic as mentioned earlier and later political economy with its new attention to the problems of demography, supply, and demand. Norris' proposal however was not simply an exercise in woodland climbing but imagine that a designed forest might come to the revolutionary pace unleashed by London's coal. In this way and to conclude, the essay suggests how we must run thought experiments in multiple directions. The deliberate management of the farm or the forest compelled the cyclical planning that corresponded to the repetition of annual growing seasons. An essay upon the fuel of London suggested that the time of coal would be different. The core of the modern steam engine before coal fired iron production before canals was in fossil capital. Norris' attention to the interaction between coal smoke in the built environment revealed that fossil fuel, even at this first urban scale, threatened to transform the material basis of society in a new and encompassing way. He suggested that there was perhaps something intrinsic to the temporal relations that fossil fuel precipitated. Coal's time would proceed directionally rather than cyclically. It would also proceed faster creating and destroying with a new unfamiliar intensity. Exchanging repeating seasons for subterranean forests of energy this thought experiment revealed perhaps for the first time how fossil fuel would drive time deeper and deeper in London's direction. Well, thank you so much, Lucia for putting this conversation together. And thank you to Johnson, whoever might be there. And Alec, I admire your work both of you very much and so it's really a delight to hear. Thank you also to all friends and colleagues who are here. So today I'll present to you a small section from the book that I'm hoping to finish soon. The book is called Intriguingly Imperial Data and it's about how information was collected, aggregated and structured in very particular ways in London in the second half of the 19th century. It's also an attempt to understand by looking carefully at this historical moment when Britain entered a new phase of imperialism that was informed by less severe policies how the epistemic arrangement that we might today call a database create the economic value from resources extracted in the colonies coal is a bit of an exception because so much coal came from Britain, but also by simply arranging and re-arranging things, usually just pieces of paper in the metropole. I call this the Alchemy of Data and I can say more about this if you want in the conversation but given the topic at hand which is building land, coal and the fact that I have only 20 minutes I'll present to you a tiny fraction from the chapter on mineral statistics with an eye on how land and subterranean resources were aestheticized in a mid-19th century building in London hence the land, coal and building. I start here. I'll begin in 1831 after where Alec left us. In August of that year a free miner by the name of Warren James appeared before the Assizes Port in Gloucester for having violated the right Act of 1750. The charges were quite serious that summer James had led a group of national miners from the forest of Dean in the southwest of England as they took over parts of the forest which according to the deputy surveyor they had no legal right to occupy. So the Leiden question was part of the 22,000 acres that had been enclosed by the crown in the 17th century in order to grow timber for the main date. At the time of the forest locals known as free miners were given exclusive rights to dig up designated parts of the rural land. Think of them as subsistence miners of sorts. These free miners used a technique called galing to excavate the island and coal that lay more or less on the surface of the forest. Free miners had staged uprisings before to challenge how much of the forest was enclosed and for how long. In this sense the 1831 incident was one of the last instances of the many absence of resistance against the enclosure acts which as I'm short as crowd knows the British parliament had been passing since the 17th century. The rationale was that consolidating commons, forests wastelands and small subsistence farms in the hands of the crown or the aristocracy would improve productivity and thus grow national wealth. So as free miners put up notices around the forest for that meeting in June 1831 they were planning to do what other opponents of enclosure had done for almost two centuries. Take down hedges and pull down fences and walls in the name of opening the forest. That is to say they were fighting enclosure on the horizontal plane of earth's surface. Meanwhile a different kind of enclosure was already playing out in the vertical dimension. Early political economists privileged agricultural improvement over other kinds and dismissed mineral riches as lottery. This is famous Adam Smith. But it was abundantly clear by the turn of the 19th century as Alekash already shown us that British wealth was now driven by coal. This meant that when calculating national wealth sections mattered as much as flags, even though most geological work was still done on ordinance maps. Coal, its taxation its pollution, endless news of the deaths its mining cause came up constantly in the parliament but just two years before the uprising in 1829 there were debates in the parliament about how to calculate the coal trapped under British lands a political arithmetic of the kind that Alekash talked about. These reserves could last between 300 to 1700 years according to experts depending on whether one based one's political arithmetic on plans or sections. More relevant to what I'm trying to argue here extracting this coal was proving as tricky as teasing productivity out of British fields before the enclosure acts. It was no secret that there was plenty of coal under the free miners shallow gales in the force of Dean for example but that coal needed steam engines railway cars and elaborate pumps to be dug out that is capital that the free miners who held the legal rights to the surface did not have. One reason for the 1831 uprising in fact was the legal chaos that had followed the dissolution of the local mine law court after the mysterious appearance of its historical records in 1775. How to extract the coal under the royal forest when the land in question was contested by free miners anxious to expand their rights horizontally on the one hand and by entrepreneurs interested in excavating vertically on the other. This is also arguably a confrontation between the wood field economy and the coal field economy that Alec just talked about and also the moment of emergence for a kind of metabolic understanding of the economy and the universe in general. It was in response to this question that in 1833 two years after James's uprising the mining engineer and mineral surveyor Thomas Subwitt was dispatched to the forest of Dean, a special commissioner on behalf of the Crown. Subwitt's task was to collect mineral statistics with the ultimate goal of awarding excavation rights in a manner that would facilitate the extraction of the deep coal without of course causing more rioting. He tackled this tricky situation by producing an overwhelming amount of information plans, sections and models of the region in addition to countless tables and charts which he started publishing in 1835. Most impressive perhaps were the two physical models we have constructed here I'm showing you the smaller one now in Oxford which shows four sections of the forest on the outside and it hinges open to reveal eight additional sections in the interior. But just important was a series of plans that Subwitt drew with an eye on the geological sections of the forest which you see up there. Plans in which were marked not only the shallow mines operated by free miners cross hatched here I don't know if you can see much closer cross hatched here with these horizontal lines in Subwitt's map but also large stretches of land under which laid deeper veins of coal marked here with other kinds of cross hatching overlapping and very complicated. The latter as you can guess were potential areas for future capital backed mining. These then were essentially vertical enclosure maps superimposed on enclosure maps of the old kind used since the 17th century to mark property lines though not always with success. In 1838 these sectionally inflected enclosure maps became the evidence the legal evidence for a parliamentary bill which even as it appeared to be stating the old privileges of the free miners opened up the region to big capital. After the bill passed many free miners were forced either to lease out their gales or to work in their own gales as pledge laborers. Subwitt's was convinced that further political trouble was avoided in the forest of Dean thanks to what he called the discretionary power based upon reasonable data he was probably right which is probably why he started advocating for forming a comprehensive registry of geological information in 1841. 19th century Britain abounded with exposed sections he argued, excavated for the mutually reinforcing activities of railroad construction and coal mining. He did not collect all this information in a systematic manner in a standardized format. He was particularly interested in collecting geological sections. Horizontal sections of the kind that you see here on your left which reconstructed the stratigraphic and photographic transformations of land over long spans and vertical sections on your right long and thin columns with horizontal sections further by visually restoring the folding and folding of strata into perfectly parallel lines. Vertical sections were particularly amenable to aggregation since they provided more information and did so with more precision. Subwitt therefore argued that with the introduction of such systematically arranged mineral statistics, mining would no longer be lottery. Instead of relying on chance, entrepreneurs could now depend on data to make intelligent choices even when facing unpredictable price fluctuations. While this goal of standardization remained elusive the project of forming a registry of mineral statistics was realized at least partially when hundreds of the vertical and horizontal sections along with geological maps and models to which they were keyed came together in the Museum of Economic Geology in London. Our first version of the museum was founded in 1835 in makeshift departments to accommodate the assortment of artifacts discovered during the geological surveys excavations but the collection was formalized when the institution reopened in 1851, yes, the year of the great exhibition between German and Piccadilly streets in this building that you see here designed by James Penithorn on behalf of the Office of Works. In addition to exhibition galleries which I'll show in a minute which were also like the auditorium arranged around the horseshoe plant the museum accommodated large lecture hall, chemical and metallurgical laboratories a library, a model room and several offices the largest of which was the mining records office the primary home of the geological plants and sections. This geological collection was neither a cabinet of curiosities nor a natural history museum rather these programs are just listed were there the service explicitly of entrepreneurial activity. The laboratories in the building carried out chemical analyses to test the efficiency of coal from various sources in Britain and its colonies investors consulted the mining records office before opening up a mine inventors regularly wrote to the museum to ask about the potential uses of a particular mineral and presumably all made abundant use of the museum's great literature deposited in the library bulletin newsletters, almanacs filled with thousands and thousands of pages of mineral statistics from the empire and in my story this great literature wins over architecture at the end but that's amazing. But it wasn't only the mining records office or the library that offered structured information. The primary exhibition galleries packed with display cases which were crowded with specimens and with unusually detailed labels at least for that time also provided an information environment that was just as carefully designed. So these exhibition galleries consisted if you can see my cursor of a main floor this is the main floor and two cantilevered galleries that wrapped around this impressive central atrium illuminated by a 43 foot tall iron and glass roof and a horizontal glass pane right here in the middle of the lecture in the exhibition galleries let light into the lecture hall in the basement of the building. So historians have pointed out that the interior elevations of the atrium where the display cases were arranged and striated layers on three floors resembled a geological section but the architectural section did not follow the logic of a geological section in a strict manner. The minerals on the primary floor were organized geographically with each corner of the world represented spatially the subdivisions were British, colonial and foreign roughly corresponding to the departments of imperial bureaucracy. The visitor's gaze was meant to move up in each geographical section up the vertical display cases with specimens of minerals and then down to the horizontal trains that display the products manufactured from those minerals. So the eye was expected to go from a particular crystal for example to a vase made from that crystal. Meanwhile the fossils in the two cantilevered galleries were arranged chronologically from west to east and back from earlier geological periods to later ones. So it was significant that the minerals were separated from fossils as a result of which the question of geological historicity very controversial at the time was suspended. Which is to say the focus here was on the practical uses of the geological specimens instead. This was especially important for the working man who according to contemporaneous sources was the other intended audience of the museum apart from the entrepreneurs. One newspaper wrote in 1854 if a working man had the intellectual capacity the dramatic displays of the museum might waken up to make him a watz a Stevenson or a Miller that is while he may not have the capital of a real entrepreneur the building might turn him into the kind of enterprising inventor that presumably made possible with some gold industrial revolution today. However ingeniously arranged this was clearly too much information even for the most ambitious of entrepreneurs and the most inspired of working men. Just as the thousands of pages of mineral statistics were not meant to move. I would argue these overcrowded galleries were not meant to be viewed carefully. Moreover it seems the overall impression of the exposed section far surpassed whatever practical lesson could be gleaned from individual displays. So I want to stress the peculiarity of the architectural consult here. The primary exhibition galleries put the visitors in the position of inhabiting the interior of Earth's crust all the while offering them the advantage of a panoramic view in which the geological composition of the entire globe was represented to them all at once. This was clearly not the severely constricted view of a minor who would actually be coiling the bowels of the Earth. It was also not exactly like the views afforded by the great exhibition of 1851 the works of industry of all nations under one roof in the crystal palace. The spatial logic of the Museum of Economic Geology was perhaps closer to that of Wiles Great Globe. A temporary structure constructed also in 1851, that fateful year, in Leicester Square, near blocks away from the Museum of Economic Geology and it may be worth noting here that the globe was initially designed to be inside the crystal palace which would have made it another kind of viewing experience. Like the Museum of Economic Geology Wiles Great Globe offered an impossible view. One could be inside and outside at the same time both completely encased in the ideal geometry of the globe and in a position to enjoy its full form as if from a distance. Architectural historians have shown us that the enclosure movement produced its own aesthetics of impossibility in the 18th century. Nearly enclosed landscapes of neatly hedged fields looked small it was frequently reported compared to the unbroken cons that they had replaced. One historian of the picturesque explains as the real landscape began to look increasingly artificial like a garden. The garden began to look increasingly like nature like the pre-enclosed landscape. Hence, Reptans before and after tricks with the help of a strip of paper not here right there. He could show his clients how the design would transform the ugly but necessary fence to a beautiful view. This was also the slowness it was developed on the one hand to separate productive land consolidated into large tracts for monoculture, farming and husbandry from gardens now reserved exclusively for aesthetic enjoyment. On the other hand it created the illusion of course that the boundary did not exist so that the eye could enjoy provided you looked from the right side of course not from the cow side the continuity between productive and unproductive as one uninterrupted continuum. I want to conclude then by proposing that we should understand this kind of 19th century architecture in a similar vein as a form of representation that enabled newer forms of enclosure necessitated by a new phase of capitalism some called this phase of capitalism that was fueled by fossils. Not as an enlightenment architecture that sought to accommodate all knowledge under one roof an obsessive yet innocuous project to exhibit the world as an encyclopedia and attempt at classification and order at a moment when there happened to be an information explosion. Rather this kind of architecture was an instrument that extracted new productivities and a representation that kept at bay the political frictions which that process inevitably produced. We might never know if any free miners happened to make the trip from the forest of Dean to London to see the Museum of Economic Geologies galleries. It's safe to assume however that if they did, they too might have been impressed by what was on display. The metropole's endless capacity to transform matter that was dug out from the dirt to such useful even beautiful objects but also its ability to turn what was essentially a new technique of violent extraction into a technique of powerful representation. John can, that was fantastic John can hear and see us. I guess you can't really see the room. There's about 35 people around a very large seminar room. Great, so I'm now imagining 35 people around a very seminar around a seminar table, so it's a good enough picture. Good afternoon everybody. I of course would love to be there in person, I'm very sorry that I can't be let me thank everyone who made the event possible especially those who have made my online presence possible and also to thank Lucia for the invitation also just to kind of global thank you to Lucia. I mean I don't think I ever really would have thought much about architecture or the history of architecture and its relationship to capitalism and its history, unless I had met Lucia many years ago and she kind of kindly welcomed me into these conversations and it's greatly enriched my work so I'm happy to have the opportunity to do it again today. These are great papers to say the obvious. Let me let me take my time and offer kind of one general remark that might fray some things and then kind of from there or along the way offer a few specific points by turning back to the papers you know in turn. Okay, so I suspect you know years ago maybe a generation ago that if we had two papers about coal and building and architecture and infrastructure that we have heard a different story I think. I think it would focus much more so on industrial revolution and industrialization industrial modernity in fact we would have heard a lot about the rise in broad strokes of the factory system with the factory including factory architecture a well studied course and fascinating subject being at the center of the analysis together with you know probably in the mix the rise of the market market relations commodity relations the rise of wage labor kind of broader process of proletarianization which necessitated or was necessitated by or entailed enclosure of the commons pushing laborers away from the countryside cities into factories you'd have capital presented as an industrial factory a factor of production with land excluded from the category of capital a history of urbanization and I suppose it would be fair to say the architectural focus would have been on buildings like the actual buildings of the industrial so I think you would have heard this story mostly about industrial modernity very familiar coordinates and of course we heard some callbacks we just heard a lot about enclosure although in a very creative kind of novel and original way we've had kind of callbacks to a lot of those coordinates but I think it's clear that we're getting a very different story nowadays so I just want to talk about that move and it seems to me how industrial modernity has been kind of newly framed as a subject and I think it really strikes me that and this is not a critique I'm just sort of stating this as a fact that the history of industrial revolution even in its birthplace England is now sort of busily being rewritten as fundamentally an environmental in climatological history I think this is good but I just want to note that we should be thinking of the specific contributions that architectural histories can make to this approach so just to kind of start with the conceit of this panel which is that land environment nature in the broadest possible sense of these terms are not given they have to be made and in that sense of thinking about environment and the built environment as an awfully encompassing and expansive category so I definitely just want to add my sort of yes to that kind of project and that way of framing these terms let me then add two more thoughts to these which both of the papers are two more issues I should say which both of the papers dealt with I thought beautifully and also very creatively and those are our time dare I say temporality that's one and then second is value and valuing first is just to note I mean this is a response to something Alex said in his remark about what kind of temporality is this kind of coal or fossil fuel kind of posit for society it strikes me that it posits extraordinarily complex temporalities now of course this is something historians are very familiar with this is what historians do we kind of deal with and find ways to narrate complexity of kind of overlapping in multiple temporalities but it does strike me that when it comes to coal that the challenges is quite extraordinary you know one needs to have a kind of sense of geological time one has to have a sense of obviously economic scales social political scales I mean Alex starts his paper on the velocity of urban time you know coal use stretches back centuries millennia right so you kind of have an extraordinary number of different time scales at hand to try to make sense of and it does seem to me that one of the contributions that architectural histories can make is showing how or demonstrating the ways in which through building right and through use that these different kind of temporalities these different scales have to kind of cross cross pass one another and locate in the same space so it's a way to kind of ground an extraordinary complex phenomenon and find ways to write about it and analyze it now we normally think and Alex sort of said this beautifully in his talk but we normally well I normally as an amateur you know might think of urban planning as a largely spatial phenomenon of how to spatially organize cities and that's true but we think about Alex's paper I mean his remark that really the issue here is the progressive material disintegration wrought by London's turn to to coal to fossil fuel in the 17th century and he says did not merely affect the eyes and lung but it disrupted the reliability of time itself with again time here being plural across a multitude of landscapes from the economic to social you know the environmental the aesthetic even kind of the bodily of people kind of rubbing their eyes giving all the pollution at this moment but normally here we think of time and industrial modernity as a kind of great speed up right and there's a way I think very fruitfully to think about Alex paper in the language of obsolescence you know which he does right I mean that's that's there that's important but what if we thought of urban planning design in the industrial epoch you know not so much as a project to fix activity given the many kind of disruptions of the era you know what if we thought of modern urban planning as a project that first and foremost was about restoring or at least establishing the reliability of time and I suppose relatedly to even go kind of bigger picture to think about the history of capitalism but how to periodize the history of capitalism you know with respect to different moments in the history of time and temporality you know as opposed to a stadium kind of pre-industrial industrial post-industrial tradition modernity kind of post-modernity it's a very abstract thought but one the less one that I think Alex paper presents now this does seem to me to be what Norse was trying to do I mean I think it's fair to say it's conservative but it's not but to say that a kind of wood based energy system has what to him was a very reliable and familiar kind of temporal rhythm to it including making continuity possible continuity in the design of space and cities but also continuity in terms of things like how long can you use your couch before you have to you know throw it out given pollution you know how can we go back to wood as opposed to pushing on with coal I guess I have two sort of war thoughts here related to this I mean first just to note a really I mean really remarkable moment in this paper I mean a remarkable moment in the history of environmental consciousness where Norse or other people are kind of realizing that there's no going back right the sort of fossil fuel use and coal is infrastructurally locked in you know we can't do this there's sort of too many feedback loops in the system to kind of go back to wood from coal I mean one is just to say that's a very you know still a very familiar sentiment to what we have today right and it's sort of fascinating to see that consciousness emerge in real time and then once again to think of fossil fuel capitalism as the capitalism we still live in right as opposed to thinking of our present capitalism as being fundamentally different from the industrial capitalism you know that came before another thought and this is kind of randomly thrown in it came up in Lucia's remark and it's more so at Alex paper I mean of course he couldn't do justice the papers remarks but to think about property as a category here I mean it comes up for him I've been thinking about sort of the right to the public right to re-figure space and to re-figure an energy system and if you think about property as being a really central category through which society has achieved that space temporal order right it does seem to be that like property is a really important category for these thinkers and property a really important reason especially as you move into the 19th century of why kind of private property rights insist that this system is locked in and we can't change it right so kind of rights of public use and rights of the public to discover the scope of private property rights to be really important to this history you know I guess I said I had two thoughts but a third on this idea of the reliability of time I mean I think it's a very helpful way to think about our present moment as we turn to thinking of not just building land and coal but building land energy and you know just how unsettling it is to all of us to have our own sense of the reliability of time disrupted by by climate change I mean I was at a talk here yesterday in Chicago with actually a financier and he was talking about how to leverage private finance for a green energy transition and he said you know I'm sure all of you have been to talk to people who have said things like this you know recently he said you know we have to do this or else we're all doomed you know we're all going to die and you know this guy I won't name his name I think he was pushing he is pushing like 80 years old you know so he's going to die pretty soon anyway but but to his credit to his credit you know in a moral sense right and his life is now dedicated to restoring a kind of collective expectation right that the world will continue to exist after we all die you know and that's a conflict to another kind of expectation that makes time feel reliable to all of us right is that we'll have continued economic growth in the future right and these kind of expectations kind of conflict with each other they make time both reliable and kind of unreliable and you can kind of see that sensibility emerging already you know I think from Alex paper the 17th century this is very important and fascinating to read about it now I mean I mentioned that kind of episode because it's a it's kind of one way to transition because if you think about it you know why care if the world exists after you're dead you know one has to value the world right in order to care to value it in a moral but also I think is that that does get me to my second topic of kind of value and valuing which is there at Alex paper you know certainly much as temporality is just like temporalities in Zanib's paper of course but let me just focus on this issue of value and then I'll stop talking obviously you know the question of aesthetic value looms large the history of of building the history of architecture in terms of how it's related to issues of economic value and economic valuation and just to note that I think Zanib's paper has just all kinds of fresh insights about that relationship in very kind of specific kind of concrete ways that I found really illuminating the aesthetics of the kind of vertical enclosure you know as a project in the 19th century now kind of what approach about thinking about valuation which I you know just happened to practice myself you know that I see resonating with you know with the paper is to focus on capitalization and that you know capitalization as a process does get you to say okay well land isn't just there it has to be created or made as a capitalized object or asset you know in that frame right I mean there is kind of one practice of creating value that's particularly prominent capitalism but that's valuing an object in light of not in light of its inherent qualities and features or substances but in terms of its ability to create a future value that's a profit and you know when you value something in that way you know you've capitalized something and again to think of kind of capitalism as a more encompassing category that can expand the industrial epic but also moments before and after it a factory can certainly be capitalized but so can land and so can't information surely now again to note the same point this is very different than how scholars would have framed a lot of these issues within an industrial majority framework so usually we think of the 19th century as bringing about a kind of spread of the market a spread of market relations and given that the Victorian project is to set limits to the market set limits to the markets corrosive spread and that museums as kind of Victorian projects were very much a part of that of setting a limit and creating a space outside the market within culture to defend other moral cultural and aesthetic values and I guess here in this paper we see something very different I mean the Museum of Economic Geology was intended as an architecture for a new kind of subject a subject to imagine as a homoeconomicist an entrepreneurial subject endowed with intrinsic speculative abilities to seek and achieve future wealth using the environment and the self resources to me this is fascinating I mean as someone who's kind of tracked similar calculative practices by writing about really boring things like accounting practices a similar move with the field or the evidence or the evidentiary register not being accounting books but the kind of visual and aesthetic field of the museum is just really stunning and you know I am predisposed to but I think the argument is really compelling and really works and again I mean it does have the advantage of reading back into the kind of high period of industrial revolution industrialization a more kind of overarching idea of what capitalism is and how capital is valuing works as it relates to environment and nature and land that's present in that period but also is present in our own too and of course this is the move about the origins of the database kind of in this moment and again I just find this really compelling given just how much compelling I find it let me then sort of put on a different hat and kind of pose some devil advocates questions about it and I guess I suppose these could kind of go to Alec as well but first has to do with limits and sort of thinking about okay if the project here is not the Victorian project of setting the limit on the market but rather kind of tracing how a certain kind of style of registering things commensurable standardizing things creating statistics creating new calculative practices that kind of capitalized the world shall we say you know what's the limit to that I mean you ended the paper with Jules Saib talking about human imagination being the only possible limit to this kind of or this style of evaluation and valuing and also the metaphor of alchemy here is very kind of rich too there's almost a kind of magical power at stake in being able to transform the world according to this logic I mean again this is very different I'll just say the name David Harvey it's probably all I have to say theoretical vocabulary that comes from Marxism right through which the history of industrial revolution has been written in a very powerful and compelling way where instead building there actually is a limit to capital it's necessary to make capital flow to make surplus value yada yada yada but nonetheless it's a kind of structural limit or container to the process you know that relates to the second question about class I don't think we have to be like Harvey and go back to a labor theory of value you know to be concerned about class as a category of analysis it's there right the free miners enclosure up up risings like a lot of the kind of set pieces of a Marxist historiography of industrial revolution you know are kind of there but they're different right and I'm kind of thinking of how does your kind of analysis of the vertical closure of the museum it's built for entrepreneurs but there's a sense that working people will be there too like how this kind of analytic that you're bringing in to make sense of this history you know is it different does it exclude or in some ways might be compatible with analytics of a different kind of vintage you know that once made sense of the same you know phenomenon I mean actually I think about a lot myself I don't have an answer I'm not quite sure what my answer would be myself so I realize it's a daunting kind of question to throw to our panelists but you know be very curious what they would have to say about this so I'll stop here and once again just thanks for inviting me to this conversation it's a pleasure thanks so we're in the peculiar position where you're behind us but our audience is in front of us so two questions one on limits the other on class David Harvey has been thrown onto the table just so you know John that's a surefire way to polarize this room probably but I sense that that's not the sense in which you meant it that sort of was a helpful heuristic for a certain you know older histories of space and capital so you look ready to answer oh I don't know thank you so much there's a way for him to use that it's better to look there John thank you so much fantastic response the first limits and I love the way that you said this is not the usual Victorian project of setting limits it is actually a very strange kind of institutional setup where historians perhaps younger than David Harvey might call writing the rules of creating the illicit fair economy so I think you were the one who recommended it to me who basically the frameworks around the illicit fair economy are being planned rather than so this is one of those institutions but I think in response to the question what are the structural limits I mean one limit clearly is the resistance not so much in the case of the free miners in the forest of Dean but in my other chapters in the book there is a lot of friction and resistance on the ground for example I have a whole chapter on the way that kind of global enclosure is being written across the colonies and there shit happens for lack of a thing ships think plants die, people rebel more successfully than the free miners who seem to have been put down. The other limit obviously in this conversation are the metabolic limits and the strange temporalities offered by this new fossil world where coal suddenly although it takes millions of years to come into coal it gets consumed in a very short time setting strange temporal limits on the future so that's the other limit in terms of the analytics of a certain vintage I'll take that and actually I was very deliberate in this particular presentation to use the word representation which is a somewhat old fashioned term in architecture of history because of development that is sometimes called a technical term I myself have participated and guilty of participating in that kind of historiographical moments but I have to say there is something in that museum of economic geology a kind of representational fanfare I've pulled it elsewhere that no amount of explaining the database will account for there's something that is happening there and I don't think there is a way of making sense of it without using those analytics of a certain vintage life class in this instance but it could just as well be other ones which you mean that the are specifically aimed at an imagined other class for the making of a class or something like that yes I think so I mean why take the trouble and you know in the chapter that follows this in the case of the Imperial Institute they figure out pretty quickly the people running the Imperial Institute the government that kind of representational fanfare doesn't necessarily architecture the cinema films they show there and the postcards of photographs they start selling and the museum takes over that role this is a kind of a unique moment at which architecture is doing that role but yes that representational fanfare has its uses for sure and you want to build space into that for the sake of the hard way so or you don't have to I mean I I'm not comfortable with the for example spatial fix as a kind of form of explanation just because it sounds like a kind of telos in its own right and you know we happen to be in a discipline that was bred in what is supposed to be space so I think it takes a certain kind of disciplinary show to insist on that I'm a bit cautious of that but class I'm okay with Alec sorry very close for the interview just could you fill in a few I mean I know you have a telescope but could you fill in a few basic facts about this institution that would help us understand it I mean who under whose administration is it I know the office of works builds tell us anything they build any government building so what who makes it happen it is under the jurisdiction of the geological survey of Britain which is mostly and they have to go begging for funds every year from the parliament and you know there's a little bit of funding that comes from the geological society but most of it is government funding that makes the institutions and these people are scientists they're scientists but they're also I mean the director is a fellow by the name of a founder who's a geologist who starts out a gentleman geologist and becomes a professional professionalist but someone like Sopwith is an entrepreneur in his own right he's a geologist just slash surveyor who gets paid by the government just as the architect by the way the architect is also an entrepreneur type who spent most of his life complaining to the office of works about how much he was paid so there are a lot of scientists and a lot of entrepreneurs given the economic is it the ex-checker administration of the economy I'd like to intervene on the same paper but it's just important to note that as you know the state-driven aspect of it is extremely heartbreaking in Britain so throughout the late throughout the late 18th, early 19th century everyone's kind of writing in France and Germany they have these immense state-run institutions that track their mineral wealth whereas here in Britain where we rely mineral wealth we have nothing to track it so there's a contradiction of tension throughout and then there's the relationship between the private geological society which is like a gentleman's club which supports this part of it but not the origins of use so have you now taken the taking stick well thank you John yes I don't know I don't have much to say about that I'm not sure that people have more interesting things to say just very briefly thank you for introducing the term continuity I didn't cut that in the paper and I think that's a really good kind of extension of what I was trying to say and just briefly on the question of property and this wasn't in the presentation but I hope it comes out a little in the paper but I'm still thinking through it the ways in which Norris of course is a landowner certainly speaks on behalf of them we're writing in the 1690s where Ski Finkus tells us the kind of the fissure between capital as land and capital in circulating the merchant's interest and the landowner's interest and it seems to me that Norris kind of intimates or like has this anxiety and maybe I give him way too much credit but that Cole is somehow going to undermine the land earning interest that it's that it's unleashing not just of course these material relations but social relations that leading to the undermining of the landowners as leading class and just briefly I should mention there's lots of people scholars I could mention but in terms of the question of planning of space versus planning of materials I'm indebted to an amazing essay that I haven't read in a long time though called the city as chemical system by the historian of science and medicine Christopher Hamlin where it takes place basically right in Zaynep's period 1830s and talks about the rise and the rapid rise and fall of agricultural chemistry as advisors to cities particularly early Victorian cities in the 19th century and how it moves how kind of urban planning it briefly is the planning of material really planning as such to the planning of space and basically the planning of space doesn't do anything that's good so Harvey's been addressed yeah great so we have many people in the room we probably have questions I could of course have my own we also have a time limit of our own certain things happen in six minutes and people who have to leave we just ask the taters quietly so that the conversation can continue are there any questions immediately burning aside from various insistent on more facts of how the building is was your question answered more or less yeah I just wanted to know if you're relating to a governmental project just wanted to know what was the source of it and it is curious that they have to beg for funding if in a sense they're creating no this is a pleasure to be part of we just have great papers and response and I love to discourse so I hope I can bring it down yeah I think the insistence on representation in this building from 1851 is fascinating and over determined and it seems to me now I'm well out of my depth but it seems to me the question of mining involves multiple and incommensurate timescales so there is the geological timescale of millions of years there is the incredibly long timescale that Jonathan wavy points us to of capitalism that we need to know that there will be resources to increase in the future and Zayn if you point out is this going to be hundreds of years might this be 1700 years these differences are not small and especially if we imagine increase output and productivity those distinctions will become absolutely crucial there is also in the 19th century as today there are boom and bust cycles to mining so timing the investment rate is the difference between massive fortunes and fantastic bankrupties so how does a building negotiate make operational perhaps represent these incommensurate timescales I think your building does it in these quasi geological representations of the earth and the earth millions of years and then in that fantastic detail which you point to in the move to the horizontal plane then and toward industrial production so we have then in this because the representation and the operational data then line up fantastically well on the one hand we need to understand millions of years of geologic evolution which also involves tectonic ships and where are the deposits located so that we can ensure hundreds of years of growth but we also have to make sure that we time it right to extract to invest and extract at just the moment to produce the industrial materials or to provide the factories with the coal to produce the industrial materials to allow us to maximize our investment so it not only makes operational these different timescales it represents that beautiful point thank you before thank you I want this exchange to keep going but John has to go so I want first of all to thank him because he doesn't appear your response was extremely generous and I hope this is not their anxiety but there is a certain amount of dancing going around between our fields where the history of capitalism is referred to for periodization by historians of architecture and then the history of architecture is referred to by historians of capitalism for concretization or something like that and so hopefully this I thought your points about accepting our contribution to periodization while also reminding us of old good old analytics such as space and class were right on so thank you so much for joining I hope you the doctor says it's okay to travel and let's just thank him with our applause great sorry thanks to all and sorry I can't stay but I gotta run okay take care so thank you that was did you have more as usual we'll take them down when we said thank you thank you for this beautiful beautiful paper I'm going to ask you a question about a kind of mad question about the economic conditions with which the question of time comes into the in your period 16th century I mean to the right staring and the question of lying is really of the distribution of risk and so forth is understood in spatial terms hedging that, having investments in adjacent properties pooling resources and especially in terms of domains of financial investment but also just the true no one is thinking millions of years of time geologically speaking at that moment I don't publish the geology so I mean there's a question about there's a small scientific community that enters into that consciousness much earlier but certainly the liners and the forests of Dean are not thinking on those kinds of timescales of the 2000 years so I'm just wondering about the question of these multiple timescales to which it all will flow for whom they are operative to what extent does the necessity of their reading of the can of the images determine people's actions but their their fear is collective and less collective because it's not just that we're dealing with multiple timescales we're dealing with the timing of we entry into the consciousness of the multiple timescales that seems to me to be something that happens in the period that you're addressing exactly in the period that you're addressing for some people a much later a much later for a lot of the people who are working in the community Adam I think you have okay okay briefly sorry I think that's kind of the exact point I'm trying to make is that the geological is not an operative timescale for a nurse it's not that there are intimations of geological time in the 17th century but as Martin Rudwick shows us there are moments that we can project backwards but nurse is totally not uninterested in geology but he's not trying to figure out where Cole comes from he's just interested in its effects and that's why I find it interesting that it kind of precipitates this a set of questions that maybe I'm maybe it's a tendentious reading it probably is like I'm reading it now as John pointed out so I can't say whether I think it's just it's the disconnection between his minds I didn't say that in the talk I didn't say in the paper I don't say like well of course nurse had no idea about climate change but he had no idea about this part of the caption or about no ideas about the true timescales in which geology is open that's such a brilliant question because it also turns around and poses completely differently all this historical debate about biblical time when you ask it for whom are these timescales operative clearly but the whole literature on biblical time versus geological time which always serves some kind of secularization pieces of modernity and so on clearly doesn't mean a thing for the miners so I love the way that you're putting that question but the entire literature in digital life as far as I'm concerned it could find your length but could you see the museological apparatus that you were describing as part of our logic in ever time to the extent that that I mean the whole discourse is always about whether it's a few thousand years or millions of years that's the way that it's always summarized that debate but I think Noam's point about how the operational function of the museum and the representational function of the museum line up once your gaze goes down from the mineralogical timescale of millions of years to the the horizontal the trees where you see them it doesn't matter this is what I was trying to say with suspending the question of historicity because it doesn't matter all that you care for is that you manufacture the dates from them I was just wondering about shopping this is a very simple question but just like you look like store friends as if you could buy but also in your case the consciousness is not necessarily of time all the temporality is your subject matter it seems that there was another kind of literacy about the effects not of time so not a temporal consciousness but one about absorption about a kind of not alchemy but a kind of substance exchange I mean Barry just whispered to me he could never have imagined that the forest would have maybe one day captured the carbon which is what you would today this is why you're drawing is so great because this is what today architects would propose you keep the coal but you still planted trees around so they don't capture it so what about that because the experiences you describe are people coughing, people absorbing stuff the smoke being absorbed into building materials in between the cold air being between there's a kind of novel understanding of things being moved around and to what extent is that something that is inaugurating a new consciousness by the people on the ground I think it's unintentional consciousness excess in abundance this is like a classic human environmental history there's no sink big enough for the problems that are unleashed right so the possibilities of absorption or again this is why when I read Norris 3 years ago it's like this is everything but there's no consciousness of this but that seems to be part of again the unintentional consciousness that within the frame of the city and that's like a trick here because it's only because everything's contained within London that you can see these effects because if it were like you can't absorb it fast enough and then first of all what he said about you know kind of intensity of the conversation thanks to I actually have two questions that are one I think would be to keep with some of these things about time and other space but I don't know maybe we can put them together another I'm sure you know under his mom's call for for a kind of Leninist ecology based on soviet war communism in which for a brief period the Bolshevik economy is forced to come onto wood because they can have access to the the order of code and at this moment of crisis right now whatever you think or anybody thinks of this kind of you know call it introduces and I doubt that we would be having this conversation if it wasn't for some sense of crisis imminent or in some sense you know this is I think above all shifted art historiography it wasn't just like a new generation of scholars I think it's Christ so that that's how fashion turned to a temporal one mobilizes that you know uses this historical example to show actually coal is not inevitable he does this also in fossil capital there's a very high price to pay so actually that's what immediately your diagrams and your descriptive example reminded me of was that this question was in some sense is a recurrent one it's not so that is precipitated perhaps I don't know by crisis so that would be maybe one way to mediate the space time because I don't think we need to choose between space and time the problem Harvey of course articulates is the relation so on the limits then do you know is China represented in or is any you know Chinese geography I would have to double check but it's in the foreign section in the museum I was one because you both cited the great divergence and in which he makes this case you know it's a little bit environmentally deterministic but at the same time it modifies that these grand narratives of polygon and so on of the linear development of industrialization because it has to do with differential access to coal in between Newcastle Manchester on the one hand and in China landlocked you know so I just wondered whether in that sense first of all the other thing that you know kind of articulates is the formula coal in colonies that produced this particular kind of if we are really trying to dissenter or consider that narrative in some more critical and relational sense it would seem to me that China might represent some kind of not just spatial limit you know as to what they didn't have access to the same extent I'm sure to information I don't know I mean it would be interesting to know what might have been exchanged and whatever but this wasn't actually the whole world probably at least in some uniform sense so this is the world's team from the British Empire Beijing was the largest city in the world in 1800 so you know this whole story does actually in in some diverged borrow his term around the coal question in spatial and maybe ultimately historiographical but that's what really what I'm asking so how you know to what extent ought we see this as a metonym for a world and or you know for like the world versus a very specific way of articulating you mean the building a relationship between colon colonies the limits of which one limit of which spatially and historically might be something like China if on Barack or here you would remind us that coal in the ships that fuel colonialism were used as ballasts so coal travel around the world sometimes only to return to the UK in order to be used to balance the ships so the colonialism as they would say this is a bad point is not about aesthetic other but a no no it's not but but Converance's point is that these two civilizations have different access that's where the most sacred yeah that's the most sacred calculation comes from it's the so do we get a meaningful difference here basically that's what I'm asking so I would say that I mean yes of course there is a certain kind of ideological representation the world is represented it's represented as the world but it is actually the British Empire and as a matter of fact the coal is not the best mineral through which to talk about this because in this period it was still very British they were basically looking mostly at British minds but if you look at something like gold which I have in the older version of this then it's very clear that they're focused on one their colonies like Australia and informal colonies even Russia where they can find their way in yeah absolutely this is an imperial map it's not a world map for sure still processing I'm going to respond a little to the non inevitability of coal question because I don't want to come across as some sort of channel word environmental determinist although sure it can sound that way but so as much as I like deeply in my mom's work I think my project following many others particularly Frederick Young's questions of chronology that he puts forward which of course is a very conventional chronology that credits industrial capitalists in the 1820's and 1830's with inventing fossil capital I'm talking about something 130 years earlier and I think that's important just yeah again I don't want to be like I don't know how to say this but again it seems to recognize that there are certain surpluses and problems that already are emerging long before even there's a newcomer who has not even thought of his first steam engine so in my larger project I kind of think of this as a kind of problem of how coal furnishes the series this is still very much in development trying to reformulate the dissertation into coherence but coal generally is a series of spatial archetypes that people then think with a kind of like a better territorial relation in which the material has a fair amount of agency or rather it's a dialogue between agents and materials mom I hugely admire this once to make it an entirely social story and he does that very convincingly but also very contentiously and also if I may add it seems to me the inevitability comes from as John pointed out from the property life not from which I think is became in your presentation as much as mine it's not that it's not individual it's because of the property life so there's a question about that from the zoom which may give others time to think of their questions I think this is the anonymous question Dave Onnes how well how things changes in the environment when locked in is perplexing and elusive what is the current theory would you say about the lock in of private property and in a way it's true John already pointed out you didn't really mention private property so much and of course in the series on land we think about private property so is there what is you just articulate a little bit that there's an overarching agency of the post enclosure what what is your current what would you say about that as a statement I mean as I hope the case of forest of Dean shows though I mean first of all the property structure in Britain is very peculiar second you know these things were constantly in negotiation I mean the enclosure lines were constantly being negotiated and through things such as I you know this it's called beating the bounds which I found about recently the ritual that still exists in New England and it's supposed to be this ancient ritual but I suspect it has many relationships to this history that I you know these things are your answer is not so much a locking in it's a constant I think even when they have been turned into a wall and turned into maps clearly they're constantly being negotiated I don't have a good answer to that I guess the thing that comes to mind and maybe to half respond to the second question is that we can be cold horse to death fossil capital changes the scale of which things can be owned or at least acted upon so the I haven't thought like there is some scalar possibility that is opened up with it that has a relation to to the hinge between cold and cold and by the way by seeing negotiating I don't want to make it sound like a world in which things happen very nicely so the uprising was sentenced to death and at the end found himself in Tasmania which is totally not clear right the second question is in the film it's from William Cavert who says question for Alexander Evelyn's plan to reform London pollution is closely related to his other agenda such as gardening forestry architecture naval power and more but what about Norse how do you see his essay on fuel connecting to the joint essay on the country house it's true you didn't connect with that so is the common thread conservatism and antagonism to urban mercantile Puritan London civic elite is that the connection what's the connection between this plan and the service thank you for the question if you're still watching Will I basically need your help to answer this but briefly I guess I was as I tried to sketch and I do more in the paper what Norse does throughout the rest of the book as he does also in the essay on fuel as you know is that he kind of tracks relationships through time so the connection is really how a certain design is put in place and then it kind of has further social and spatial implications and that was kind of my big idea how that relates to the particular late 17th century context is not one that I need your help to understand the particular political evalances that Norse is dealing with also because as you know Norse is practically an unknown figure we know nothing about it except for this book and all of that go ahead I'm just also very fascinated by the way in which there are two kinds of economic activity there are the agricultural you said it was an addendum to that book I mean it made me think of this you know phrase by David Ricardo I think in that class where scheme engines this elastic kind of technology that stretches the limits of land so I think that may also be a connection between the two Mor has a question that will be the last one because then we will liberate ourselves and we can continue to talk over coffee and the remains of lunch more since Jonathan Levy picked up on this I was wondering if you could say more about in both of your texts where you exactly see the place of aesthetics and like the general hierarchy of Gonzales because both I think and out of your case the aesthetic of kind of like a redistribution of the sensible through coal and like the dexical relationship between coal and river environment and that was like a starting point to some of these reflections and in saying that I think I mean I have you kind of de-submitted this thing it's really not representation but not like almost as an a priori and in the end you seem to suggest that you're just slightly different than saying there is already enclosure happening and then the representation happens in the museum which I mean as you kind of also suggest I mean this is basically ideology in like a TJ Clark sense so it's like how much I mean that's also I think it's a fairly common thing for architectural not common but like one of the things that we can talk about that other historians have can't do something like this then my question would be like how much kind of causal power are you willing to give to it in the larger scheme of the periods that you're in like how much is it actually doing aesthetics or representation I mean as a good architectural historian I would of course say very high not a very direct causal power but I was recently reading Eric Williams's Take On Capitalism and Slavery and I have to say of all I'm going to sound like a of all the things he does in that book the his willingness to give slavery the causal power that it has you know and to think that it was the economic reasons not the humanitarianism that ended I have recently started feeling that the kind of ways in which as good cultural historians we built cushions or uncousality perhaps we could you know we could be I'm not saying you know it was the Museum of Economic Geology that caused the enclosure that was ludicrous of course but I am willing to I think give it a bit more causal power and you know at least I would be compared to myself then I would have a few years do you have any thoughts on aesthetics spelled with an E just E yeah I feel like I'm just repeating myself a little but the problem is I'm really happy the conversation could have ended there but I'm doing a time scale of kind of the aesthetic absorption and again that's great no worries but like I've written a tiny bit about this in this one that random internet essay climate change generally isn't a challenge to the limits of human aesthetic appreciation and there's this kind of myth that if we could see climate change if it's visualized the data is perfectly visualized and we have this moment where we change our lives and I guess I just didn't think that's true that being said the problem of aesthetic change over time is absolutely causal in the case versus argument right is that more causal than others no that's agree with the end it was right there that he's diagnosed fundamentally he said thank you both extremely very much and thank you everybody for the wonderful conversation and have a good end of December for everybody and also families