Anna Renken, University of Toronto, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, is the recipient of the 2025 Carter Manny Research Award.

As environmental concerns evolved from the 1970s to the 1990s, a variety of architects established laboratories at North American universities, where they developed research-based ecological approaches through close engagement with science and technology. This project focuses on three cases—the work of laboratories led by Ralph Knowles at the University of Southern California, Wolf Hilbertz at the University of Texas, and Carolyn Dry at the University of Illinois—within a larger constellation of practices. In doing so, this dissertation argues that these architects used techniques from the natural and applied sciences to explore material processes in an effort to integrate design into ecological dynamics. Scholarship on science, technology, and the environment informs this investigation of how designers operated across disciplines and communities through the Cold War years and beyond. Examining a period of activity often overshadowed by the experiments of the 1960s and sustainability in the 2000s, this dissertation aims to contribute to more continuous histories of environmental design that offer important lessons for education and practice today.

Anna Renken is a PhD candidate in the history and theory of architecture at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design with an MArch from Princeton University and a bachelor’s of arts in architecture and art from Yale University. Her research addresses environmental approaches to design since the mid-twentieth century with an emphasis on the role of science and technology. She has worked on exhibitions and publications on related topics at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Walker Art Center, and the journal Log, and her writing has been included in Places, Drawing Matter, and Pidgin, among others.