These Field Notes, on the topic of Architecture and the Environment, elucidate how problems raised in the environmental humanities have informed architectural history, and in turn, what architectural history has to contribute to this emerging field. The short essays explore specific 'positions' in the overarching debate, identifying a radical return to critical theory and the embrace of the fundamentally transdisciplinary nature of environmental humanities and architectural history. While the positions advocate for a serious investigation of architects' texts and ideas on environmental issues, the collection also champions a broader engagement with Anthropocene questions and proposes to adopt the environment as an intellectual perspective from which to look upon the world.

In the 1930s and the 1950s China recruited thousands of foreign "experts” to consult on programs to modernize the country. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000), an Austrian architect and postwar member of the Communist Party, was invited to participate in these programs in both periods. Today Schütte-Lihotzky has been canonized in this history of architecture for her interwar contributions to modern housing and educational institutions in Austria, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Turkey. Recent scholarship has shown, however, that both, her architectural and political efforts, spanned more than eight decades. Schütte-Lihotzky was actively involved in the Austrian Communist Resistance in the 1940s, as well as the Austrian women’s movement, the international peace movement, and transnational architectural organizations such as the International Congress of Modern Architecture (ciam), and the Union of International Architects (uia) in the postwar years. By focusing on two extended research trips Schütte-Lihotzky made to China in 1934 and 1956, this essay positions her work in a wider discourse about the agency of female architects as well as the networks of communist intellectuals during the Cold War. It presents Schütte-Lihotzky’s endeavors in China as a lens for examining the complex entanglements of gender, class, and ethnicity in international women’s organizations as well as instances of “othering” perpetuated by European architects who served as foreign “experts” abroad. Finally, the essay also argues that Schütte-Lihotzky’s travel coincided with moments of China’s effort to build relationships with countries abroad. While her book manuscript Millionenstädte Chinas, completed in 1958, thus serves as a document chronicling these exchanges in design culture, at the time Schütte-Lihotzky understood it as a preparatory text for devising a global architectural history written from a communist vantage point.

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Para Sonia y sus hijos Für Sonia und ihre Kinder This essay illuminates a story of friendship between the Austrian Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Chilean Victoria Maier Mayer, two architects who took part in the resistance against the Nazi regime. The observation of their lives opens up ways of writing spatial histories of dissidence and pose question about kinship after trauma. The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden, which our century has placed on us-neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated attentive facing up to, and resisting of reality-whatever it may be (Arendt, 1958:viii). Comprehension or Resisting of Reality1 In 1953, the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000) wrote from Vienna to her friend and colleague, the Chilean architect Victoria Maier Mayer (1914-2004) in Santiago.2 It was one of the many written communications between the two women who had shared a political and architectural life in Turkey and Austria during the early 1940s, where they had been active in the Communist resistance against the Nazi regime. "I live in Vienna, I separated from my husband," Schütte-Lihotzky wrote to Maier Mayer, "now I am alone at Hamburgerstrasse 14, in Vienna's fifth district, of which you would not have so pleasant memories."3 Those "not so pleasant memories"

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