Q&A: Jessica Varner, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

This fall, Jessica Varner, a historian of the built environment, joined the Weitzman faculty as an assistant professor of landscape architecture. In her research, Varner explores the intersections between architectural, environmental, and chemical history, including the use of chemicals in building and construction materials. At Penn, she teaches courses on landscape history and landscape writing. She came to Philadelphia from MIT, where she earned a PhD in the history of art and architecture. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
 

What’s your background and how did you come to this field?

I’m from Nebraska—the area around Lincoln. Our family farm was between Cook and St. Mary. I was once asked how I got into history and the built environment as I’m from a place without any—that was the assumption. As an undergrad, I lived three years in Italy, learning about Renaissance architecture in Sicily and Venice. When you’re from Nebraska, when you get out, you really get out!

I eventually practiced architecture, mostly in nonprofit, no-income housing in Los Angeles. I also worked on toxics remediation around the LA River and teaching and writing in Los Angeles. It’s there that I fell in love with teaching history. I started teaching very early in my career, and decided to go back for a master’s in history. I fell deeply in love with the power of understanding the past to make change in the present, and then went for my PhD at MIT.
 

How did you get interested in looking at the links between the development of the chemical industry and its connection to architectural materials and architectural history?

I started with a master’s with a focus in environmental history, thinking about the 1970s moment at that time. When I came into my PhD, I started with a question of US regulatory frameworks in the 1970s from the environmental movement, early conceptions of the EPA, and product consumer laws. As I started down that road, I realized the history was quite a bit deeper. Those regulatory frameworks, the pre-history was really in the emergence of the corporation in the 1860s. Corporate history was critical to understanding how consumer products got made, which led me to synthetic chemicals. Chemicals were not on my cover letter when I applied for a PhD. It was definitely not in my purview. But MIT is such an interdisciplinary place. I started with a predoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. It resonated with me how little we knew—when I say ‘we,’ I mean practitioners in the built environment, in construction, in landscape history, and beyond—just how prolific synthetic chemicals are, and why they’re there.
 

You talk about architectural practice—I don’t want to put words in your mouth—to a certain degree laundering the reputation of chemical corporations.

When I started the archival research, the records were found on the chemical plants [factory sites], to discover what chemical corporations, what analysts, what policy folks and lobbying interest groups were really looking at. Often folks think of pharmaceuticals or food or pesticides as the entry point for chemicals development. But really, the deep connection to the built environment—to construction products, to paints, grouts, and glues—emerged at a different register. And I believe it is understudied because of the very different regulatory framework that construction products follow.

I found key moments when synthetic chemicals reached production stops, they were being heavily regulated in certain areas, and companies quite shrewdly would turn to building and construction products for growth from coal, oil, and gas products. That’s really what the base of synthetic chemicals are. I write about those moments when the chemical industry has generally experienced a lull, whether it’s post-war or a regulatory moment when they couldn’t grow in certain sectors, the building materials market really played a key role in synthetic chemicals’ growth. Specifically, I look at PCBs, early dyes. I look at PFAS. And I look at plastics—polystyrene and ethylene-based plastics. These came at really key moments for chemical growth and environmental devastation.

Moments where the chemical industry was looking for avenues for growth in ways that served its own needs, rather than trying to solve architectural or built-environment problems?

Correct. Companies, in some ways, were making solutions where there were no problems. With the example of Dow ethylene-based plastics, development occurred in postwar WWII US as material rations were put in place on steel, concrete, and wood materials because they were being used for military needs. Dow executives and politicians that were involved in the Dow corporation became influential in federal legislation at the moment, as material shortages confronted governance, plastics as an alternative to those material rationings came to the fore. In corporate archives, you see opportunistic moments when chemicals entered the building construction materials environment.
 

“It’s this longer, 100-year chemical century that got us to this moment where we don’t understand exactly what we’re specifying in our buildings.”
 

What are the implications of this research for contemporary designers and scholars?

My questions come precisely from a background in environmental advocacy and coalition-building around anti-toxics. I think this moment in particular, because of the climate crisis, and because climate change is well understood, people are asking deeper questions about, structurally, how we got here. Many scholars are working in this realm at the moment, mostly in pesticides and agricultural research or environmental history—many of my dear colleagues and collaborators work in these fields. But the built environment, less so.

One reason is the opacity of intellectual property laws. We still don’t know what’s in certain things because patents protect ingredient disclosure. And those structures are deep in the 1860s and 1870s, early patent laws and cultures around ingredient disclosure. I think there is a growing awareness about trying to understand supply chains, to understand what is in the products around us. But it’s this longer, 100-year chemical century that got us to this moment where we don’t understand exactly what we’re specifying in our buildings, or in the recycled plastic that we might use in landscapes. My research seeks a deeper understanding of why those products matter in this moment, and their origins in coal, oil, and gas.
 

What courses are you teaching, and does your research connect to that?

I teach a core class for the Master of Landscape Architecture, as the historian in the department. So I teach a course in the fall called Landscape Histories, and then I teach Landscape Writings in the spring. It’s a full-year arc course that allows students to deeply understand landscape histories, how they can begin to write about them, and how they can improve their foundational skills in research and writing. Really it comes from a deeper understanding and a background in the history of science, in environmental history and the design world. Getting the students these tools for the deep research that they will be using in the future in the humanities and asking critical questions about landscapes globally.

For example, through the histories of soil, we connect deep structural histories of Indigenous land removal to longer histories of state and corporate land takeover, and to issues of toxics in Illinois. The class finds its footing in contemporary questions—of environmental justice, human health, plant humanities, climate change, and more, and traces the questions into 19th-and 20th-century histories. I also teach a seminar called Home: Environmental Justice Histories in the Americas. We’re thinking through questions of how environmental justice movements have worked together transnationally in different landscapes. How the idea of home and the indoors is fairly understudied but deeply part of how the environmental justice histories and movements have worked.
 

"Slow attention to place is a deep lesson for many of the students."
 

You’ve lived in a variety of places. Are there certain resonances between the places you live and the research you’re doing? Is Philadelphia itself a site of interest for this research?

A big part of the landscape histories class is really engaging deeply in Philadelphia, along with Penn archival resources and collections resources in the city. We visit drawings from Lawrence Halprin on wind in Penn’s Architectural Archives and we view original maps of the Hooghly River in Bengal in early 20th century India. The class digs through the collection of Walter Lear, a health activist and physician in Philadelphia, starting in the 1960s. We also visit the Morris Arboretum—a living collection. Part of my goal, always, as a place-based historian is to have the students understand what deep primary source research looks like in the places where they live.

For the writing course in the spring semester, we write in, on, and with 15 landscapes. I have students do a slow observation assignment for their midterm where they spend two hours in one spot and each student is in a different place on the map. Slow attention to place is a deep lesson for many of the students, especially landscape architects and practitioners in the world, to slow down and pay attention to different things at different moments.
 

What kinds of observations do they make and what kinds of places do they go?

To start, they read “From Environmental Case Study to Environmental Kin Study” by Zoe Todd and Anja Kanngieser. They think about being with an environment. They go to places dispersed across Philadelphia: FDR Park, Marconi Plaza, Belmont Plateau, Woodlands Cemetery, Awbury Arboretum, the Bethel Burial Ground [Memorial Park]. 50 students in 50 places all simultaneously really thinking about place and slowing down. They come up with observations that are unique to them. Some observe sound. Some focus on movement. Some focus on plant life, looking deeply at the ground. Some focus on people—on families our communities. What you see, hear, and feel in 10 minutes is very different from what you see, hear, or feel in two hours. It not only teaches patience but also, intrinsically, some of your own personal biases go away. It sharpens your focus; it’s one of my favorite exercises.