The Environmental Professionals: Architecture, Regulation, and the American Landscape
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Hanly-hanly-arch-phd-2026-thesis.pdf
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Author(s)
Hanly, B. Jack
Advisor(s)
Dutta, Arindam
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
In the early 1960s United States, the environmental consequences of the high-modernist developmental drive began to spark widespread backlash. Highways, power plants, and expanding suburbs – once heralded as signs of national progress – symbolized to many observers a landscape in visible decline. What would soon coalesce as the environmental movement emerged from this discontent, organizing against a wide range of development schemes that opponents argued threatened ecological integrity and democratic accountability. This dissertation examines the ensuing flood of environmental actions – policy interventions, litigation, and grassroots protest – that reshaped how development projects were debated, legitimated, and resisted, with particular attention to the forms of professional expertise mobilized in their adjudication. I argue that this moment catalyzed the rise of a new figure: the environmental professional, whose interdisciplinary methods borrowed from ecology, systems thinking, and corporate management consulting in order to mediate conflicts between activists, regulators, and developers. Focusing primarily on a series of local skirmishes across California, the dissertation’s four chapters trace the convergence of designers, bureaucrats, engineers, scientists, foresters, economists, and activists who offered competing interpretations of development’s environmental impacts. Architects occupied an especially unstable position. They were accused of abetting ecological degradation, even as their expertise in spatial and visual analysis made them uniquely positioned to diagnose and remedy the nation’s aesthetic and ecological pathologies. At the same time, the growing complexity of real estate development pushed architects beyond the design of singular buildings and into new service domains, transforming themselves in the image of environmental professionals capable of navigating technical data, public scrutiny, and regulatory procedure. The institutionalization of environmental protection further magnified the complexity of building, as proliferating agencies and oversight mechanisms reshaped the process and product of design. This dissertation thus attends to the tools and techniques architects deployed to shepherd projects through increasingly contentious political and bureaucratic terrain – from environmental impact statements and resource inventories to visual simulations, surveys, and soil reports. It examines the interdisciplinary knowledge paradigms – geological, aesthetic, computational, and economic – that assembled around controversial developments to determine not simply the magnitude of environmental impact, but the very meaning of harm, responsibility, and ecological fitness. The first chapter analyzes efforts to “Save the San Francisco Bay” from shoreline reclamation for speculative housing developments, where the physical properties of mud and fill became central to public debate. The second chapter examines the development of Sea Ranch and subsequent legal challenges mounted by activists who saw not an ecologically sensitive community, but a privatization of California’s dwindling coastline. The third chapter explores the aftermath of the California Environmental Quality Act and the broad mandate to produce environmental impact statements, focusing on architect Beverly Willis’s proprietary CARLA program, which promised to ease construction bottlenecks through computational analysis. The final chapter turns to the U.S. Forest Service, where landscape architects developed methods for quantifying scenic beauty, translating public outrage over clearcutting into hybrid metrics of aesthetic and economic value.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
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