Dear colleagues and friends,
Today is Sunday, February 1st: the day that marks the beginning of spring in the Gaelic calendar, and the feast day of Brigid of Kildare—patroness saint of Ireland, but also, among others, of poets, livestock, and dairy workers. On this very day, exactly 130 years ago, La bohème, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, premiered at the Teatro Regio of Turin. But I am digressing.
What I am really trying to do is to find a good omen for a very special day: today marks the official start of AnimalFarm: An Architectural History of Intensive Animal Farming (1570–1992), generously funded by an ERC Starting Grant and hosted by the Department of Architecture and Design at the Politecnico di Torino. I am excited beyond words: AnimalFarm will keep me and the project team busy for five years, as we investigate the architectural history of factory farming from early modern Europe to the present day.
From sixteenth-century Palladian villas to today’s concentrated feeding operations, AnimalFarm starts from the assumption that Western architecture has evolved through the entanglements between humans and domesticated animals. The project focuses primarily on cattle, pigs, poultry, horses, and on their species-specific architectures. It explores the architecture of the farm in its broadest sense, considering typologies and technologies, as well as institutions and politics. We will do so by analysing the printed sources that turned animal husbandry into a transnational and industrial model, such as rural treatises, zootechnical handbooks, farmers’ journals, etc.
Cement for the industrial farm (1937)
AnimalFarm will bring together scholars with different areas of expertise, including PhD students in architectural history—hosted by the PhD course in “Architecture. History and Project”—and postdoctoral researchers from diverse backgrounds (critical animal studies, the history of veterinary medicine, and history of rural labor and environmental history). We have an ambitious agenda that combines archival research, publications, seminars, a public program, an international conference and an exhibition. But more on these activities in the near future!
For now, a couple of notes on The AnimalFarm Dispatch. Having developed a certain allergy to social media, I felt that the best way to share the project’s work in progress would be something more static and less hectic: a newsletter that will, hopefully, knock at your inbox no more than every two or three months, and that can be read again and again over time. I imagine this newsletter as a flexible, ever-changing editorial project, sharing news and events about AnimalFarm, alongside notes and reflections by the PI and the team. Over the months and years, The AnimalFarm Dispatch will introduce new sections and formats.
Let us start with a couple of sections to break the ice in this issue, no. 0.
Recruiting
There are currently no open positions at AnimalFarm, but some will be available very soon. Updates will be announced through major newsletters and platforms, such as EAHN, ArtHist, and the Rural History Newsletter.
News from the farm
Over the past three years, my interest in the architectural history of animal farming has taken me in different—at times diverse—directions. It all began with a research fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, to which I will always be grateful. From those two wonderful months in Montréal emerged a book published last year, which asks: Is there a known optimum gate size for the dual control of cattle and sheep?, or, more broadly, it asks: what do architects know of zootechnics? How does architecture perpetuate our assumed dominion over other species?
Since last year, I have also been involved in co-curating—together with my brilliant colleague and friend Víctor Muñoz Sanz, who has been conducting excellent research on cows—a section of the forthcoming exhibition at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich, Convivium: Food Systems at the Limit, opening on April 22, 2026. More on this in the next issue of The AnimalFarm Dispatch. As a teaser for some of the exhibition’s themes, you can read this short piece kindly hosted by isola studio on their LAVA journal.
Speaking of exhibitions, I will soon be visiting this show, which I am very curious about.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to highlight the excellent work of Alice Morena, who defended her Master’s dissertation last year at the Politecnico di Torino under the supervision of prof. Antonio di Campli and myself. Her research on intensive pig farming in the Italian province of Brescia, and specifically her insights on factory farming as a hyperobject, has been truly inspiring.
Currently on our table (AnimalFarm doesn’t eat meat, but books)
I am currently preparing a talk for the OFFISS seminar series at the University of Bologna, kindly invited by Miriam Borgia. The focus (I am roughly translating the title from Italian) is: The American Barn and the Zootechnical Battle: Buildings for Dairy Farming in Fascist Italy. This has provided a very good excuse to return to the outstanding Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism by Tiago Saraiva, and to discover this recent, enlightening essay by Daniele Valisena on the “battle of zootechnics”.
A very rational barn (ca. 1933)
Also on the table these days there is this, a rather hard to find Italian book on the cultural history of hunting by Paolo Galloni. Hunting and farming may appear like distant universes, but actually they are not. With the help of gifted anthropologist Chloé Roubert, we are developing a side project on the interplay between industrial pig farming and wild boar hunting in Northern and Central Italy. More on this over the summer!
I have also recently gotten my hands on a book I am very excited to read: The Architect and the Animal, edited by Kostas Tsiambaos. It opens with a striking representation of Noah’s ark, as printed in the supplement to the Encyclopédie by Diderot and d’Alembert. A reminder that we animals are all together in this floating and fragile ark.
Until next time,
Sofia/ERC AnimalFarm
Image references (from top to bottom)
(logo) Edward Richard Jones, Farm Structures (Madison: College of Architecture, 1933)
Plans for Concrete Farm Buildings (Chicago: Lehigh Portland Cement Company, 1937)
S.A.F.I.Z. Società anonima italiana Impianti Zootecnici e Agricoli, Catalogo generale 1933-34 (Milano: Cantarella, 1933).
