Excerpt from L’Architecture en ses écoles : Une encyclopédie au XX^e siècle, éd. Locus Solus, 2022.

At the suggestion of two architects then teaching at the School of Architecture in Rennes (Bernard Boclé and Louis Beaupré) a department of Geoarchitecture was created in Brest in 1974, within the University of Western Brittany (UBO). At first, it proposed only an institutional diploma, but two years later, with a new management, the accreditation of a Master of Science and Technology of the same name was obtained: Geoarchitecture thus appeared in the nomenclature of national diplomas. The initial promoters of the project claimed to be Thomas Munro, founder of the American Society of Aesthetics, who in 1949 had devoted a chapter to geo-architecture in The arts and their interrelations, translated into French in 1954. Based on the example of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), he saw it as the art of combining the different scientific and artistic disciplines in order to make the most of the environmental and social possibilities of a land, a city or a region. In fact, the word seems to have been first used by geomorphologists dealing with the great landscape; it would have been taken up by planners working on the vast TVA program. Its first occurrence in the literature is in an article by the German-American art historian Wolfgang Born, who used it in Magazine of art in January 1944 to discuss Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater villa and its relationship to the surrounding nature.

Twenty months later, Le Corbusier used it twice in The Three Human Settlements: "The study of these three kinds of settlements," he wrote, "will allow us to advance towards certainties. The occupation of the ground will be able to be reconsidered, which means properly: to order the space, to make human geography and geo-architecture, terms which appeared little by little in these times, in serious memoirs, in reports and studies". Le Corbusier did not cite the documents on which he relied, but he had long been interested in the development of the TVA, which he would visit a few weeks later with Eugène Claudius-Petit. He knew the latest developments, notably through the intermediary of the Centre d'études et de recherches en urbanisme (CERU), set up within the young CNRS, where Pierre-André Émery, André Sive, Marcel Roux, François Bienvenu and Jean de Maisonseul were active, who considered the development of the Tennessee Valley to be the best example of what the new times were calling for.
From then on, the word flourished, more precisely theorized by Carl C. Condit in 1947 and Thomas Munro in 1949, then taken up or borrowed by biologists (Alfred Gundersen, 1950), geologists (Andreas Hoppe), archaeologists, etc.

The Institute of Geoarchitecture in Brest, located in the Faculty of Science and Technology of the UBO, is characterized by a broad interdisciplinarity; its programs mobilize almost all the disciplines involved in planning, but also in environmental management, of which it was a pioneer, which immediately earned it national recruitment. The built environment and architecture (history and current events, doctrines and theories) occupy an important place. Moreover, the pedagogy borrows from the traditional forms of architectural education. Thus, workshop work is favored and the organization of a significant part of the activities (the management of contracts supporting the projects and the organization of study trips, in particular) is assumed by an association reminiscent in many respects of the “masses” in the past at the ENSBA and in the regional schools. The Institute of Geoarchitecture, which has been run by architects since 1976, offers a bachelor's degree and a master's degree, while the research laboratory "Geoarchitecture: Territories, Urbanization, Biodiversity, Environment", created in 1982 and to which it is attached, welcomes doctoral students: the total number of students is 120.
The Brest-based training program retains the exclusive right to use this name in France, but it has been used in many other countries: in 1998, Paolo Portoghesi (founder of the journal Abitare la Terra: Rivista di geoarchitettura) was the promoter of it in Rome, within the faculty of architecture Valle Giulia of La Sapienza; Hashim A. Sarkis glossed it from 2012 at Harvard University graduate school of design and Fang Wang popularizes it at the College of architecture and landscape of Peking University. In addition, its use in various very active blogs cannot be overlooked, including that of Lindsay Bremner, professor at the School of architecture and c ities at the University of Westminster in London: "Geoarchitecture, recording intersections between architecture, geology and politic".