Modern Architecture and Climate

Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning

Daniel A. Barber
Princeton University Press, July 2020

Hardcover | 8 x 10-1/2 inches | 336 pages | 272 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0691170039 | $60.00

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design.

Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.

Daniel A. Barber is associate professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. He is the author of A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War. He lives in Philadelphia.

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dDAB COMMENTARY:

The September 7th "Style & Design" issue of The New Yorker features an article by Jill Lepore about a place that has been on many people's minds since the coronavirus pandemic forced many people to work remotely and therefore spend even more time in their own homes: the indoors. Even before the pandemic, people in the US and Europe were spending most of their time inside buildings and automobiles: 90% per the article quoting from Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity, a new book by two Harvard professors, one public health and one business. Speculating on the changes coming to indoor environments in our post-pandemic near future, Lepore also quotes from another new book, journalist Emily Anthes's The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness. It appears that the time is ripe — pandemic or not — for books discussing air quality, work productivity, microbes, and other aspects of our indoor lives.

Lepore cites just one architecture book: Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture, which accompanied a 2011 exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, is so old it would appear to indicate that architects are not on the same wavelength as doctors, business people, and journalists. Not so, given Daniel A. Barber's excellent Modern Architecture and Climate. Carrying the subtitled Design before Air Conditioning, the second book by the UPenn professor is clearly historical, focusing on buildings straddling World War II, but it is highly relevant to our present condition, considering the increasing time spent indoors intertwined with the need to reduce energy usage on air conditioning in order to have any hope of addressing climate change. Some of the buildings and research examined by Barber offer lessons for today's architects, even as the contexts spanning more than half a century are so dramatically different.

Modern Architecture and Climate consists of six chapters in two parts, both of which are the flip side of the widespread integration of air conditioning into buildings starting in the 1950s. The first part, "The Globalization of the International Style," discusses architecture before air conditioning, starting with buildings designed by Le Corbusier as early as 1930 and continuing to buildings by numerous architects in South America and other parts of the world after the war. The facade was the focus of Corbu and other architects, and therefore it is where Barber devotes most of his attention. Although he presents many images of buildings whose facades shade occupants from the sun or channel breezes (e.g., Josep Lluís Sert's US embassy in Baghdad, which is on the cover and in a spread below), the book is not a catalog of designs or techniques. It is a deeply researched history on a half-dozen strands of modern architecture where buildings were designed to harness the local climate for the comfort of its occupants but then to do the opposite: digest large amounts of cheap fossil fuels once the Great Acceleration kicked in.

Barber's introduction is called "Architecture, Media, and Climate," and one sense of the word "media" is prevalent in the second half of his book, "The American Acceleration," when climate-minded architects confronted oppositional architects who wanted freedom in their designs and other powers that eventually led to what he calls "The Planetary Interior." American houses pulled from the pages of House Beautiful are found in one chapter, for instance, followed by the research of the Olgyay brothers at Princeton University in the 1950s and 60s, when they wrote the classic Design with Climate. Many books and journals are illustrated in Modern Architecture and Climate, giving readers peeks at content they probably wouldn't see otherwise, but more importantly elevating the importance of these venues in presenting research and developing technical solutions at the time. The book ends with the Seagram Building and other hermetically sealed interiors exploding into the urban-scaled, conditioned spaces of John Portman in the 1970s. The following decades were basically a Postmodern pause, one the current generation is now forced to reckon with by considering "design after air conditioning": architecture that provides comfort without requiring so much energy use or cutting people off from outdoor environments. Given the reality of climate change — the next crisis to deal with urgently, after the pandemic — this "after" is nearly here.

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