Modern Architecture and Climate

Design before Air Conditioning

Daniel A. Barber

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691204949
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects 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.

Part I

The Globalization of the International Style

1. Obstacles

The Climatic Basis of Modern Architecture

The writings, drawings, and buildings of Le Corbusier operate like a screen, selectively framing our view of the history and relevance of climatic modernism. As the Barcelona Lotissements project already begins to suggest, climate was essential to Le Corbusier’s articulation of the principles of modern architecture in the interwar period and to their development after World War II. Buildings, texts, and diagrams indicate that Le Corbusier considered a flexible relationship to the climatic surround to be an essential aspect of the promise of modern methods and design ideas. Alongside a large number of architects of the period, most of the climatic modernists discussed in later chapters were, in one way or another, heavily influenced by Le Corbusier; for many, climate was an essential aspect of their master’s work, and they saw themselves as developing his legacy on these terms. However, the voluminous historical literature on the work and influence of Le Corbusier has, with few recent exceptions, ignored this robust evidentiary thread.¹

There are profound discursive obstacles to embracing the repositioning of architecture according to its relevance to environmentalist debates. Formalism, broadly considered, appears to resist the integration of architectural ideas into the constellation of cultural practices aiming to recon-figure social conditions according to environmentalist pressures. A history of architectural modernism with a focus on the production of novel form has, at risk of overgeneralizing, been the dominant narrative of relevance to debates in the field since the 1960s.² This was rendered explicit in Peter Eisenman’s 1963 doctoral thesis at Cambridge, “The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture,” which saw in the iterative manipulation of platonic solids the capacity to resolve the purported paradox of form and function.³ Although only recently published, the ideas embedded in Eisenman’s thesis, his insistence on the importance of modern architecture being almost exclusively in the formal tools that it engendered, have consumed significant aspects of architectural academia and, while less direct relative to professional activities, have conditioned the discussion of architecture since. Eisenman’s project is a symptom of a wider turn away from social and political effects of architectural ideas and practices toward a widely embraced emphasis on the “autonomy” of architecture as a discipline—a premise that has, with a number of substantive exceptions, guided theory, pedagogy, and a number of practices for the last few decades.⁴

And yet, the history of architectural engagement with climate is robust. It offers tantalizing context for many familiar projects and ideas, and opens out to new ways of thinking about architectural engagement with technology, environment, and social conditions. At stake are the terms and means by which architecture is valued. The computational production of novel form is still seen by many historians, critics, and practitioners as the metric of value in the field—“innovation” in architecture tends to involve the production of heretofore unimaginable spatial experiences, generated through computational means and, at times, through collaboration with structural engineers or others. Concern over how those spaces and structures relate to the environmental conditions of the building is rarely discussed.

1.1 From the Le Corbusier archive.

This may seem odd to those unfamiliar with architecture culture; indeed, it is something of an overstatement. There is extensive, elaborate, and excellent work occurring in architecture on technical questions in search of energy efficiency, though such questions rarely appear as central to the public value of a building. Think, for example, of the Pritzker Prize or high-profile building competitions, which until very recently tended to pay little attention to environmental questions. While there may be reasonable assumptions that some form of environmental metric should be in place to produce an architecture worthy of accolades, the terms of that metric are not always clear, and in any event, a building’s success or failure, in the eyes of the architectural public, rarely relies on questions of climatic performance. While a comprehensive analysis of how architecture is valued—arguments about what, in fact, constitutes a substantive distinction in the context of differential evolution—exceeds the scope of the present volume, one of the essential claims of this book is that an alternative narrative of architectural innovation is available to inform such a criteria, one of direct relevance to questions about how to integrate form and performance, and as a means to shift the conception of architectural value in the present. New narratives can begin to suggest alternative legacies and emphasize new criteria for assessing architectural ideas and practices. The work of Le Corbusier, in its importance to claims of formalist lineage and in the richness of alternative historical threads that it offers, is here both obstacle and opportunity.

One of the effects of inserting climate into architectural histories is that it opens up a new set of events, and a new set of criteria, for understanding how that history has developed with relevance to the present. Emphasizing other events, as Isabelle Stengers suggests, can shift historical narratives, the legacies they imply, and the futures they offer an opening toward. This causal inversion, of a past rearticulated according to its relevance to possible futures, will continue to frame my approach to the effect of climate on the history of architecture. The ambition here is less to contribute to the scholarly literature on Le Corbusier and more to establish a historical ground from which to articulate the robust history of climatic modernism that followed from him.

The Barcelona Lotissement, already mentioned (see figures 0.1 to 0.3), represents an impasse and a transition. The façade as shading device was conceived as a means to temper the effects of the all-glass wall on the thermal interior. The Barcelona project was one of a number of such experiments in the 1920s intended to ameliorate the challenges faced by drawing the principles of European modernism into different climatic conditions. While Barcelona is, of course, in Europe, it was, for Le Corbusier and others, one of the southern ports among a select group of cities forming a consolidated ring of a specifically Mediterranean culture, with specific architectural needs. Other essential cities, most also of direct relevance to Le Corbusier’s experiments in the period, included Marseille, Algiers, and Rome.⁵ The Mediterranean basin thus embodied, in miniature, the climatic and lifestyle distinctions later encountered elsewhere. The climatic differences between the northern coast of Africa and the shores of Lake Geneva, for example, serve to emphasize how crucial climatic distinctions were to refining the design methods of interwar modernism—and how imbricated they were in the racialized and colonial frameworks of the period.⁶ Barcelona was in this sense suggestive, if not representative, of a set of climatic and cultural challenges presented to the new architectural principles of modernism—challenges that would amplify the importance of the shading device and resonate across subsequent experiments in regions with more intensive climatic distinctions.

The Lotissements were a laboratory, a test site, for the paired strategies of the dom-ino diagram and the brise-soleil shading device, and for the paired principles of adaptability and normativity. A significant effect of climate as a historical and historiographic framework is the recognition that the purported potential of architectural modernism, in the years of its development and early expansion, was a capacity to produce a consistent interior across different regional, cultural, climatic, political, and economic conditions—as Le Corbusier indicated in a lecture in Buenos Aires in late 1929:

Every country builds its houses in response to its climate. At this moment of general diffusion, of international scientific techniques, I propose: only one house for all countries. . . . The Russian house, the Parisian, at Suez or in Buenos Aires, the luxury liner crossing the Equator. . . . In winter it is warm inside, in summer cool, which means that at all times there is clean air inside at exactly 18°.⁷

The Athens Charter, similarly, insisted that every building should be oriented so as to receive at least two hours of direct winter sunlight.⁸ The universalist, internationalist premise of modern architecture was, in this sense, the capacity to adapt the building to a given site and sociocultural condition, to use architectural means to adjust the building design toward a normative thermal interior. Conceptually, this interior was a space requisite for the elaboration of modernity—in the sense of social modernization and industrialization, and on both material and symbolic terms, as the deployment of modern strategies and techniques for the production of a universal space of life, work, and leisure—what Peter Sloterdijk later termed “the world interior of capital,” emergent, as Sloterdijk notes, in the Crystal Palace of 1851. It was, by the 1920s, refined through a set of spatial, material, and technological strategies of adaptability and normalization.⁹

The geopolitical ramifications are significant. The climatic perspective also reveals that, despite its apparent affiliation with familiar tropes of metropolitan sophistication, the historical development of architectural modernism is really about an encounter with the dynamism of the so-called periphery—architecture became modern in the Global South. Or, better, the terms and tenets of architectural modernism were articulated in response to the challenges presented by other climates, other cultures, and as a result of strained colonial and metropolitan hegemony. Barcelona in 1931 was in this sense representative and transitional, a stand-in for a more elaborate interest in climates distinct from those of northern Europe—climates that would come to be seen, by Le Corbusier, as the site for architectural experimentation. These experiments in the capabilities of modernism, as a system of adaptation and normalization, then returned to the north once the concept of acclimatization was refined and applied through mechanical conditioning.

This periphery operated not only spatially but also temporally—as much as assumptions and presumptions were made about the geographic and climatic aspects of a given region and its culture, largely according to the presumed superiority of the metropolitan center, the emergence of modern architecture also depended on a host of complicated interrelationships with the vernacular and the traditional as cultural patterns purportedly inferior to those that followed. Climatic modernism consisted largely of attempts to formalize and render optimizable a range of building strategies that reach back millennia. Indeed, protection from the elements has long been a substantive aspect of the origin narratives of architecture; most cultures were, until the structured imperatives of industrialization, cultures of climatic adaptability. The thickness of walls, the use of earth-based thermally active materials, the deployment of screens, extended eaves, and other shading systems, and many other strategies intended to temper the interior at least in periods of climatic extremes. In part, the project of architectural modernity was to produce design techniques—universal or generally applicable—that could deploy new materials and strategies in order to provide the same, or better, thermal mitigation as these other, ongoing practices. In this sense, architectural modernism followed on the developments of various colonial architectures that regulated or rendered scientific the traditional practices that they sought to replace. That such vernacular or traditional strategies were less energy dependent, in both embodied and operating terms, is not insignificant to the present dilemma. More generally, here again, attention to climate reveals some of the broad complications and contradictions in the presumed progressive trajectory of modern architecture.

Reorienting Modernist Icons

Climate was essential to Le Corbusier before the Barcelona project, even before the specific strategy of ...