The Environmental Imagination

Technics and Poetics of the Architectural Environment

Dean Hawkes

• Editorial: Taylor & Francis
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351810050
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Arquitectura
• Categoría: Arquitectura general

The Environmental Imagination explores the relationship between tectonics and poetics in environmental design in architecture. Working thematically and chronologically from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book redefines the historiography of environmental design by looking beyond conventional histories to argue that the environments within buildings are a collaboration between poetic intentions and technical means.

In a sequence of essays, the book traces a line through works by leading architects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that illustrate the impact of new technologies on the conception and realisation of environments in buildings. In this, a consideration of the qualitative dimension of environment is added to the primarily technological narratives of other accounts. In this second edition, the book has been substantially rewritten and restructured to include further research conducted in the decade since the first edition. A number of important buildings have been revisited, in order to extend the descriptions of their environments, and studies have been made of a number of newly studied, significant buildings. A completely new essay offers an environmental interpretation of Luis Barragán's magical own house in Mexico City and the earlier studies of buildings by Peter Zumthor have been gathered into a single, extended essay that includes a body of new research. On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Reyner Banham's, The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, the book concludes with a critical tribute to that seminal text.

The Environmental Imagination will appeal to academics and practitioners with interests in the history, theory and technology of architecture.

Part I

From Enlightenment to Modernity

Essay 1
Soane, Labrouste, Mackintosh

Pioneers of environment

A new movement appeared in industrial society which had been gathering headway almost unnoticed from the fifteenth century on: after 1750 industry passed into a new phase, with a different source of power, different materials, different social objectives. This second revolution multiplied, vulgarized, and spread the methods and goods produced by the first: above all, it was directed towards the quantification of life, and its success could be gauged only in terms of the multiplication table.

This statement, from Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization,¹ expresses a commonly held interpretation of the period from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. In those years applied science and technology reshaped the way in which artefacts were conceived and manufactured and thus was often thought to be a triumph of quantity over quality. My aim in this essay is to examine the nature of the architectural environment as it was influenced by the new technologies that came into use during the nineteenth century. I have chosen to look at the works of three architects, Sir John Soane, Henri Labrouste and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, which span the beginning, middle and end of this period.

Throughout the nineteenth century, in the field of building construction, new materials and techniques, allied with tools for calculation and analysis, allowed the dimensions of clear span, enclosed spaces to increase and for new configurations of space to be proposed. These themes have been the focus of extensive study in works such as Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age,² Peter Collins’s Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture³ and Kenneth Frampton’s Studies in Tectonic Culture.⁴ In parallel with the tectonic there was a corresponding line of development in environmental technology, although this has received relatively little historical or critical attention. In 1969 Banham’s The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment⁵ was the first to break into this ground and remains an important text. But the treatment of events in the nineteenth century tells only a part of the story. The book hardly touches upon the works of significant architects until it reaches Banham’s important studies of the environmental achievements of Frank Lloyd Wright at the Larkin Building and the Robie House.

In the intervening years other studies have begun to fill in many gaps. For example, Robert Bruegmann has made an important study of the general effect of developments in central heating and ventilation on architectural design in the nineteenth century⁶ and the series of ‘Masters of Building’ studies, first published in The Architects’ Journal,⁷ explored a group of significant British buildings. One of the most detailed studies of the relationship between environmental technology and the work of a major architect is Todd Willmert’s research into Sir John Soane’s application of new methods of space heating in his designs for his own house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.⁸ This provides the point of departure for this sketch of the architectural environment as it evolved from the Enlightenment to the threshold of Modernity.

Sir John Soane

The due and equably warming of rooms in cold climates, it must be admitted, is of great importance to the health and comfort of the inhabitants of every dwelling, from the cottage of the servant to the palace of the sovereign. So necessary is warmth to existence that we cannot be surprised at the various inventions that have been produced for the better and more economical warming of our houses.

The architect will do well to examine and reflect on the different modes adopted by painters of introducing light into their studios. The ‘lumière mystérieuse’ so successfully practised by the French artists is a most powerful agent in the hands of a man of genius, and its power cannot be too fully understood, not too highly appreciated. It is, however, little attended to in our architecture, and for this obvious reason, that we do not sufficiently feel the importance of character in our buildings, to which the mode of admitting light contributes in no small degree.

Sir John Soane (1753–1837) made these statements in Lecture VIII of the series that he delivered, between 1810 and 1820, in his capacity as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts.⁹ This is the lecture in which he most directly addressed aspects of the environment in buildings. ‘Warming’, a more felicitous term than our modern reference to ‘heating’, is identified quite pragmatically as an element of ‘health’ and ‘comfort’, whereas light, although of practical value, is considered to be an ‘agent’ of ‘character’ in architecture. While the statements maintain separation between the thermal and the luminous environments and seem to distinguish between the quantitative – warming – and the qualitative – lighting – it may be argued that in the realisation of his buildings Soane brought together all of the dimensions of environment into a complex synthesis.

Soane first occupied a part of the premises on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London (latitude 51° 30′ N) in 1792 and lived there up to his death in 1837. The process of reconstruction of the houses numbers 12, 13 and 14 continued for much of this period and is well documented.¹⁰ As the years passed and Soane took over yet more of the buildings it is possible to see how the arrangement in plan, particularly in the museum and office, became less cellular, more interconnected (Figure 1.1). This process also occurred in cross section as the rear yards were progressively covered over and vertical links established as the accommodation for the office and the museum took shape.

Figure 1.1Soane house and museum, 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London ground floor plan in 1837.

Willmert has shown the extent of Soane’s interest in innovations in methods of warming, as they are revealed by both the texts of the Royal Academy lectures and the contents of his library, in which there are no less than seventeen books and pamphlets on the subject.¹¹ But even more authoritative than these documents is the evidence of his practical application of new systems of warming into designs for buildings from as early as the steam heating installation at Tyringham House that was completed in 1797. Experiments in heating were made in the works at the Bank of England and in many other projects. This direct experience of the design, installation and use of these devices, as Willmert attests, equipped Soane to apply them in the reconstruction of his own house.

In the forty five years that Soane lived at Lincoln’s Inn Fields he seems to have almost continuously experimented with all conceivable methods of heating, encompassing stoves, fireplaces and three kinds of central heating installation using, in turn, steam, warmed air and hot water as the heating medium.¹² These were applied to the apartments at the northern edge of the house, behind the windowless façade facing the mews at Whetstone Park that contained Soane’s professional office and the museum that housed his ever-expanding collection of works of art. In contrast the heating arrangements of the main body of the house were relatively conventional, retaining the tradition of the open hearth as the principal, usually the sole, source of heat. In explanation, Willmert cites Soane declaring that in their houses the English must, ‘see the fire, or no degree of heat will satisfy’.¹³

The realisation of effective heating in the museum took Soane many years and numerous false starts were made, but finally, in 1832, the installation of a hot water system by the engineer A. M. Perkins seems to have solved the problem. This is extensively described in Charles James Richardson’s, A Popular Treatise on the Warming and Ventilation of Buildings, first published in 1837.¹⁴ Richardson was an architect who worked in Soane’s office from 1824 and his book is devoted exclusively to the illustration of installations of Perkins’s system. With reference to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Richardson wrote of, ‘The perfect success of Mr. Perkins’s system … especially as I well remembered the miserable cold experienced in the office during former periods’.¹⁵ The extent of the installation was described in full technical detail.

There are 1,200 feet of pipe in the Soane Museum. It is divided into two circulations; one of which warms the picture-room, and the two rooms beneath. The other, which has the largest circulation annexed to it, first warms the office in which the expansion and filling pipes are placed; the pipe then traverses the whole length of the Museum, then passes through the breakfast-room under the long skylight, intended to counteract the cooling effect of the glass; it then passes through the floor into the lower room, forms a coil of pipe of 100 feet in the staircase, and returns to the furnace, passing in its course twice round the lower part of the Museum; a coil from this circulation is likewise placed under the floor of the dressing-room, which, by an opening in the floor and the side of the box, admits a current of warm air into the room above.¹⁶

This was almost certainly one of the first instances in the history of architecture in which a complex and specialised spatial organisation was rendered thermally comfortable by an advance in technology. It anticipates by nearly a century Frank Lloyd Wright’s synthesis of heating with the open plans of the Prairie houses, as described by Reyner Banham.

Here, almost for the first time, was an architecture in which environmental technology was not called in as a desperate remedy, nor had it dictated the forms of the structure, but was finally and naturally subsumed into the normal working methods of the architect, and contributed to his freedom of design.¹⁷

By common assent Soane’s over-riding environmental concern was with the quality of the luminous environment of his buildings. As David Watkin shows,¹⁸ the ideas of Le Camus de Mézières, most particularly in relation to the effects of light, la lumière mystérieuse, lay at the centre of Soane’s architecture.¹⁹ The essential instruments in the realisation of these effects were the use of top-light, false or mysterious light and reflected light. John Summerson proposed that top-lighting, which Soane adopted as a matter of necessity in his work at the Bank of England, ‘becomes an essential of the style’ in the works of the so-called ‘Picturesque...