The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture

Air, Comfort and Climate

C. Alan Short

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317658689
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Arquitectura
• Sous-sujet: Diseño arquitectónico

The Recovery of Natural Environments in Architecture challenges the modern practice of sealing up and mechanically cooling public scaled buildings in whichever climate and environment they are located. This book unravels the extremely complex history of understanding and perception of air, bad air, miasmas, airborne pathogens, beneficial thermal conditions, ideal climates and climate determinism. It uncovers inventive and entirely viable attempts to design large buildings, hospitals, theatres and academic buildings through the 19th and early 20th centuries, which use the configuration of the building itself and a shrewd understanding of the natural physics of airflow and fluid dynamics to make good, comfortable interior spaces. In exhuming these ideas and reinforcing them with contemporary scientific insight, the book proposes a recovery of the lost art and science of making naturally conditioned buildings.

1
Airs, fears, dangers

Figure 1.1
‘An Allegory of Air', Studio of Johann Breughel the Younger 1601–78. Oil on copper, 69 × 87cm. Reproduced with grateful thanks to Sotheby's.

The building must be designed so as to separate putrid exhalations from currents of fresh air, in the same way that currents of fresh water had to be divided from used water. The idea was that the shape of the building itself would ensure satisfactory ventilation, thus rendering traditional methods redundant. Cupola and dome were transformed into machines to draw up miasmas: experts climbed onto rooftops to breathe the invisible, evil-smelling spirals they created. … The degree of stench was a measure of the architect's efficiency.

(Alain Corbin, 1996, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the Social Imagination, p. 98)

Anxiety has long existed about the real and imagined condition of the ‘air’, the elastic fluid in which we bathe and which we actually take into our bodies. Interest in ‘air’ has developed into a broader fascination with atmospheric circulation, the weather, the ‘history of weather’, what we call ‘climate’, and its apparent effect on our physical and intellectual vigour. This constant immersion in air, the unavoidable business of ‘being’ in air, has preoccupied commentators for more than two millennia. Figure 1.2 reproduces John Griscom's particularly vivid image of human respiration from his 1850 manifesto The Uses and Abuses of Air…, accompanied with the equally vivid comment (1850, p. 6):

By the exercise of a certain corporeal function, which is carried on without our notice or aid, it flows, surely and steadily, deep into the body … it is no sooner inhaled then its work is begun.

It is surprising, then, that modern Western societies have contracted out the responsibility for delivering ‘good’ air in their interior spaces to a specialized component of the construction industry, the world of mechanical and electrical engineers and subcontractors with roots deep into the 19th century. As Griscom (1850, p. 6) asks: ‘But when was a deficient supply of air ever known, except through the agency of man himself in his folly and ignorance?’

The industry that coalesced around the rise of mechanical and electrical engineers is very defensive of its custom and practice beliefs and technologies, with a small number of notable exceptions. It is devoted to the technology of making artificial environments and it justifies this position by thorough ‘denunciation’ of pre-modern practices as ‘unsafe’, ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘primitive’. Architects have been complicit in this. As Chapter 6 will explain, some designers by the later 19th century were working closely with heating engineers and ‘ventilation experts’.

Before this appropriation of indoor environments, commentators could imagine very direct architectural means to make the ‘atmospheres’ within buildings. Corbin (1996, p. 98) reminds us, ‘The influence of aerist theories on Enlightenment architecture is well known.’ This may be an overstatement but he quotes Beguin (1979, p. 40) referring to the 18th and early 19th centuries: ‘Planners aimed “to use nothing but architectural resources to capture the air, cause it to circulate, and expel it”’. [Emphasis added by current author.]

This intent is exactly what this book attempts to explore. Could it have been achieved? Was it, and if it was, can it be effected now and, more importantly, in the future, in a changing climate?

Figure 1.2
Griscom, J.H. (1850) The Uses and Abuses of Air, 2nd Edn. New York: J.S. Redfield, Clinton Hall, p. 20 Figure 4.

Classical architectural motifs were being adapted, subversively, to serve these purposes. The environmental phenomena being manipulated demanded large-scale architectural interventions even if the forms bent to perform the task concealed their actual function. The site plan of architect C.N. Ledoux's late 18th century model settlement at Chaux in France indicated that he pursued ‘aerist trends’, being very deliberately ‘exploded’ apart into discrete pavilions, with hygienic separation. Such anxieties crystallized in the problem of the hospital, the military hospital most particularly. Deodorization was the primary intent, achieved eventually through progress in ventilation, but not least in the management of excrement and of those expelling it through increasingly disciplinarian regimes which Foucault describes in some detail.¹ A significant part of this book's enquiry is devoted to the analysis of hospital environments (Chapters 6 and 9). Their social redemption as a building type in the 19th century is tracked through progress in disinfection alongside the consequences of Western society's olfactory ‘advancement’: a lessened tolerance to odours, and tendencies to disproportionate, obsessional preoccupations with cleanliness, with indications from contemporary advertisers that the condition characterizes displaced populations.

Vinikas (1992) reports on the ‘awakening’ of the American public in the early 20th century, in particular recent immigrants, to undetected personal odours. He writes:

Lever Brothers under President Francis Countway ran large ads with photographs in Milwaukee's Polish newspaper Kuryer Polski. One explained the plight of a young woman whom men avoided because of underarm odour after only a few dances.

The message was reinforced by relentless campaigning by the newly established ‘Cleanliness Institute’ from mid 1930 to late 1931, which ‘exploited women's worst fears of giving offense' (Hoy, 1995). Aspirant working men and women came to believe they could also join the new ‘sweatless, odorless and successful business class’. For example, the spectacular increase in sales of Listerine (a mouthwash) by the Lambert Company in the early 1900s was engineered through its manufacturer's announcement of a concocted disease, halitosis, presenting itself through socially crippling bad breath. The company, through the entrepreneurial younger Jordan Wheat Lambert, flattered Joseph Lister into giving his personal endorsement for the fluid, hence the brand name Listerine. Without even changing the design of the bottle, the campaign ignited what became the huge industry dedicated to the deodorization of the self (Vinikas, 1992, pp. 145–146). Did the manufacturers of building environments also embrace this new sales opportunity to respond to what Vinikas (1992, p. 95) describes as the population's ‘fearful bashful preoccupation with their own natural odours … pervade[ing] the common consciousness’?

Were there other consequences for Western architecture? Did a ‘clean aesthetic’ wrapping a ‘clean atmosphere’ suppress other promising emerging architectural propositions?²

Bad air

By the early 17th century a commentator on the human condition, Robert Burton (1621, p. 75), could declare in exasperation: ‘We scorn all that is cheap … This air we breathe is so common, we care not for it; nothing pleaseth but what is dear.’

Burton speculates on what forces might determine the weather in the essay A Digression of the Nature of Spirits, Bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy, recording various scholars' collective conclusion that there were nine kinds of bad spirit, variously inducing dishonesty, mischief, vengefulness, war-mongering, falsely accusatory, ‘rejoicing at suicide’, but (1621, p. 30):

The sixth are those aerial devils that corrupt the air and cause plagues, thunders, fires, etc.; spoken of in the Apocalypse, and Paul to the Ephesians names them the princes of the air … they cause whirlwinds on a sudden, and tempestuous storms; which though our meteorologists generally refer to natural causes, yet I am of Bodine's mind … they are more often caused by these aerial devils.

Perhaps this is one of the earliest recorded instances of scepticism about meteorologists' explanations of the cause of extreme weather phenomena (ibid. p. 30). In this theory, the ‘aerial devils’ bind themselves to the victim so that the individual is the epicentre of personalized weather systems, a current research interest at the University of California – Berkeley's Center for the Built Environment.

A century later, Leoni published his translation of Alberti's rueful commentary of the 1440s on the ill effects of poorly judged environmental design in 1726 (Book IX, p. 91):

What are the causes which make the air unhealthy, we have already shewn sufficiently at length in the proper place. We may only observe here in general, that for the most part those causes are either the too great power of the Sun, or too much shade: some infectious winds from neighbouring parts, or pestilent vapours from the soil itself: or else something in the very Climate itself that is noxious.³

The noxious vapours refer to what became known variously as fixed air, phlogiston, air saturated in fomites, gasified carbonic acid or generic ‘miasma’. John Arbuthnot MD FRS (1733, p. vi), writing a little later,⁴ was astonished by what he saw as the lack of enquiry into the physiology of the effects of air by his colleague physicians:

The Reason of which Neglect may be, that air is one of those Ingesta, or things taken inwardly, which neither can be forborn nor measured in Doses; But the use of air being unavoidable, is no Reason against inquiring into its Effects … and there are many more Useless Inquiries than this, about the Effects of Air, which are daily the Subject of Human Curiosity.⁵

For the avoidance of any doubt about the importance of the topic in his readers' minds he adds, a little patronizingly: ‘Abstinence from Air is not, the Sort of Air which they use, is [sic] in the Power of a great many People’ (ibid.).

The above quote stresses the importance of understanding as much as possible about, ‘the Effects of a Substance that we take inwardly every moment’. He concluded his and other physicians' patients were so little interested because they were obsessed with the minutiae of ‘every drug rarely taken’. He refers warmly to the ‘first Founder of our Art’ the great Hippocrates, paraphrasing: ‘Air is what he means by the Powers of the Universe which he says Human Nature cannot overcome’ (ibid.).

But, as we shall see, human ingenuity has indeed attempted to change and redistribute the air intended ‘to be taken inwardly’ by people for centuries. Arbuthnot offered precise calculations of the volumes of air required to sustain life, reporting Hales' experiments: one gallon of air for a minute of human life (Hales, 1727).

This 18th century dictum equates rather poorly with an already outdated later 20th century standard of 8 litres of air/per second/per person of supply air, equating to over 105 gallons of air/minute, 6335 gallons/hour. The current recommendation by the UK Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) for public buildings is higher: 10 litres per second.

In self-experimentation, Hales subjected himself to near asphyxiation, determining 74 cubic inches of air barely sustained him for half a minute. He concluded 1 hogshead of air (i.e. 63 gallons) would just enable a person to survive an hour, but 500 people locked up with 500 hogsheads of air ‘would be dead or in Convulsions’ after only 20 minutes. Hales investigated the gases produced by decomposing vegetal matter. His interest derived from a finding made by chemist and physicist Robert Boyle (1627–91) a century earlier:

… a good quantity of Air was producible from Vegetables, by putting Grapes, Plums, Gooseberries, Cherries, Pease, and several other sorts of fruits and grains into exhausted and unexhausted receivers, where they continued for several days emitting great quantities of Air.

It was assumed this sustaining gas was the product of combustion, ‘fixed air’, in effect carbon dioxide (CO₂). Joseph Black (1728–99) collected CO₂ but deduced that plants needed another constituent of air to survive.⁶ This odourless, colourless, indetectable product of combustion became known as phlogisticated air (Conant, 1950). It is possible that ‘modern’ practice still feels the dead hand of phlogiston theory.

The theory, attributed to Becher (1667), christened by Stahl (1703), deriving the term from the Greek word for flame, phlox, proposes an invisible element that enables combustion. Experiments in combusting material in a closed vessel appeared to confirm that the air itself had a limited capacity to absorb phlogiston and support combustion. As the material extinguished itself the air was described as being fully phlogisticated and in this state could not support life. A room of phlogisticated air was a dangerous place to be. Air with no phlogiston, dephlogisticated air, supported vigorous combustion, later to be identified as being oxygen-rich. Subsequent work revealed, of course, that far from elements expelling a substance of some kind when burning, or oxidizing, they actually acquired oxygen, gaining mass, not losing it.

Thomas Henry's finely judged Preface to his 1776 translation of Lavoisier's Essays Physical and Chemical, made for the Fellows of the Royal Society, proposed that his own countrymen Stephen Hales, Joseph Black, David Macbride, Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley had been setting the pace in the an...