Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment

1. Unwarranted apology

In a world more humanely arranged, or one where architects more easily recognised where their prime human responsibilities must lie, neither the present apologia nor this book need ever have been written, because those services in buildings that provide for the comfort and well-being of humans would always have been part of the history of architecture as taught in the schools, studied by scholars, and honored by the profession. And had such a book been written nevertheless, librarians would not have been so perplexed to know where to file it. The book is offered as a contribution to the history of architecture as normally understood and was produced by fairly conventional modes of architectural history writing. Yet, so corrupted is the understanding of architecture after some two centuries of narrow-eyed aesthetic vision, that most librarians have put the first edition of this book among general introductions to technology—in which role it would leave much to be desired.

The idea that architecture belongs in one place and technology in another is comparatively new in history, and its effect on architecture, which should be the most complete of the arts of mankind, has been crippling. In the eighteenth century, at least as late as Isaac Ware’s Complete Body of Achitecture (1756), that body had indeed been complete, and the technology then available had found a comfortable place within its compendious pages. Thereafter, however, the art of architecture became increasingly divorced from the practice of making and operating buildings.

Among the achievements of the great generation of architectural historians that preceded mine was the incorporation of the whole range of new structural materials and procedures into the general history of architecture. This was the easier to do, however, because it merely extended the range of constructional techniques (timber, brick, masonry) that architectural historians had always discussed. Iron, steel, and concrete were new topics, but their general category was old and familiar. Not so electric lighting or mechanical ventilation. Insofar as lighting had been part of the older history of architecture, it had been daylighting via windows which were, effectively, local absences of masonry, while artificial lighting had been via lamps, candlesticks, and other movable pieces which did not usually show on the plans and were rarely the architects’ business to design.

Chimneys, where they occupied ground space, did figure in the drawing of plans, and fireplaces were shown where the interior elevations of grand rooms were required. But the rooms where the fuel was stored commonly go unannotated on the plans, and the labour of the humans who scurried up and down stairs, fetching coals or wood, or carrying out ashes, goes unnoticed and uncommented in the drawings and therefore tends to fall out of all subsequent studies of architectural history.

In rare instances, such as Thomas Jefferson’s house at Monticello, certain environmental and sanitary procedures are always noted, but that is because they occupy space on the plans and are composed of volumes such as passageways and corridors which are familiar in architectural discourse. Where they did not approximate to familiar room types, they go unacknowledged—the elegantly engraved plates in volume after volume of Vitruvius Britannicus have little to tell us about the maintenance of decent levels of comfort (if they existed) in those handsome buildings (other than oddities like the curved flues in the thickness of the dome at Mereworth). Fair enough; there was little to show. What is alarming is that equally little will be shown in published drawings of, say, the work of McKim Meade and White a hundred and fifty years later, when environmental provisions had become vastly more complex and sophisticated.

Perhaps the most astonishing instance of this separation between architecture (meaning gross structure) and technology (meaning all the rest of the physical plant) is revealed by the fact that the sectional drawing of the Robie house on page 119 of this book had to be specially researched and prepared, because the allegedly complete set of measured drawings made by the Historic American Building Survey showed none of the environmental provisions of this house—where such provisions were so crucial.

Because of this failure of the architectural profession to—almost literally—keep its house in order, it fell to another body of men to assume responsibility for the maintenance of decent environmental conditions: everybody from plumbers to consulting engineers. They represented ‘another culture,’ so alien that most architects held it beneath contempt, and still do. The works and opinions of this other culture have been allowed to impinge as little as possible on the teaching of architecture schools, where the preoccupation still continues to be with the production of elegant graphic compositions rendering the merely structural aspects of plan, elevation, and sometimes section. (‘Never mind all that environmental rubbish, get on with your architecture.’)

Mechanical services, and even some non-mechanical environmental devices such as partially reflective glass or acoustic surfaces, have largely passed out of the control of architects into the hands of specialist consultants who now comprise a whole range of parallel professions. The rise of these technical specialists may be explained, if not excused, as part of the general specialisation of all the professions in the modern world (and the case with building is hardly worse than that with medicine!), but this does not reduce the tragically deleterious effect on the discourse and practise of architecture.

Left: Richards Memorial Laboratories, Philadelphia, Pa., 1961, by Louis Kahn.

Right: Larkin Administration Building, Buffalo, N.Y. 1906, by Frank Lloyd Wright.

In this circumstance of persistently lopsided architectural discourse, environmental provisions have only attracted attention when they have made some gross monumental impact on the exterior aspect of buildings, as with the brightly coloured duct work of the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the blind brick service towers that gave picturesque outlines to Louis Kahn’s Richards Memorial Laboratories in Philadelphia. Though they contained no technological innovations of significance, these inscrutable duct-boxes brought environmental services forcibly to the attention of historians and critics. No matter how profound the changes wrought on architecture by the electric lamp or the suspended ceiling (to cite two fundamental innovations), the fact that such changes were not visible on the exterior of the building denied them a place in the history of architecture. Or, rather, it maintained their marginal and literally superficial role in that history, for what was visibly manifest on the Richards Laboratories had been equally visible and manifest on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo almost sixty years before. The corner towers of the Larkin Building house innovatory service installations in a city that was then the focus of environmental research and, therefore, constituted a suitable datum to which critics and historians could refer. Yet the few who availed themselves of the opportunity did so only to wonder if the Larkin towers were the formal source from which Kahn might have copied his.

Such superficial attention to two such profoundly interesting buildings can only be seen as inevitable, given the prevailing state of architectural culture and its value systems. How deeply those values were entrenched in the culture of architecture was clearly shown in the five years or so after this book first appeared, the period of growing concern about the apparently irreversible depletion of the Earth’s energy resources and the pollution of its biosphere. Even before the Arab oil embargo precipitated the fuel crisis of 1973-74, this book got progressively worse and worse reviews—it was a history of the use of environmental energy and proposed no anathema on that use and was therefore made out to be a tract in favour of wasting energy.

At the same time, the waning confidence of architects in their own ability to deal with energy problems (or opportunities) was increasingly manifested in the form of calls for a return to traditional modes of construction, inherited wisdom about location and orientation. Much of what was said was intelligent and well-founded, but most of what received publicity in those years now looks like paranoia. Rather than calling for more efficient air-conditioning, the call was for the abandonment of air-conditioning altogether, no matter who might suffer. If light-weight buildings, however appropriate on all other counts, were poor insulators, the call was not for better insulation, but for heavy-weight structures in traditional masonry.

Some of the pronouncements of the period must now seem quite incredible. At the annual conference of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1972, a past president was recorded as saying, ‘You could build buildings simpler, better, cheaper . . . with fewer drains (spend the money on important things like decent brickwork).’ The man who said this was gentle and humane (when not being an architect), a political liberal and a beloved teacher (which is why I cannot bring myself to give his name). The fact that, in his professional posture, he could prefer the niceties of bricklaying to the necessities of hygiene shows the profession’s perennial embarrassments over services nakedly exposed, its preference for unassisted structure frankly apparent. Yet the traditions of the training by which architects are socialised into their profession makes such attitudes almost inevitable. In particular, the teaching of history as a succession of mighty monuments and labelled periods, relieved only by displays of stylistic erudition, has tended to narrow their education in this field to a kind of mediaeval scholastic disputation on the number of influences that can be balanced on the point of a pinnacle. As a result, a vast range of historical topics extremely relevant to the development of architecture is neither taught nor mentioned in many schools of architecture and departments of architectural history. Some are external to the building (patronage, legislation, professional organisation, etc.) others are internal (changes in use, changes in users’ expectations, changes in the methods of servicing the user’s needs). Of these last, the mechanical environmental controls are the most obviously and spectacularly important, both as a manifestation of changed expectations and as an irrevocable modification of the ancient primacy of structure; yet they are the least studied.

Thus, when the research for the present study was first put in hand, the intention was to write a purely architectual history; to consider what architects had taken to be the proper use and exploitation of mechanical environmental controls, and to show how this had manifested itself in the design of their buildings. To achieve this, some grounding in the purely technical history of these controls was obviously required, but I discovered that no comprehensive study of the topic could be found. The one work that was persistently recommended to me as having covered the ground or exhausted the topic was Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanisation Takes Command of 1950.¹ It proved, however, in no way to deserve such a reputation. The true fault of the book lay in its reception. Awed by the immense reputation of its author, the world of architecture received Mechanisation Takes Command as an authoritative and conclusive statement, not as a tentative beginning on a field of study that opened almost infinite opportunities for further research. In the ensuing twenty-odd years since its publication, it has been neither glossed, criticized, annotated, extended, nor demolished. ‘Giedion,’ one is told, ‘hasn’t left much to be said.’

The present book represents a tiny fraction of what Giedion left unsaid. It, too, is a tentative beginning whose shortcomings, I have no doubt, will become manifest as research proceeds, especially since it suffers from at least one defect in common with Giedion’s—the use of the concept of ‘the typical.’ It is not exhaustive; therefore it is not definitive. In the light of partial knowledge, one cannot specify with certainty, only typify with hope. That is, all one can really do is indicate the sort of work that was done in a particular period of time, and select a particular building that seems to typify the kind of architecture done with that technique at that time.

In practical arts like building, it is not the original brainwave that matters so much as the availability of workable hardware, capable of being ordered ex-catalogue, delivered to the site, and installed in the structure. Thus, the early patents for fluorescent lighting are almost inconsequential for the history of architecture, but the commercial availability of reliable tubes some thirty-six years later was to be of the utmost consequence. More confusingly, it is possible that one or two major buildings were being air-conditioned (in some senses) two or three years before the earliest air-conditioning patents, and before the term ‘air-conditioning’ had even been coined.²

In conditions such as these, it may be unwise at present to try to establish absolute primacy of installation or exploitation, and pointless to lavish too much attention on primacy of invention. It has seemed better, in many cases, to settle for a building which appears to sum up forward thinking and progressive practice and let it stand as typical of the best or most interesting work being done at the time. The use of typicality in the chapters that follow is purely illustrative; the buildings singled out for mention tend less to be the first of their class than ‘among the first.’

This too seems just; this is less a book about firsts than about mosts. The invention and application of technological devices is not a static and ideal world of intellectual discourse; it is (or has been) impelled forward by the competitive interaction of under-achievers and over-achievers—who might even be one and the same person, for some breakthroughs in application were achieved without matching breakthroughs in invention. But nothing would have been broken through without some extremism of method, and extravagance of personality.

Le Corbusier might admonish in 1925 that ‘an engineer should stay fixed and remain a calculator, for his particular justification is to remain within the confines of pure reason . . .’³ but the fact remains that many of Le Corbusier’s own buildings would have been unbuildable or uninhabitable had engineers ever heeded his advice, instead of pursuing their own eccentric and monomaniac goals without regard for professional demarcations and social conventions. The history of the mechanisation of environmental management is a history of extremists, otherwise most of it would never have happened. The fact that many of these extremists were not registered, or otherwise recognised as architects, in no way alters the magnitude of the contribution they have made to the architecture of our time. Perhaps finding such men a proper place in the history of architecture will be some help in resolving the vexed problems of finding their proper place in the practice of architecture.

2. Environmental management

The surviving archaeological evidence appears to suggest that mankind can exist, unassisted, on practically all those parts of the earth that are at present inhabited, except for the most arid and the most cold. The operative word is ‘exist’; a naked man armed only with hands, teeth, legs and native cunning appears to be a viable organism everywhere on land, except in snowfields and deserts. But only just; in order to flourish, rather than merely survive, mankind needs more ease and leisure than a barefisted, and barebacked, single-handed struggle to exist could permit.

A large part of that ease and leisure comes from the deployment of technical resources and social organisations, in order to control the immediate environment: to produce dryness in rainstorms, heat in winter, chill in summer, to enjoy acoustic and visual privacy, to have convenient surfaces on which to arrange one’s belongings and sociable activities. For all but the last dozen decades or so, mankind has only disposed of one convincing method for achieving these environmental improvements; to erect massive and apparently permanent structures.

Partial solutions to these problems have always been offered by alternative methods such as wearing a coat in the rain; getting in a tent out of the sun, or gathering around a camp-fire in the cool of evening. But a coat is an unsociable solution, a tent is short on acoustic privacy even though it may be adequate to keep off prying eyes, and a camp fire, while it can provide heat and light enough to make a useful area of ground habitable, is short on all sorts of privacy and offers no protection against rain.

But, over and above considerations of this kind, one must observe a fundamental difference between environmental aids of the structural type (including clothes) and those of which the campfire is the archetype. Let the difference be expressed in a form of parable, in which a savage tribe (of the sort that exists only in parables) arrives at an evening camp-site and finds it well supplied with fallen timber. Two basic methods of exploiting the environmental potential of that timber exist: either it may be used to construct a wind-break or rain-shed—the structural solution—or it may be used to build a fire—the power-operated solution. An ideal tribe¹ of noble rationalists would consider the amount of wood available, make an estimate of the probable weather for the night—wet, windy, or cold—and dispose of its timber resources accordingly. A real tribe, being the inheritors of ancestral cultural predispositions would do nothing of the sort, of course, and would either make fire or build a shelter according to prescribed custom—and that, as will emerge from this study, is what Western, civilised nations still do, in most