Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning

by Daniel A. Barber

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691248653
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/11/2023
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	707,102
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Daniel A. Barber is professor of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This extraordinarily timely and welcome book traces vivid episodes in the history of modern architecture's engagement with climate control in the decades before energy-intensive air conditioning arrived on the scene. Barber reveals architecture's deep entanglement with technical, environmental, and geopolitical concerns at a moment when architects are increasingly called upon to take responsibility for the violent impact of climatic instabilities."—Felicity D. Scott, author of Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency

"Daniel Barber breaks new ground in analyzing how architecture manages and makes climates, offering a genealogy of the climate-controlled environments that most of us live and work in. At a moment when we are faced with critical challenges concerning climate change and need new ideas and imaginaries for the future of human life and built environments, this book provides inspiration."—Orit Halpern, author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945

"Imagine you are gliding through one of the great modernist masterpieces of a Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, or Neutra. The steel and glass lines inspire a sense of protection, clarity of purpose, cool anonymity, perhaps heroic optimism. Barber throws an environmentalist wrench into such familiar fantasies, showing how twentieth-century case studies in gracious living were actually prototypical fortresses against the vagaries of climate. He points toward possible futures when 'inside' and 'outside' will no longer hold against the coming emergency."—Karen Pinkus, author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary

"Barber raises important issues regarding modern architecture and its relationship with climate control. This is a book that every architect, architectural historian, and interior designer should read."—Fernando Luiz Lara, coauthor of Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia

"This book is a significant contribution to architectural history and theory. Through his close and innovative rereading of buildings by familiar figures such as Le Corbusier and Richard Neutra, Daniel Barber casts a new light on the canonical history of modern architecture. He also introduces us to lesser-known but equally significant figures such as the Roberto brothers and the Olgyay brothers, expanding the canonical history both geographically and theoretically through sophisticated engagement with interdisciplinary theories on environmental humanities."—Jiat-Hwee Chang, author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture

Editorial Reviews

05/11/2020

Barber (House in the Sun), a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, documents in this erudite work the ways modern architecture was used to shape climate control before the development of air conditioning. Heavily illustrated and deeply researched, the first half of the book examines the work of such architects as Le Corbusier (Unité d’Habitation, Briey, France, 1963), Richard Neutra (Northwestern Mutual Fire Insurance Building, Los Angeles, 1951), and Frank Lloyd Wright (Solar Hemicycle House in Middleton, Wis., 1948) and how they employed shading systems, louvers, and indoor/outdoor space to “acclimatize the interior... and thereby to improve the quality of life that would happen within.” Barber argues that future design must focus on alleviating climate change with carbon neutral buildings, and in the book’s second half he examines the evolution of new technologies for more comfortable living, including the Climate Control Project by House Beautiful and the American Institute of Architects, whose purpose was to aid architects in their work by presenting only visualizations of the complexities of climate, and the theoretical, scientific work of the Olgyay brothers and their dome-like Thermoheliodon climate control system. Academics, urban planners, and environmental designers will most appreciate this thought-provoking and detailed volume. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"I’ve waited years for a book like this… What Modern Architecture and Climate suggests is an alternative reckoning with modernism’s legacy—its ideas, strategies, and practitioners. With the urgency of our global climate crisis, many of these concerns are once again central…Barber’s book points us in the right direction."

Arris

Winner of the inaugural Architecture Book of the Year Award, Technical Category

From the Publisher