Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America by Avigail Sachs (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America by Avigail Sachs Elliott Sturtevant (bio) Avigail Sachs Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018 240 pages, 44 black-and-white illustrations ISBN: 9780813941271, $39.50 HB As Avigail Sachs notes on the book's first page, Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America tries to answer a question posed by her doctoral advisor, Jean-Pierre Protzen: "What did happen to the scientific approach" (ix)? In what follows, Sachs skillfully retraces how a series of "scientific" theories and exchanges with adjacent disciplines radically transformed architectural education in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. "The answer," she writes, "is that 'science' was caught up (unsurprisingly) in both national and professional politics" (ix). For some, the story may be familiar, perhaps even intimately so, and may remind them of time spent in participatory design meetings, reading about environmental psychology, or feuding over curricular reform. For others, particularly those whose educational trajectories did not cross the schools discussed—mainly Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale—Environmental Design offers a compelling view of architectural education as it swung closer to the natural and social sciences in the immediate postwar era and then, starting in the 1970s, began to swing back. The book is organized in five chapters that move chronologically through five decades of the mid-twentieth century, each documenting different valences of "architecture as environmental design" (3). This is primarily done through a detailed analysis of the shifting structure and pedagogical priorities of American schools of architecture and relies on research in institutional archives. Sachs begins the long arc of this disciplinary "pendulum swing" in the 1930s. In chapter 1, "A Social Art," environmental design first gains traction as a progressive response to the challenges and opportunities posed by the Depression and subsequent New Deal era. Working for federal agencies, architects were confronted with a new set of "clients"—namely, the public—and forced to share the limelight with other experts, including planners, landscape architects, and economists. These new conditions were perhaps most clearly felt following the passage of the Housing Act of 1937, which Catherine Bauer, one of the chapter's main protagonists, helped write. The federally mandated provision of housing for the masses, in turn, exemplified one of the main tensions of architecture as environmental design, or its "dual allegiance," as Sachs writes, "to political and public action, on the one hand, and to scientific inquiry and knowledge, on the other" (9). The use of the term environment was meant to convey this broader purview by encompassing all aspects of the human world within disciplinary bounds, and by recasting architecture as a means of mediating the relationship between humans and their surroundings, rather than a fine art. To this was added the idea of research, following in the American pragmatist tradition of John Dewey, that represented a commitment to scientific knowledge and inductive reasoning over top-down, universalist solutions. To reframe architecture as environmental design was hence both a revaluation of professional responsibilities and recalibration of disciplinary horizons. After the war, proponents of the environmental approach, now faced with fewer public commissions, retrained their sights on architectural education. For instance, at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, William W. Wurster, Bauer's partner, encountered Dean Joseph Hudnut's effort to replace the school's professional emphasis with "a collaborative, environmentalist one" (23). Sachs recounts similar transformations at the School of Architecture at MIT, after Wurster was offered [End Page 130] its deanship; at the School of Fine Arts at Penn, after one of Hudnut's hires, G. Holmes Perkins, was appointed dean; and at Berkeley, where, after much debate, the Department of City and Regional Planning and College of Architecture were combined to create the College of Environmental Design in 1959. At MIT, and later Berkeley, Wurster used the term "research" to distinguish architecture as environmental design from its beaux arts predecessors. This was meant to elevate designers' status in the public eye, but also to create distance between architectural education and the competitive, commercial reality of architectural practice. In this sense, and counter to...