Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning by Daniel A. Barber

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning by Daniel A. Barber Matthew Johnson Daniel A. Barber. Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780691170039 Hardcover: 336 pages Several years ago, I moved to Houston, which has been called the "most air-conditioned city in the world." In the sweltering summer months, when the air parks at 95º F and 90% humidity, the city retreats indoors to a constant climate. Houston is a city of bubbles: cars and restaurants and houses all miraculously thermoregulated at around 72º F. Its postwar growth was enabled by a number of factors, but air conditioning was perhaps the most important catalyst. In cities like Houston, sealed glass towers became the iconic models for a climatically unbounded global architecture. But there was a period before air conditioning was ubiquitous when architects explored visionary modern alternatives to climate design without the use of air conditioning. Daniel Barber's Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning engages with this history of what he calls "climactic modernism,"1 where questions of sustainable design were fundamental. Modern architecture, Barber argues, was initially formulated as a "strategy of climactic adaptability."2 It was only later deployed as a means of universalizing global urbanization. Barber proposes a reevaluation not only of the period before air conditioning but also of the interpretation of modern architecture in the decades since, which he describes as a process of "reorienting modernist icons."3 Modern architecture, he suggests, was transformed by later critics who filtered how we understand this work. As he argues, midcentury architects struggled to promote modern architecture's ability to create comfort in varied climates over and against the pressure to disseminate a glossy image of it as a luxury. Air conditioning was a modern convenience, a new emblem of futuristic living. Le Corbusier is a central figure in Barber's argument. Today, Le Corbusier is known most prominently for his innovations in building form, structure, and program. But key to his early thinking—and relatively underexplored—is his engagement with climate. Modern Architecture and Climate's opening chapter describes at length Le Corbusier's unbuilt Barcelona Lotissements from 1931, whose facade was a louvered climatic control system, defining how the residences mediated breeze and light. As Barber shows in Part I of the book, modern architects in India, Brazil, Congo, the Philippines and elsewhere quickly adopted Le Corbusier's sun-shading louver strategy, first developed in the Lotissements project. This strategy provided a way of absorbing diverse cultures into a single, optimizable architectural solution that could be applied anywhere, with its parameters adjusted to local climate in heat, light, and humidity. Barber emphasizes that this concern with building climate was not a "green" movement in the contemporary sense.4 The goal was not necessarily to create deeper connections with nature, nor healthy ecosystems. Instead, Barber repeatedly uses the words optimize and condition. And it was not only air being conditioned, but people and even societies. Climatic modernism instrumentalized the interior environment to create ideal conditions for working and living. Barber points to the much-utilized notion of the comfort zone as evidence that the very idea of comfort becomes a stand-in for idealized architectural space. Barber extends this argument to portray a global colonization by architectural technologies.5 Early paradigmatic models were built in Brazil, such as the 1936 Ministério da Educação e [End Page 133] da Saúde by a team including Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, and were widely copied across the global south. The US government, similarly, built International Style embassies in climates as varied as New Delhi (Edward Durrell Stone), Accra (Harry Weese), and Stockholm (Ralph Rapson and John van der Muelen). Architecture and its technologies became a tool of post-colonial statecraft, a geopolitical aesthetic telegraphed to distant locales. This geopolitical aesthetic went hand in hand with new notions of the planet as an integrated environmental system, such as Kenneth Boulding's spaceship earth, that arose from both the hard and social sciences. Barber calls this the "planetary imaginary," a way of considering building ecology entwined with global ecosystems. Richard Neutra, whom Barber regards...