Architecture as Environmental Technology

Review Article ARCHITECTURE AS ENVIRON­ MENTAL TECHNOLOGY JOHN A. KOUWENHOVEN Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of the Well-Tempered En­ vironment1 is an important book and will therefore be ultimately influential, although it may be sniped at severely in the meantime by those whose dogmas it challenges. Banham succeeds in demon­ strating that “outside the culturally protected circle of what is taught in architecture schools and discussed by architectural pundits” there has been, for almost a century, a tide of innovation in the technology of environmental management which has “dragged archi­ tecture with it, willy-nilly.” In the process of demonstrating this, Banham inevitably adduces evidence which will make it difficult to sustain the currently inflated reputations of some very famous modern architects, and of some of the historians and critics responsible for the inflation. He also provides data which will make it necessary to look more attentively at the work of a few architects and a number of nonarchitects whose role in creating a truly modern architecture has been largely ignored. Modern architecture has hitherto been discussed and judged, as Banham observes, almost exclusively in terms of “the external forms of habitable volumes as revealed by the structures that enclose them,” with little or no concern for the mechanical environmental controls which are largely responsible for the fact that the structures are habitable. J. Burchard and A. Bush-Brown’s The Architecture of America is, for example, the only architectural history to point out that steel-frame construction and the elevator were not the only Dr. Kouwenhoven, who teaches in the departments of English and Art History at Barnard College, is the author of Made in America (1948), the first essay on the role of the vernacular in the arts of modern civilization, and of The Beer Can by the Highway (1961). 1 Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chi­ cago, 1969), 295 pp., illustrations, note on “Readings in Environmental Technology,” index, $15. 85 86 John A. Kouwenhoven prerequisites for skyscrapers; many other devices, including electric lights and telephones, were also necessary. Yet, as Banham points out, even these authors fail to mention two of the principal devices which made skyscrapers habitable: flushing toilets and the revolving doors which controlled the tall building’s thermal syphon—the strong updraft which made doors hard to open and close, and which also sucked in bad weather and dirt at street level and pulled it up stairwells and elevator shafts to foul the whole interior. The lack of interest in such things on the part of architectural historians is, of course, a direct result of the fact that the architects themselves have not been interested in them. As long ago as 1898, the anonymous author of the “Review of Architecture” in the History of Real Estate, Building and Architecture in New York City (published by the Real Estate Record and Guide') observed that no architect had had much to do with the development of the sanitary appliances, electric light and power, new building materials, fireproofing, and other “improvements” which made skyscrapers possible. None of the forty-four mechanical services involved in tall buildings, which this anonymous writer listed in a footnote, had even, he pointed out, been “in any great measure” the result of the architect’s demand “or of his perception of the requirements of his clients.” Architectural historians and critics have understandably had small interest in things the architects themselves usually ignored or dealt with by proxy. It is interesting to note, as Banham does, that little was written about the strong, monumental external forms in which Frank Lloyd Wright expressed his pioneer system of mechanical servicing in the Larkin Building (1906), until they were discussed as a stylistic source for the forms of Louis Kahn’s Richards Memorial Laboratories (1961) at the University of Pennsylvania. Perhaps the explanation is that Wright, almost unique among architects in his vernacular-rooted acceptance of machine technology, simply allowed his mechanical services to become part of his overall architectural conception, so that those who were concerned with architecture as style did not even notice what he had done. Kahn, on the other hand, “thoroughly hates” pipes and ducts and therefore

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Architectural engineering · Environmental ethics · Geography · Sociology · Architecture · Architecture and Computational Design · Architecture and Cultural Influences · Architecture, Modernity, and Design · Engineering · History · Philosophy