BOOK REVIEW ON

MODERN
ARCHITECTURE
NAME: SOUMYA. M. H
CLASS: T.Y. B. ARCH – A BATCH
ROLL NO: 33
Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning

By Daniel A. Barber (Princeton University Press, 2020)

It’s been more than 50 years since English architecture critic Reyner Banham
wrote his ground-breaking The Architecture of the Well-Tempered
Environment, the first comprehensive history of the integration of mechanical
and electrical systems into architecture. Lamenting the “sheer paucity and
poverty of academic discourse on the topic,” Banham set out to demolish
the academic prejudices that had excluded these systems from serious
consideration as integral to understanding the architecture of modernity.

In many respects, University of Pennsylvania Architecture professor Daniel A.

Barber’s expansive Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air
Conditioning surpasses Banham’s considerable ambitions. Barber achieves
this not just by his meticulous historical scholarship, but also in the way the
book lays bare the principles that underpin our energy- and carbon-intensive
built environment.
Modern Architecture and Climate is a fresh and original history that
chronicles the intense research undertaken by designers to adapt modernist
architecture to various climate conditions, as modernism’s political and
aesthetic influence reached across the globe. Barber’s history of the period
stretching from the mid-1930s to the 1960s—preceding the widespread
adoption of mechanical air conditioning and sealed curtain-wall buildings—
is also a glimpse of what might have been. The book showcases a climate-
adapted architecture free from reliance on fossil fuels or other energy,
particularly to address cooling loads.

The book divides neatly into two parts. Its first half comprises three histories of
formal explorations made to keep buildings cool, beginning with Le
Corbusier, moving to the work of modernist architects in Brazil, and
concluding with American architects working outside of the continental
United States. The book’s second half chronicles the impressive efforts to
harness the increasing scientific understanding of weather and climate into a
reliable means of maintaining a livable interior. It describes the pioneering
work of the Olgyay brothers, who coined the term “bioclimatic architecture.”
As in every great book, there is an antagonist: in this case, it’s ASHRAE, whose
uniform definition of comfort paved the way for mechanical ventilation to
overwhelm the more subtle and variable solutions developed before air
conditioning.
Barber’s originality is apparent in the whole new cast of characters—almost
entirely missing from existing histories of modernism—that emerges in this
book. This is especially remarkable considering that the historical period the
book covers is so often chronicled that it appeared to have been picked
clean.

Even his chapter on Le Corbusier focuses on an obscure 1931 Barcelona

proposal, the locus for a series of climate-adapted innovations. These
included an internal courtyard to draw hot air up and away through the
building’s section, and a rudimentary brise soleil—elements that would
continue to be repeated and refined in Le Corbusier’s later work. Similarly,
the chapter focusing on Brazil includes not only modernist superstars like
Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, but also the Roberto brothers—architects
of some of the most truly innovative climate-adapted buildings of the 1930s.
Their built projects may not have preceded Le Corbusier’s concept of the
brise soleil, but they certainly surpass it in sophistication and adjustability.
Each of these examples is well illustrated with beautifully selected drawings
and archival photos. A notable example, from Barber’s chapter on
American architectural work around the world, is the set of drawings and
photos of Josep Lluis Sert’s project for the embassy and diplomatic
compound in Baghdad. Sert’s work here manages to elide the bombastic
projection of American diplomatic and scientific prowess, to instead create
an original and specific response to climate and culture.

The book’s second half is just as rewarding. Barber’s chapter on the Olgyay
brothers is an especially noteworthy piece of scholarship. These two
Hungarian-born architects led a Princeton research lab that set benchmarks
for measuring the effects of climate on building form, undertook ground-
breaking experiments, and promoted architectural design as a means of
tempering climate. The fact that they are largely unknown is a reflection of
the difficulty (until very recently) of translating complex ideas, like those
around climate science, into instruments that the profession could
understand and reliably deploy.
In the background of all these histories is an effort, largely led through
engineering bodies that amalgamated as ASHRAE, to establish a set of
uniform and universal standards for interior temperature and humidity: an
ideal interior climate. It’s depressingly unsurprising that the assumptions which
underpin the development of this ideal climate were shot through with
racism and a paternalistic legacy of colonialism. In the decade following the
Second World War, the triumph of the fossil fuel economy of the United
States and Europe swept aside most climate-sensitive architectural
investigations as mechanical air conditioning systems supplanted these
earlier, more responsive, efforts to address cooling. Like a motor on a
sailboat, the new technology of air conditioning allowed architects to
abandon the intensive knowledge of site and local conditions that formed
the basis for climate-responsive architecture.

Barber’s work is a welcome addition to the history of architectural

modernism, and is particularly pertinent in our current circumstances. It
demonstrates the profound impact that our expectations of a uniform
interior have had on the planet we share. But its examples also offer an
inspiring model for challenging assumptions about the role of building form in
mitigating climate extremes.
THANK YOU