Weatherwork

David Leatherbarrow
To cite this article: David Leatherbarrow (2013) Weatherwork, Building Research & Information, 41:2,
248-249, DOI: 10.1080/09613218.2012.735451
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09613218.2012.735451
Published online: 15 Nov 2012.
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David Leatherbarrow
Weather Architecture
Jonathan Hill
Routledge, Abingdon, UK, 2012; ISBN 987 0 415 66861 3

Le Corbusier once claimed that the history of architecture could be written as the history of lighted floors. Floors as such
were not his concern; instead windows, through which light was admitted. Light, in turn, defined inhabitable space. His
designs for the pan de verre and brise soleil were to illustrate the last chapter of this history. Jonathan Hill's book proposes
an equally surprising approach: to write a history of architecture as a history of weather. While Le Corbusier's account
included examples from antiquity to the present, this subsequent one addresses a rather more restricted historical period:
the 18th century to the present. Hill also limits his focus to English architecture, although examples from elsewhere in
Western Europe and Scandinavia are discussed in passing. In one sense, the book is a response to current concerns about
the environment: environmental change, resource depletion and landscape degradation. That concern, Hill suggests, has a
history. ‘Environmental awareness' in architecture begins in the Enlightenment; more particularly, ‘the Picturesque'. One
appreciates this enthusiasm for the book's subject-matter, but surely the claim will be seen as exaggerated when the pre-
18th-century gardens, garden pavilions and theatres, villas, loggias, etc. are considered. Andre Le Notre, Andrea Palladio
and Leon Battista Alberti were certainly sensitive to the role played by the natural world in the conception and construction
of gardens and buildings. Their writings and designs show careful and creative attention to nature, particularly in the siting
of buildings, the orientation and distribution of settings, the selection and finishing of materials, and the formation of
images (which often narrate linkages between cultural patterns and natural processes). If anything begins in the 18th
century it is the wide acceptance of a categorical distinction between the created work and the natural world, a distinction
that is directly analogous to the separation of the perceiving subject from the objects of perception. Hill is not wrong to
chart the growth of ‘subjectivity' at this time. Ironically, its corollary is the gap between the work and the world that this
account of weather architecture seeks to overcome.
There is another concern that is equally central in this text - one that arises out of the author's earlier studies - agency in
architectural design. One of the book's most provocative claims is that the weather should be credited with ‘architectural
authorship', that storms and sunshine are ‘creative architectural forces'. More than influence is being argued here. The play
of winds and rain, the fluctuations of temperature, and the change of seasons are said to co-create the appearance and
meaning of buildings. These forces share this role with the people who inhabit, use and modify their accommodations.
Architects, inhabitants and atmospheric forces all cooperate in the formation of the built world.
In consideration of these several aims, Weather Architecture is both more and less than what it sets out to be. An outline of
the history of weather can be found in the book. Historians of climate and meteorology, such as Vladimir JankoviC
(Reading the Skies, 2000) and Lucian Bola (The Weather in the Imagination, 2005) have provided Hill with the basics of
this narrative, as well as some useful definitions; particularly, the several meanings of the words ‘climate' and ‘weather'.
The second (weather) is the variable, localized and perceptible aspect of the first (climate), whose characteristics are
particular to geographies as wide as a region and recur over comparatively long periods of time. Yet, still another term has
prominence in Hill's study, nature. This heavily loaded term is sometimes used as a substitute for the first two, even though
its range of meanings is so much wider. Decades ago Arthur Lovejoy distinguished no less than 66 different notions of
nature used in literature and philosophy from the time of the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment period. Despite the term's
complexity -perhaps because of its various meanings- Hill uses it to build bridges between the histories of weather and
architecture. Most of the time his usage intends physical nature; which is to say empirically existing things that are directly
available to the senses, even if they give rise to associations and are often described metaphorically. Yet, it is precisely this
usage, this turn to nature that makes the book much longer than it needs to be and, at times, hard to follow. Why? Because
Hill's concern with nature inclines him to devote many of his pages to the history of gardens and landscape architecture.
There is certainly nothing wrong with this interest, many share it; but its direct bearing on the history of weather
architecture is less than clear. Gardens and landscapes become so central that one must say that the history of weather
architecture is eclipsed by the story of the picturesque garden, from the early years of its development (in the writings of
figures like Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison and the designs of William Kent) to the time of its afterlife and recupera-
tion in contemporary revisionist histories. Hill does not aspire to add to our understanding of picturesque design and
theory; he recounts what has been presented by historians such as John Dixon Hunt and John Macarthur. When the history
of landscape is coupled with the history of romanticism the scope of the study becomes unmanageably broad, so much so
that the relationships between weather and architecture history disappear from view. Those relationships are clearest, I
think, in the account of Rousham Garden, Oxfordshire, seen through two lenses, James Thompson's poetry and Kent's
images. Seasonal change is the theme of both, but also the partial enclosure of landscape settings, as well as the growth and
deterioration of landscape materials. Temporality, change and incompleteness are shown to be key themes that bind
weather to architecture.
Can one say that weather both affects and authors works of architecture, that wind and rain are creative forces similar in
kind to the hands of a builder or the drawings of an architect? Were the claim less ambitious fewer questions would be
raised. Accounts of weathering such as John Ruskin's 一 his beautiful description of the ‘golden stain of time' 一 attest to
the effect of weather on architecture. Can one say that such a cause is creative, that authorship is involved when copper
oxidizes, curtains blow in the wind, or rain and ice weaken a brick wall? Even if the reader grants the expressive sense of
environmental processes 一 at least traces of them 一 surely this goes too far when asserting the testimony of
environmental processes indicates the outcome of an author's imagination. The evidences of environmental effect are
always unspoken, like the testimony of a silent witness. They are also typical throughout their location, making them too
general to define a particular work. This means either the senses of authorship and creativity are weakened, rendering them
silent and incapable of individual works, or the effect of the weather is accounted for in different terms. The argument
would be more convincing if it took a different form, if the effects of weathering were used to expose and reject the
pretences of old-style thinking about authorship, the notion that a designer's intentions are sufficient to explain the reality
of a work, especially as it exists over time. An account of weathering that did not argue for creativity but expressive effect
could also free us from the bad idea that design means control, that project-making is the same thing as production, that the
end of a creative process is known the moment it begins.
The real promise of a study of weather architecture is a better understanding of the work's involvement in the world, with
all the promise, uncertainties and richness that involvement allows. The merit of this book is that it brings these issues to
the reader and gives concrete examples that reveal the reality of architecture work, as it is conditioned by forces outside the
architect's control.
David Leatherbarrow University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, US leatherb@design.upenn.edu © 2013 David
Leatherbarrow