The Thermostat Age

In 2016 I wrote a paper called “The Thermostat Age: Questions of Historiography” for the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) conference. Since it has quite a bit of original thinking, I thought I’d share it.

A quick summary:
• Steven Mouzon coined “The Thermostat Age” in his 2010 book The Original Green.
• This paper is exploratory: to test whether “The Thermostat Age” is a valid and useful concept for architectural history.
• Although architectural historians Reyner Banham, Sigfried Giedion, and James Marston Fitch have paid attention to this subject, we don’t treat the energy-intensive buildings of the 20th century as a coherent category.
• If “The Thermostat Age” is indeed a valid and useful concept, we ought to be able to reconstruct the key technologies, texts, and canonical buildings. I make a first-draft attempt.
• This exercise reveals the importance of the continuity between (loosely) the Victorian period and the Modern period. In other words, if you wanted to write an architectural history of “The Thermostat Age,” you’d include a lot of content from the 19th century (and even earlier).
• This conclusion surprised me, because in conventional architectural history there is great emphasis on the discontinuity between Victorian and Modern.
• Complexity: Engineer Peter Rumsey and scholars such as Henrik Schoenefeldt and Vidar Lerum have recently emphasized the importance of Victorian-era environmental technologies, but for a different purpose—to design lower-energy “green” buildings (in the post-Thermostat Age).
• Whether or not we adopt “The Thermostat Age” terminology, it is useful and challenging to think of highly-serviced buildings as a category (not a style) and to recognize that this category seamlessly spans the 19th and 20th centuries.