Lawrence B. Anderson on Air Conditioning

One of the important recurring themes in the history of the solar house, ironically, was the advent of air conditioning. In the book I discuss how the solar house and the all-glass house (requiring air conditioning) developed in parallel although they were fundamentally opposed in concept.

The architects who truly contributed to the solar house movement were modernists, and so most of them sought to control the indoor environment and embraced emerging science-based standards of comfort. But they were interested in saving energy, and so they were troubled by the increasing reliance on air conditioning. 

Lawrence B. Anderson is an important character in the book and one of those prescient critics of architecture's over-reliance on mechanical systems. Anderson was  the Head of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for decades at mid-century and designer of MIT's Solar House IV. In 1959 he wrote:

“Comfort is desirable; the mechanisms for achieving it threaten to strangle our art.

The honeymoon is over in air conditioning. A large surtax of dollars and space now penalizes almost every building project. We have come to rely on gadgets instead of using our brains to outwit the climate by shading, insulation, breezes, and other adaptations that used to give regional character. Much of our time is spent trying to balance budgets that are forty per cent mechanical equipment, and the rest of it goes toward figuring out where to put all the motors, fans, valves, ducts, transformers, filters, pumps, dampers, pipes, traps, vents, grilles, compressors, and access panels.

The brightest engineers got bored with environmental control before the architects. They regard these problems as having been solved years ago, and are now at work on rocketry. We are left with a great proliferation of devices that work some of the time, but no very sophisticated advice on how to arrange them for effective use.”

Our stereotype—mostly true—is that architecture in the 1950s paid little attention to proper envelope design and passive strategies while it fully embraced the advent of air conditioning. (See Gail Cooper's Air-Conditioning America for the larger story.) But a vocal minority of architects like Anderson swam against the powerful tide, and their resistance, in fact a form of social protest, should not be forgotten.

[Anderson quote from  "The Architect in the Next Fifty Years," Journal of Architectural Education, Spring 1959.]

80 years: The House of Tomorrow

It was 80 years ago this month that construction began on Fred Keck's "House of Tomorrow" at Chicago's Century of Progress exposition.

House of Tomorrow by George Fred Keck (1933)​
Photo by Kaufmann & Fabry Co.
from University of Illinois at Chicago Library
http://www.flickr.com/photos/uicdigital/4387523202/

Keck said he 'discovered' solar heating when he found workers inside the house wearing only shirtsleeves on a frigid winter day. This is the legendary 'shirtsleeves story' which I deconstruct in the book. Still it is clear that the House of Tomorrow set Keck on a powerful, decade-long inquiry that culminated in the solar house movement of the 1940s.

My friend Jim Laukes, an independent scholar formerly of the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT), wrote the following tribute:

 Well done and salutations on your 80th birthday, House of Tomorrow
 
Still holding out on a bluff overseeing the assaulting waves of a tumultuous inland sea, The House of Tomorrow, designed primarily by Chicago architect George Fred Keck for the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition has gained iconic stratospheres unanticipated at its inception.  Rare is the book on any aspect of American World’s Fairs which lacks a photo and mention of it.  
 
As a precipitously late entry into the Home and Industrial Arts group, it made an unusual fit. Neighboring Model Homes proclaimed sponsors such as aptly named Southern Cypress Manufacturers’ Association, American Lumberman’s Association, Brick Manufacturers Association, Masonite Corporation, Stransteel Corporation and the ‘breezy’ State of Florida which chose reinforced concrete as prime material. The glass and steel House of Tomorrow stood out on the proverbial limb, awaiting the huff and puff of a Neptunesque big bad wolf which might proverbially progress in blowhard destruction from straw to wood to brick. Recall that this grouping was only a few hog hollers east, and downwind, from the broad-shouldered stock yards. Steel-reinforced concrete stood as an obvious improvement, be it for wolves or hurricanes. (Straw was unrepresented in 1933 – see 1871 calamity - for fire safety reasons alone.) But those twelve sided expanses of single strength plate glass?  Hubris or prescience?  
 
Another exception awarded the House of Tomorrow was the commercial status of ‘concession’ – the ability to charge a 10 cent fee. Entry tickets to the Fair were 50 cents unless discounts applied and most exhibits were included.  A 1931 Century of Progress rulebook for the Model Homes in the Home and Industrial Arts group defined them as exhibits and admission fees were expressly forbidden.  Somehow this latecomer managed a ‘unique’ place on the Midway to Manna. More on this and related repercussions such as Chicago-style backroom business practices in a later writing.
 
If icons need heroic if not also tragic proportions, a saga of solar heating will perform nicely here. A story arose some years after the Fair closed that during a stage of construction, a few workmen had shed their winter coats while laboring inside the enclosed space. But the furnace was not yet operating. It's known as "the shirtsleeves story." This led Keck to begin speculation that the sun streaming bountifully through the glass was a readily available, cost-efficient source of space heating.  In many retellings, this took on a form akin to Isaac Newton’s gravitas apple. Sometimes the date of this accidental epiphany was set in February or less specifically after a freezing night.  With construction just getting underway in April, it’s likely that the glazing was not completed until very late in April or, more probably, in early May.  Two books, The Solar Home: Pioneering Sustainable Design by Anthony Denzer (just published) and Let it Shine: The 6000 Year History of Solar Energy by John Perlin (available August 2013) elaborate on aspects of this tale.
 
As a self-proclaimed practitioner and student of Modernism, Keck’s model home should not be considered ahistorically. Estimable efforts by Mies van der Rohe such as the Barcelona Pavilion and the Tugendhat House deserve vital consideration.  As the paths of Mies and Keck would intersect at a later date, this must be pursued in further writings.
 
So, Happy Birthday, House of Tomorrow, and here’s a toast to a hundred more!

---Jim Laukes

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And on the subject of Keck-related anniversaries, it's been 20 years since the last serious scholarly study of Keck's work: Robert Boyce's Keck & Keck: The Poetics of Comfort.  That's far too long for a figure of Keck's significance. 

More recently on the blog:
The House of Tomorrow Postcard
A National Treasure: The House of Tomorrow

Reyner Banham's Unwarranted Apology

Architectural historian Reyner Banham has been a major influence on my work.  In particular, I consider his 1969 book The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment to be a monumental contribution to the discipline of architectural history.

Banham titled the introductory section of his book an "Unwarranted Apology." 

For what did he need to apologize?  The effects of the disciplinary divide between architecture and engineering—Sigfried Giedion's "schism."   Banham wrote:

"In a world more humanely disposed, and more conscious of where the prime human responsibilities of architects lie, the chapters that follow would need no apology, and probably would never need to be written.  It would have been apparent long ago that the art and business of creating buildings is not divisible into two intellectually separate parts—structures, on the one hand, and on the other mechanical services.  Even if industrial habit and contract law appear to impose such a division, it remains false."

The book then explored the immensely interesting story of how the development of architecture was shaped by mechanical systems of heating, ventilation, cooling, and lighting.  Although Banham had some grudging appreciation for pre-modern passive strategies, such as the shading of the Gamble house, the book is mainly a celebration of Victorian engineering and the evolution of modern environmental control. 

One of Banham's great contributions in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, is how he began to establish an aesthetic theory for the next paradigm (what we now call Green Building, I suppose).  Speaking of Zanuso’s Olivetti Factory, with its hollow concrete beams serving as air ducts, and its clip-on air-conditioners, Banham raved:

"The building is serviced, and manifestly seen to be serviced."

Banham borrowed this insight and its distinctive phrasing from himself.  Earlier, in describing the Glasgow School of Art and the Gamble house by Greene & Greene, he wrote:

"About the way the structure works, there is a … frankness, but it is made demonstrative: as with many modernists after him, so with Mackintosh, structure must not only be done, it must manifestly be seen to be done."*

For the time, this was a powerful idea, that a building's mechanical services ought to be exposed and coordinated with the overall aesthetic expression, perhaps even celebrated.  This was, of course, before the Centre Pompidou and Lloyd's of London.

Finally, and most importantly to me, Banham criticized fellow architectural historians for focusing on appearance and style, rather than the technical aspects of the building process.  He complained:

"However obvious it may appear, on the slightest reflection, that the history of architecture should cover the whole of the technological art of creating habitable environments, the fact remains that [it] still deals almost exclusively with the external forms of habitable volumes as revealed by the structures that enclose them."

For the most part, Banham's challenge has fallen on deaf ears.  (There are a few indications of change, which I'll plan to discuss on this blog in the future.)  And sadly, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment is out of print and hard to find.  It should be required reading for architecture and engineering students.

●          ●          ●

*Banham, Guide to Modern Architecture (1962).  Banham borrowed the construction from the popular British saying: "Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done," which was written in law in 1923.

See also: Reyner Banham on Solar Heating

The Clothesline Paradoxes

In the 1970s, a new concept appeared in the solar house discourse: The Clothesline Paradox.

Peter van Dresser apparently coined the term in the early 1970s as a macro-level critique of the methods of energy economists.  van Dresser complained that when economists described total US energy use by source---oil, coal, natural gas, etc.---they did not properly account for passive solar energy.  He said:

"If you take down your clothes line and buy an electric clothes dryer the electric consumption of the nation rises slightly. If you go in the other direction and remove the electric clothes dryer and install a clothesline the consumption of electricity drops slightly, but there is no credit given anywhere on the charts and graphs to solar energy which is now drying the clothes."

In essence, definition one of The Clothesline Paradox says that there is an 'informal' energy economy which is not properly measured and credited.  Steve Baer popularized the term, giving credit to van Dresser [source].  I don't know if there is any attempt to account for this version of the Clothesline Paradox in energy economics today.  Perhaps not.

Later, Sim Van der Ryn (apparently misremembering Steve Baer) offered a second, micro-level definition of the Clothesline Paradox.  The paradox was that you could rely on a complicated, expensive, and lossy system of power generation to dry your clothes in a machine, or you could simply use solar and wind power by hanging your clothes outside.  Van der Ryn said:

"The clothesline paradox is a good metaphor for our inability to perceive locally available solutions" [source].

This second line of thought is especially paradoxical if your power source was a 1970s-era active-solar collection system.  In fact, Van der Ryn may have been remembering a cartoon from van Dresser's book Homegrown Sundwellings (1979) which lampooned overly-designed active-solar houses.  I reproduced this cartoon in the book in a larger discussion about the 'active vs. passive' debates of the 1970s and 80s.

Both renderings of the Clothesline Paradox made a perfectly valid point, of course.  But you wouldn't want to confuse the two.

See also: Steve Baer Resources

Edison's famous quote

In 1931, Thomas Edison supposedly told his friend Henry Ford:

"I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy.  What a source of power!  I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."

Although solar enthusiasts like to use that quotation to show that visionary people have been advocating for the cause for a long time, you won't find it in my book.

It is certainly possible that Edison presciently said that to Ford at that time, but I decided not to use the quote because it comes from James D. Newton's memoir Uncommon Friends, published in 1987.   Newton was indeed friends with Edison and Ford, but he was 82 years old when he published the book, recalling a conversation from age 26.  There must be a statute-of-limitations for a personal historical memory.  Nobody else quoted Edison talking about solar energy in the 1930s.

In any case, Edison made no contribution to the history of the solar house as far as I know.  I'd be happy to hear from any Edison scholars about this issue.