The "Surprisingly Sophisticated" Fallacy

Earlier this month I noticed, twice, writers describe pre-modern* architecture as "surprisingly sophisticated."  This caught my attention in part because I was just wrapping up an experimental seminar course which explored how pre-modern architecture worked in terms of heating, cooling, lighting, and structural systems.  We looked at a lot of sophisticated pre-modern buildings; it stopped being surprising pretty quickly.

On Treehugger.com, in an article called "What is a smart home anyway?", Lloyd Alter—who I respect quite a lot—said the Native American wigwam was "surprisingly really sophisticated" because of its layered insulated wall system and central heat source.

I replied in the comment section:

"Good subject! I just finished teaching a class on what can be learned from pre-modern buildings. The word "surprisingly" strikes me funny because we found pre-modern buildings to be consistently intelligent and clever, given the tools available. But ultimately we concluded these kinds of buildings, while fascinating, should not be romanticized. They allowed survival, perhaps barely. (Think about the air-quality!)
It's important to acknowledge that life improved tremendously in the machine age, even as we proceed with course-corrections."

Then some other commenters also chastised Alter for the word "surprisingly," and to his great credit he rescinded it, as the page now shows.  (Nobody disagrees with the word sophisticated.) 

Then in a (completely unrelated) New York Times op-ed called "How to Rebuild Architecture," Steve Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen offered a critique of contemporary architecture by claiming:

"For millenniums, architects, artist and craftspeople — a surprisingly sophisticated set of collaborators, none of them conversant with architectural software — created buildings that resonated deeply across a wide spectrum of the population."

I'm calling it the "Surprisingly Sophisticated" Fallacy.  You're only surprised if you presume that people from the past were less intelligent than us today—and that's a basic error of historical thinking, because they certainly were not.  Again, it doesn't take much exposure to history before getting this.  A few minutes with the Parthenon will do.  You can certainly call old buildings or old practices sophisticated, just don't act surprised.

Incidentally, Aaron Betsky wrote a scathing retort to Bingler and Pedersen's larger argument, and though he didn't exactly address my point head on, he reacted to the passage above by saying: "I do not know what fantasyland these authors live in."

Finally, to forestall any misunderstanding, none of this contradicts the undeniable fact of technological progress.  A house built today is more technologically sophisticated than a wigwam or country manor, because materials, tools, and techniques generally get better as time accumulates.  And this progress is clearly reflected in our excellent standard of living.  We should not, however, take that to mean that we're more intelligent, or that people in past periods were less capable.  They were invariably clever!

*In the class we generally took "pre-modern" to mean those buildings built before central heating, or air-conditioning, or electric lighting (depending on which subject we were interested in at the moment).

Unearthed: MIT Solar House IV film

More and more every day, valuable archival material is being digitized and made available on the web.  Sometimes this leads to exciting discoveries for people like me.  Here's an example.

British Pathé, a newsreel company, recently put thousands of their historical films on YouTube.  Openculture calls it "a goldmine of footage."

One of their films features MIT's Solar House IV, built by Hoyt Hottel, Lawrence B. Anderson and their team in 1957-58.  It's short, but significant.

Solar House IV is discussed in great detail in The Solar House.

Related: Hoyt Hottel's skepticism

A Barry Commoner Quotation

In chapter 12 of The Solar House, entitled After the Crisis, I argue that the earlier experiments described throughout the book found their true significance after (roughly) 1973 when the need for energy-saving houses became widespread and urgent.  Architects, engineers, and DIY-ers were able to address the need, because the early pioneers had prepared them by creating new technical knowledge.  I wrote:

"In a sense, the solar house movement was ‘ready’ for this explosive growth due to the decades of exploratory work described [in the preceding chapters] above."

What I'm describing here is more akin to progress in a history-of-technology sense, than influence in an architectural-history sense.  I recently came across a wonderful passage from the period which offers some additional context and, I think, supports my view that the 1970s solar house movement essentially validated the progress that had been made in the 1930s-60s.  This is from Barry Commoner's The Poverty of Power: Energy and Economic Crisis (1976):

"I have refrained from describing in even slight detail the design and construction of actual solar devices for space heat, hot water, or steam-generated electric power because there is nothing very novel about them.  In these applications, all that is done is to link up a suitable solar collector with an already well-known device: a hot-water plumbing system; a forced-air home-heating system; a heat-operated air-conditioner; a steamdriven electric generator.  The engineering problems are quite straightforward and involve no insuperable technical barriers."

Elsewhere (here) I have extended this line of thought into the present, by making the point that we can now make Zero Energy houses quite easily; all of the fundamental questions are known and all methods familiar.  Of course today's dominant solar technology, PV, was not on Commoner's menu.  Progress continues and new research is always needed.  Still, the more significant barriers are cultural.  There are, as in Commoner's day, no insuperable technical barriers.

Revisiting the Bateson Building

Bateson Building, Sim Van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe (Sacramento, 1975-78)
from www.theecowizard.com

Previously I mentioned the Bateson Building, said it "will surely earn a place in the history books of the future," and I applauded Dell Upton for recognizing the importance of the project in his book Architecture in the United States.  Here's a bit more.

I believe it is accurate to say the Bateson Building was the first major public building after 1973 to achieve major energy savings.  It was built for the State of California, in Gov. Jerry Brown's first term.  The architects were challenged to save 75% on energy costs, and upon completion it was promoted as the most energy-efficient office building in the nation.  (I think the actual savings did not reach the goal, but I haven't been able to locate figures.)  It was also probably the first effort to make design decisions based on computer simulations of energy use in a large-scale public building.

I'm interested in the Bateson Building for several reasons, but here I'll emphasize that it displayed some techniques developed in early experimental solar houses.  In particular, the gravel bed for thermal storage (shown in the image below) is surely a direct descendant of the work of George Löf, as described in The Solar House.  In the Bateson Building, the gravel stored "coolth" from the night air rather than solar heat.  And like many earlier solar houses, the Bateson Building needed mechanical air systems to help mix hot and cold air.  The vertical air ducts became a major feature within the building (see last image below), and they remind me of the way architect James Hunter used vertical cardboard tubes for aesthetic interest in the George Löf Denver house of 1956 (see here).

I also enjoy sharing the Bateson Building with students because it responds to more basic and eternal principles, tapping into pre-modern wisdom about environmental control.  The building is organized around a four-story shaded courtyard, and the shaded courtyard is a feature in virtually every type of traditional architecture in hot-dry climates.  (In this case the courtyard is within the building, and part of the conditioned space.)  The courtyard also creates an ennobled sense of community for the office workers.

And the Bateson Building broke with modernist practice by offering a different expression on each of the four orientations.  The south facade includes deep trellises to provide shade; the east and west have operable canvas shades, and the north has clear glass in the plane of the wall.  Then the structure was topped by south-inclined roof monitors with operable vanes for passive solar heating when needed, and north-facing skylights for daylight.  In all of these ways, it profoundly embodied the concept of 'solar architecture'.  Calthorpe wrote:

"Each facade is different in response to its solar orientation: the south is shaded by deep trellises and decks, the east and west have colorful canvas shades that retract, and the north has simple clear glass to maximize daylight. This facade variation, along with the decks, wood siding, and landscaping, makes the building compatible with a mixed residential neighborhood."

from http://www.aiacc.org/2013/07/16/sacramentos-bateson-building-and-lincoln-plaza/

I'm also interested in the building's emphasis on legibility.  You can see what is structure and what is infill.  You can see how the shading works.  You can see how the air is being moved.  Several writers have found a Louis Kahn-influence in the Bateson Building, and I think the nature of that influence resides in the idea of legibility, as exemplified by Kahn's earlier Richards Medical Research Labs (1957-60).  This theme is buttressed by Reyner Banham's famous aphorism from The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969): "The building is serviced, and manifestly seen to be serviced."  In this way, the Bateson Building can be understood as part of a tradition including Kahn's work, the Pompidou Center by Richard Rogers & Renzo Piano (1973-77), and continuing in the work of people such as Rogers and Piano today.

Simon Sadler, in the context of a discussion about Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, offered this interpretation of the Bateson Building:

"The building recalled something of the urban holism requested by the Whole Earth Catalog’s most revered architectural critic, Lewis Mumford, and before him, Frank Lloyd Wright and Bernard Maybeck. It was not a caricature of a cybernetic or biological technostructure; with its pronounced stylistic debts to Louis Kahn and traditional Japanese architecture, its outlook was as humanly unsystematic as any of the other coevolutionary experiments visited by Brand."

from www.theecowizard.com

Upton emphasized that Calthorpe "described the Bateson Building as a living organism that would respond almost sentiently to changes in environmental conditions," and he wrote:

"Calthorpe's image of the building as a sentient being ... propels the Bateson Building from the technical domain of building science back into the metaphorical realm of nature and culture"

I'll give the final words to Sim Van der Ryn:

"We found that in designing with natural energy flows we became sensitive to difference.  The measure became not foot-candles of quantifiable illumination, which means nothing, but the quality of light you experience, which means everything.  We found we could consider the wall of the building not as a static, two-dimensional architectural element, but as a living skin that is sensitive to and adapts to differences in temperature and light.  We found that designing a building to save energy means designing a building that is sensitive to difference and results in a building that is better for people.  We are not adapted to live or work at temperatures or lighting levels that are uniform or constant.  We are most alive when we experience subtle cycles of difference in our surroundings.  The building itself becomes "the pattern which connects" us to the change and flow of climate, season, sun, shadow, constantly tuning our awareness of the natural cycles that support all life.

Maybe this is what esthetics and beauty are all about.  Maybe what we find beautiful is that which connects us to an experience of difference: to an experience of the patterns of wholeness, patterns that distinguish the living world from the works of humankind."

Sources:
Leonard Bachman, Integrated Buildings: The Systems Basis of Architecture (2002)
Peter Calthorpe, Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change (2011)
Carroll Pursell, "Sim Van der Ryn and the Architecture of the Appropriate Technology
     Movement," Australasian Journal of American Studies (2009)
Simon Sadler, "An Architecture of the Whole," Journal of Architectural Education (2008)
Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (1998)
Sim Van der Ryn, Design For Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn (2005)

The Air Force Academy solar house

Source: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/6346814

It's little known, but coming to light now as historical government documents are digitized: the United States Air Force Academy developed a solar house experiment in 1975.  It was not a purpose-built work of architecture, but rather a retrofit of an ordinary military housing unit.  They called it the Solar Test House.

The existing house was called a "Capehart unit," and it was among more than 1200 such units built by the Academy in 1958-59 in Pine Valley and Douglass Valley (on the USAFA campus).  Though there were several variations, the typical Capehart unit consisted of 3 bedrooms and 2 baths on about 1200 square feet on ground level, with a 700 square-foot basement.  The units had uninsulated brick walls (R-1) and "extensive air infiltration."  On average, each Capehart unit was estimated to need 30,000 Btu/Hr. each year.  With these factors, plus the excellent solar resource in Colorado Springs, it is easy to see why the Air Force Academy saw solar heating as an opportunity to manage energy costs.

The Solar Test House was also motivated by another set of historical contingencies.  Work on this project began in 1973, shortly after a crisis.  In the winter of 1972, Colorado experienced a shortage of natural gas, and the Air Force Academy was cut off for nearly six months.  (They used fuel oil, at great expense.)  Additionally, President Nixon announced "Project Independence" in June 1973, which aimed for national energy self-sufficiency by the mid 1980's, and the Air Force project was meant to contribute to this larger effort.

The solar heating system was rather conventional, consisting principally of 28 water-type flat-plate collectors manufactured by Revere.  Air Force researchers considered the design "unique" because, while half of the collectors were placed in a fixed array on the roof (at a 52˚ tilt angle), the other half were mounted on a ground array with adjustable tilt angles.  Apart from the ground array, the schematic design shown below strongly resembled earlier systems, especially MIT solar house IV (1957).  Extensive plumbing was required.  Also of note is that the 2500-gallon concrete storage tank was placed underground (outside the house) "for aesthetic considerations."  It was not insulated.

Aesthetically, there is not much of interest here, and architectural design is not mentioned in the official project reports.  Presumably the design was executed by the Academy's Department of Civil Engineering.  The major feature of the design is the addition of a solar roof form added to the existing standard roof of the Capehart unit.  Because these roofs follow different geometric logics and produce asymmetry, the result is somewhat incongruous, if rational.  In the larger history of solar houses, the eccentrically-shaped roof is a recurring theme; here that theme is not interestingly explored or well-resolved.

The researchers considered the Test House "a working solar energy laboratory" and modified it over a period of years.  In February 1977 they focused on efficiency, adding vestibules on the doors and urea formaldehyde (UF) foam insulation in the walls and ceilings.  (The safety of UF was the subject of much discussion at this time; the Air Force project found no harmful off-gassing.)

In late 1978 they installed evacuated tube collectors on the ground array.  These were found to be "not as effective as flat plate collectors," and more expensive.

How did the house perform?  The insulation reduced the heating load by 27%.  After that reduction, the solar heating system could provide 49% of the house's heating needs.  These figures were considered very reliable because the researchers also instrumented an identical Capehart unit as a Control House.

Then in February 1979 the researchers "decided to operate the house as though it had been completely cut off from natural gas."  (The solar heating system did depend on electricity.)  They found that the indoor temperature only fell below 60˚F twice, for short intervals. They wrote: "Therefore, a solar home occupant can survive relatively comfortably during winter weather until the supply of auxiliary energy is restored."  Clearly the themes of crisis and independence underscored the discourse about the project.

More broadly, Air Force Academy researchers concluded that the "new and growing" commercial solar industry could supply all the necessary hardware for such a system.  But the equipment was expensive: "In a competitive economic environment with conventional fossil fuels, solar energy presently falls somewhat short."

Some Air Force reports available on the web are linked on the Resources page.