Marcel Breuer's Villa Sayer

Here’s a project which offers some fascinating insight into problems of environmental control in modern architecture.

Marcel Breuer’s Villa Sayer (Normandy, 1972-1974) is currently featured in an exhibit at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris. It’s a house built with a concrete hyperbolic parabaloid roof. During the design process, Breuer made extensive notes questioning the design problems related to heating and cooling:

There is a persistent notion that Modernists like Breuer were insensitive to issues of thermal comfort. This is clear counter-evidence: an inquisitive effort to create a ‘well-tempered environment’. Yet it is also telling that Breuer asks his designers “Is this house air-conditioned?” at a relatively advanced stage in the process. An architect sensitive to energy use would certainly know the answer. (Energy use was not a concern to architects generally at this time.)

Here's a link to the page about the Villa Sayer at the Cité de l’Architecture. Also more here.

The Cité de l’Architecture seems to have a strong interest in these issues. Last summer I wrote about their display on Solar Geometry in France, 1961

Related: Straight from the Desk of Marcel Breuer, at Dwell.com

What is the floating world?

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has an excellent collection of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Ukiyo-e means ‘Pictures of the Floating World’. This is how the V&A explains this genre:

What is the floating world?

Living only for the moment, turning our attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and maples, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting ourselves in just floating, floating, caring not a whit for the poverty staring us in the face, refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current; this is what we call the floating world.

From A Tale of the Floating World, by Asai Ryui, about 1665 (trans. Richard Lane)
 

The Palm House at Kew Gardens

I recently visited The Palm House at Kew Gardens---an amazing experience and recommended to all.  I knew it to be a seminal building in the history of environmental controls due to its use of tinted glass, thanks to the work of my friend Henrik Schoenefeldt.*

Behind the glass and wonderful iron structure, I found the Palm House to be highly sophisticated in its methods of heating and cooling.  The building has in-floor ducts, steam radiators in specially-designed wall cavities, and ventilating panels at the bottom of the wall!  These are clearly integral to the original building, completed in 1848.

In The Solar House I wrote about the use of ventilating louvers (which use the same type of tilting panels, behind louvers) in houses of the 1940s and 1950s**, but I was not aware that their origins were in Victorian England.  There is so much more work to be done in understanding the history of the well-tempered environment!

The first principle is clear: buildings with a lot of solar gain need a lot of ventilation.  It's remarkable to see that this principle was so well-understood so early. 

And a final note: Inside the Palm House is a catwalk structure which you can climb and walk among the treetops.  I'm guessing it's about 24 feet above the floor.  On the day I visited and climbed, the temperature difference was profound, probably on the order of 15°F higher up top---serious stratification!  I wish I had measured it.

*Schoenefeldt, Henrik. "The use of scientific experimentation in developing the glazing for the Palm House at Kew." Construction History (2011): 19-39.
**Also discussed a bit here: Solar Principles and Laramie's Hitchcock House and here: Keck's Sloan house II: a new look

A great Banham quotation

“…as architects edge temerously along the margin of the scientific disciplines and never quite put a foot over into the other camp…  It appears always possible that at any unpredictable moment the unorganized hordes of uncoordinated specialists could flood over into the architects’ preserves and, ignorant of the lore of the operation, create an Other Architecture by chance, as it were, out of apparent intelligence and the task of creating fit environments for human activities.”
—Reyner Banham, "Stocktaking" Architectural Review (February 1960)

And a note: “the lore of the operation” is not a toss-off line for Banham here. The meaning and importance of that concept is discussed at length in the article.

Previously:
Reyner Banham on Solar Heating
Reyner Banham's Unwarranted Apology

Solar Houses & Preservation: Lovable?

Almost none of the important examples in the history of the solar house survive in anything like original condition.  (Fred Keck's Sloan house, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Solar Hemicycle are the major exceptions.)  In part this may be due to the phenomenon of shearing layers, discussed in the previous post.  And in part this may be due to the fact that they were generally not designed to be lovable. 

In his book The Original Green, Stephen Mouzon argues that buildings must be lovable in order to be sustainable, because if they are not lovable they will not be preserved.  This page by Mouzon has a summary, or for the full discussion, buy the book.  Mouzon's idea built upon Stewart Brand's comment in How Buildings Learn that we need to understand "What makes some buildings come to be loved?”

In The Solar House, though I did not use the word lovable, I did discuss the fact that many landmark solar houses were designed as 'science projects' without much attention to architectural aesthetics.  Recently on the blog I extended this line of inquiry: The Saskatchewan Conservation House: Aesthetic Questions.

Of course "lovable" was not a general aim of 20th-century architecture.  And of course the term "lovable" has a conceptual problem a mile wide: it's purely subjective.  (Mouzon seems to be a traditionalist.)  More problematically for the Preservation disciplines, what is generally lovable changes with time.  You might want to preserve an unloved building because odds are it will be loved in the future.

Still, I think the concept of lovable, however slippery, does hold some value in assessing why experimental solar houses have such a poor track record of being preserved.  If more of those houses had been designed with more lovable features, would they have a better survival rate?  Or maybe we need to develop some more love for historic experiments.

Related: To Love a Building, a page by a student of mine (not about solar houses)

Loosely related: Loveabilty (with an e) is also discussed here.