Richard Levine: A 1970s Solar Architect

When you look at solar houses from the 1970s---there were dozens of books which described hundreds of houses---you find a lot of solar architects, often unfamiliar.  You wonder what became of them.

One such architect is Richard Levine.  I quoted Levine in The Solar House, in an overview of the aesthetic issues in 1970s solar architecture.  (The book focuses on solar houses prior to 1973 and only surveys the 1970s briefly.)  I included this quotation because I thought it represented a strong idea:

The first steam powered vessels to cross the Atlantic looked like awkward sailing ships not steamships (just as the first automobiles looked like awkward carriages, not Model T’s).  They carried a full complement of sails because their reliability was well below 100%.  It was not long before they achieved the reliability necessary to evolve their own form and their own structure, vastly different from the form of its progenitors.

Solar building is beginning to embark on this same sort of evolution—awkward, not able to do the job alone, working with adaptations of unsuitable existing forms.  The turning point will be when we change our commitment from an add­-on, booster mentality to a 100% solar sensibility.  At that point evolution will be swift and irreversible.  Solar devices, solar buildings and solar villages will rapidly develop appropriate forms and structures.

Then, I wrote: "Such an evolution did not mature in the 1970s."

So what became of Richard Levine?  He is a professor at the University of Kentucky.  Today he was profiled in the Lexington Herald-Leader, featuring his Raven Run house as well as some thoughts about the future of energy-saving homes.  It's a excellent piece, because it clearly connects that experimental period, which can seem so remote, with the problems and opportunities of today and tomorrow.  I borrowed the photos above from the article.

Link to Lexington Herald-Leader article: "Early solar architect sees big changes ahead for American homes"

See also: A note on the solar architecture of the 1970s

The Batwing 66 in Wyoming

The "Batwing 66" is an iconic type of roadside architecture from the 1960s, gas stations built across the country by Phillips 66.  Most were designed with one "wing" but some have two.  I love these structures, and I enjoy looking for them when traveling across the countryside.

The stations were designed by Clarence Reinhardt, who is otherwise unknown.  The type is also known as the Harlequin 66, because of the butterfly resemblance.

Are there are others in Wyoming?  Probably.  Please comment with other examples!

Update: Here's another in Lovell, Wyoming found on Flickr. [1]  [2]
 

#SD2015

Update (Oct. 17, 2015): The SURE House by Stevens Institute of Technology is the overall winner.

The 2015 Solar Decathlon is underway in the curious location of Irvine, California.  (See earlier post: The Solar Decathlon: Back to Irvine.)  Faithful readers know I discussed the Decathlon at length in The Solar House and I've offered some criticism of the contest*.

This year I'm following from afar.  I'm looking at the official Decathlon material on their website and Twitter and Flickr.  I'm looking at news stories.  I'm looking at Youtube videos.  And I'm looking at the websites of the teams, and what the teams share on various social media platforms.

What strikes me in my virtual tour is how the "blue-collar" aspects of the activity are celebrated above all else.  Here's a sample screen-grab from the DOE's Flickr page:

First thought---and I absolutely do not mean to denigrate the efforts of the students---does this look like a University-level professional education, or a trade-school activity?  I'm the first to advocate for the value for architecture students to understand construction, and to do so in a hands-on manner.  Nevertheless, to foreground the enterprise in this manner distorts its character, I think, if we can all agree that the primary activity of architecture is design.  It is difficult, at least at this stage, to find the traditional products of architecture such as drawings and models, nor the traditional products of engineering like technical analyses and calculations.  Not to mention new methods like simulations.  You can locate some plans and diagrams, but you have to dig pretty deep.  In other words, I'm simply observing that the design intelligence of the competition is overshadowed by this kind of coverage.  

*See:
Help Wanted: The Solar Decathlon
Too Expensive: The Solar Decathlon
The “Shading Decathlon”?

A Few Thoughts on Brutalism

Whether I’m teaching architectural history here in Wyoming, or in the summer when I travel to Europe with students, it’s becoming more and more important to help them understand Brutalism. Why is Brutalism of interest right now? A few reasons. Many buildings of that type are reaching 50 years old and therefore they are potentially historic. Many are threatened due to the need for major maintenance. And, these buildings are aesthetically challenging. Is it fair to say that people generally hate Brutalist buildings?

As a historian, here are a few points on Brutalism that I think are important.

1) For starters, the term Brutalism is derived from the French beton brut, meaning “raw concrete.” The name of the style celebrates its materiality.

2) Brutalism is an extension of modernism. Although the classic International-Style modernism of the 1920s was concerned with lightness and transparency, and Brutalism was not, these are the consistencies: regular, expressed structure; an ‘honesty’ in the use of materials; the free plan; and of course the absence of applied ornament.  

3) Brutalism, it seems to me, is principally about the expression of permanence. If Le Corbusier's use of breton brut at the Unite D’Habitation is accepted as the genesis of the style, then it was born immediately after World War II. Its appeal in London then corresponds to the fact that London was bombed. In the US its appeal was probably more strongly aligned with the Cold War and the fear of nuclear attack. In short, Brutalism expresses the record of 20th century history.  

4) Brutalism was accompanied by its twin, the high-tech architecture of the space age. In art history, this is the famous Flintstones-Jetsons dichotomy; a time when art looked to the prehistoric past and the simulated future. The Brutalists are the Flintstones and Richard Rogers (at the Pompidou and Lloyd's) is the Jetsons. In times of great anxiety, people tend to want to escape to another time.

5) In the US, Brutalism was also used as tool of institutional authority.  For example, some college campuses built after 1968 were designed to deter student protests. Storke Plaza at UC-Santa Barbara (1969) is an excellent example in my opinion. In cases like Boston City Hall, the placement and scale of the building in an open monotlithic hardscape puts its citizen-subjects in a vulnerable position of surveillance and control.

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London is surely the best city to study Brutalism. Here is the classic Brutalist itinerary for London:

• Royal National Theatre, Denys Lasdun (1967–76), shown above

• Barbican Estate, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon (1965-76)

• St. Giles Hotel, Ellworth Sykes (1977)

• University of London buildings, Denys Lasdun (1970s)

• The Economist Building, Alison and Peter Smithson (1959–65)

• Robin Hood Gardens, Alison and Peter Smithson (1966-72) --- demolition pending

• United States Embassy, Eero Saarinen (1955-60)

See also: A Perfect Map For Exploring London's Brutalist Buildings

In America, these are the canonical Brutalist buildings in my opinion:

• Boston City Hall, Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles (1962-68), shown above
  note: fans of this building must watch Scorsese’s The Departed, shown below

• Buildings at Saint John’s University, Marcel Breuer (1955-75)

• Yale Art and Architecture Building, Paul Rudolph (1958-63)

• Salk Institute, Louis Kahn (1960-63)

• Wurster Hall at UC-Berkeley, Vernon DeMars, Donald Olsen, and Joseph Esherick (1958-64)

• Robarts Library, Mathers & Haldenby Architects (1968-73)

The "flawed texture" of history

In 1965, James Marston Fitch surveyed the architectural literature from 1929‒39, and concluded:

“The period seems to me a pregnant one, a very rich and stimulating one, despite the fact that, if you look closely at its actual accomplishments, they may seem pathetic in their scarcity, their small scale, their inability to go beyond the schematic and the hypothetical. (But many great periods of history reveal the same flawed texture when examined closely: reading the daily accounts of the Civil War, you would never guess that the Union would win and the nation be preserved.)”*

This is a remarkable passage for a couple of reasons. First, the phrase “pathetic scarcity” leaps off the page. Although architectural historians who focus on the 20th century (like me) surely agree that architecture suffered in the 30s due to the Great Depression, I would not depict it this way. Think of Frank Lloyd Wright's activities in that decade—Fallingwater, Taliesin West, Johnson Wax. Moreover, from my own studies, Gregory Ain produced some of his finest work in the 30s, the passive solar house was developed by Fred Keck, and the canonical Lake County Tuberculosis Sanatorium was built in this period as well. (Apart from an offhand reference to Broadacre City, Fitch did not discuss Wright, Ain, Keck, or Pereira, and this is only to mention a few of the achievements he seemingly overlooked.) I think we've developed a richer view of the 30s since Fitch’s time.

His reference to the “inability to go beyond the schematic and the hypothetical” seems to have been directed at Buckminster Fuller and Frederick Kiesler. They were discussed in some detail in the article.

More importantly, I find this notion of “flawed texture” to be immensely thought-provoking and useful. As architectural historians we typically build larger stories out of small pieces of evidence, like a detective. As (fictional character) Sherlock Holmes said: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” I like to approach my work with something of this attitude.

But I think Fitch would not subscribe to the Holmes method. He suggests discrete bits of evidence, taken at face value, may point to the wrong conclusion. Historical interpretation is not quite like detective work. We know that historical distance is required. By extension, what is also required is a kind of impressionistic imagination, and perhaps—unless I am reading Fitch too liberally—a willingness to twist facts, at least a little bit.

*Fitch’s article, “The Rise of Technology: 1929-1939,” was published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians in 1965. Fitch should be recognized as a towering figure; for a time at mid-century, he was the only architectural historian alert and sensitive to environmental issues. (I also mentioned him here.)

See also: Problems and Paradoxes of Architectural History