I started this blog in 2013; it was originally meant to discuss content from The Solar House, and material which was left out. Since then, I've allowed it to grow to include other architectural topics.
Link to list of All Blog Posts
Some years ago (2004, I think) I took some photos of the Sam Maloof house. Maloof, who died in 2009, was one of the great wood furniture makers, specializing in rocking chairs. It was an honor to meet him. He designed and built this house in Rancho Cucamonga, California, over a period of decades.
Who was Leicester Allen? Apparently a key figure in the history of HVAC. He wrote these articles for Engineering magazine, which are available to read online:
"Heating and Ventilating Homes" (1891)
"The Ventilation of Homes and Schools, Part 1" (1891)
"The Ventilation of Homes and Schools, Part 2" (1891)
"The Manufacture of Ice" (1892)
"Practical Hints on Heating I" (1892)
"Practical Hints on Heating II---The Architect Considered" (1892)
"Practical Hints on Heating III---The Heating Expert" (1892)
"Practical Hints on Heating IV---The Contractor" (1892)
"An Unsettled Question in Ventilation" (1894)
"Heating and Ventilating Tall Buildings" (1895)
In a cursory search, this is the only other information I've been able to find:
"Dr. Allen devoted himself to invention and journalism, and produced some valuable inventions, one of the best known being the Allen's dense air ice machine, which is used on board almost all of the warships in the United States for refrigerating purposes, being very effective and safe for this purpose, on account of having no dangerous fumes to deal with, as in the ammonia machines, which would be unsafe aboard ship." Scientific American, 1911
Here's a rarely-seen period photo of Fred Keck's house for Hugh and Minna Duncan (Flossmoor, Illinois, 1941). In The Solar House the Duncan house is presented in great detail, but this photo did not make it into the book.
Hugh is outside shoveling snow in his winter clothes, while Minna is enjoying the solar-heated living room in her shirtsleeves. Note the concrete floor. You can catch a glimpse of the exterior "adjustable vanes" (for shading) directly above the book Minna is holding, behind the drapes. It's a wonderful artifact from the history of the passive solar house.
Finally, I will note that the caption on the back clearly indicates that the house overheated. Overheating was an important theme in the history of the solar house, and it remains a concern for designers who want to use passive solar and "Passivhaus" methods today. Someone will someday write the history of overheating, and the Duncan house clearly can be a canonical example.
For a bit more on Hugh Duncan and the IIT study of the house, see User Behavior. Incidentally, Duncan was a University of Chicago sociologist, and he wrote a large, fascinating book about architecture: Culture and Democracy: The Struggle for Form in Society and Architecture in Chicago and the Middle West During the Life and Times of Louis H. Sullivan (1965).
Also previously on the blog: Keck's Sloan house II: a new look
Peter Rumsey is one of the smartest mechanical engineers working, and a key figure in the green building movement. Here's his website. I like Peter because he advocates for “Simple Victorian Engineering.”1 In a discipline where increasing complexity is taken for granted, this is a big idea.
What does he mean by Simple Victorian Engineering? Rumsey's project shown above---the Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford, architecture by EHDD2---gives a good indication. The design uses a prominent chimney element, which is a down-draft evaporative cooling tower with a water-spray inside. It relies on buoyancy forces, rather than fan power, to pull cool air into the building when needed. It is, as Rumsey says, "elegant and efficient." It also gives the building an architectural feature which expresses how the building works.
To see the connection to Victorian engineering, let's take the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a representative example. (I'm cherry-picking because my friends Alistair Fair and Alan Short have recently written some excellent new scholarship about the hospital complex3 and because the Isolating Ward is such an excellent aesthetic statement about ventilation as seen below.) In this building, fresh air was delivered to the patient rooms through ventilating louvers in the walls, with heating coils, being drawn in as the "foul" air was pulled up and out by the convective force of the tall chimneys which included "accelerating steam coils."4 In other words, the building uses the forces of buoyancy to move large amounts of air (2 cubic feet per person per second!) when electric fan power did not yet exist.
Isolating Ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital, c. 1876 (link to image at Wikimedia)
I'm not sure that most Victorian-engineered buildings were "simple" or low-energy. Think about all of the construction complexity in those chimneys and steam coils above! But I understand that Rumsey's point is more about returning to first principles, freshman engineering concepts, than about mimicking Victorian buildings directly. After all, Rumsey's chimney works in the opposite direction.
Another thinker who is making the connection between Victorian engineering and the current green building movement is Vidar Lerum, professor at the University of Illinois and author of the new book Sustainable Building Design: Learning from nineteenth-century innovations. This books studies 10 examples of Victorian Engineering (in excellent detail) and 16 recent examples of low-energy architecture. The cleverly-illustrated book cover shows the Natural History Museum, London, juxtaposed with the Powerhouse One building in Trondheim.
This is a very good book and I hope to write more about it. Lerum is not a historian and fully admits to “nonchalantly leapfrogging the twentieth [century].” It's a bold intellectual move to jump from 1897 to 2007, as he does, skipping over the period of Modern architecture (and the modern science of solar heating).
As a historian it is both interesting and a bit curious to see these efforts to connect Victorian engineering and the green building movement or low-energy buildings today. It seems to me there are two ways to think about Victorian engineering: 1) This way, as Rumsey and Lerum do, offering lessons which can lead us to a low-energy future, or; 2) practically the opposite, as the beginning of the era of "applied power," mechanical control, and high energy use. Reyner Banham represented Victorian engineering this second way in his influential The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969). What a fascinating duality! I'm intrigued by the likelihood that both interpretations are valid.
1I first heard Peter use the phrase “Simple Victorian Engineering” in a meeting here at the University of Wyoming in about 2010 when he was part of a team competing for a new building commission. (They did not get the job, unfortunately.) Here's a 2010 presentation by Rumsey (pdf) where he uses the concept.
2RMI case study (pdf)
3C. Alan Short, et al. "Functional recovery of a resilient hospital type." Building Research & Information, (2014).
4Described here.
The history of solar energy is full of predictions or "possibilities" that were not realized and appear in retrospect to have been too-wishful. Here's an example which I mentioned in The Solar House. In 1952, the Paley Commission completed a five-volume report entitled Resources for Freedom, which predicted future oil shortages, warned against dependence on imports, and recommended a national energy agency. It included a section called “The Possibilities of Solar Energy”, written by Palmer Putnam:
"Of new dwelling units to be built in the United States by 1975 ... functionally designed for solar heating ... the maximum plausible market may be more than 13 million installations ... supporting about 10 percent of the national energy system."
In fact, by 1975, solar energy was such an insignificant fraction of the national energy supply that it could not be quantified (pdf source), although this type of analysis is subject to The Clothesline Paradox.
Previously:
Solar Futures: The View from 1978
Solar Futures: The View from 1973
Solar House History
by Anthony Denzer
published April 2013
Rizzoli International Publications
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4005-2
