The Trombe Wall and the Penny Farthing

ArchDaily published an article on the Trombe Wall. Some quick reactions:

• To learn the full history of the Trombe wall, please seek out my book!

• It is authentically difficult to write about the relevance of historical methods to architecture today.

• The ArchDaily article is an interesting summary and generally accurate, but to my mind it buries the lede. Near the end is the line: “A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the Zion National Park Visitor Center found that 20% of the building’s annual heating was supplied by its Trombe wall.” This is a new-ish building and these are significant savings.

• I’m not interested in criticizing the author, but let’s simply acknowledge that ArchDaily is using student-interns to create serious content. This is the reality of architectural publishing.

Then on Twitter, Nick Grant posted:

Now here is an interesting question! Is the Trombe Wall comparable to the Penny Farthing? This raises deep issues of history, technology, and architecture. I have many scattered thoughts:

• Technologies that are revolutionary and good in their time only seem quaintly ‘transitional’ in retrospect. For technologies or products or methods today, it’s difficult to know if they are mature or transitional. Your favorite Passivhaus housing project might look like a Penny Farthing someday. I’ll be bolder: it probably will.

• Does the Trombe Wall work? Yes.

• What are its fundamental limitations? 1) The heat stored during the day radiates both directions at night. Much is lost outward through the glass. 2) Thermal control is difficult. You might have overheating in some spaces and times.

• Limitation 1 can be addressed by moveable insulation or heavy curtains, but low-tech solutions requiring user engagement aren’t popular in the green building community today. This is cultural. Limitation 2 can be addressed by asking people to tolerate a larger range, or use different spaces at different times. Likewise, this isn’t popular in the green building community today and also cultural.

• If you assume the Trombe Wall is like the Penny Farthing, you are assuming that it can’t evolve into something better (like a chain-and-sprocket bicycle). I don’t agree with this assumption.

• The better version of the Penny Farthing was a different bicycle, but same category of thing. As Nick suggests, the chain-and-sprocket technology was a major advance. Is it analogous to say insulation and air-tightness is the better version of the Trombe Wall? No—not the same category of thing.

There is no doubt that newer Passivhaus techniques (insulation, air-tightness, etc.) are more effective at reducing energy and providing comfort than older Passive Solar/Trombe Wall techniques. Yet it’s true that the Trombe Wall is not obsolete, because it works as a limited low-technology solution to collect and store free heat. With vastly reduced heating needs, can they be used together? Trombe parapets? Trombe curtains? Trombe furniture?

Michelangelo, God's Architect

My summer reading so far includes William E. Wallace’s book Michelangelo, God’s Architect. It’s worth sharing; let me tell you why.

In the beginning Wallace explains that he’s interested in the physical realities of art & architecture, in addition to the traditional concerns of fine art. He writes: “Art is first and foremost about stuff… Art is about obtaining materials, moving them, working them, and moving them again…. Architecture in particular requires an inordinate amount of labor and time” (p.4). I like this agenda because it acknowledges that architecture is a contingent and collaborative practice, a fact often ignored when buildings are discussed by art historians.

For much of the book, Wallace uses this sensibility (plus decades of research) to construct a different view of Michelangelo, one which adds great depth to the common portrayals. He describes Michelangelo as a true master builder, significantly more accomplished in matters of logistics and engineering than his predecessors were. For instance, his redesign for St. Peter’s Basilica brilliantly added four massive external piers with helical ramps within, for donkeys and mules to haul materials up to the base of the drum of the dome. “Eventually, even some of the most resistant workers realized that Michelangelo understood how to organize a building site” (p.77). He “astonished the entrenched supervisors with his grasp of detail and his ability to maintain oversight of the complete project” (p.78).

All of which is illuminating but not radical. But the book builds to a passage which I found breathtaking, thrilling in its intellectual sweep and rapid pace. (You don’t say ‘breathtaking, thrilling’ about architectural history-writing very often.) The tour-de-force passage is a succession of 72 questions which Michelangelo must have been holding in his mind simultaneously. Some are compound questions as you’ll see below. Here are some excerpts to give a sense of the content, but without reproducing the entire section I won’t capture the full effect of Wallace’s wonderfully composed measures:

(1) How much travertine was needed to construct the eighteen buttresses and thirty-six columns encircling the drum of the dome;

(8) how much would it cost;
(9) how much should Michelangelo worry about the cost;
(10) how much would the pope worry about the cost;

(23) was there enough rope, and was it good rope;

(26) how much animal shit would be deposited there [in the helical ramps inside the piers], and should someone be hired to clean the slippery ramps daily or weekly, and should straw be laid down to ensure good footing;

(42) how much mortar would be required, and how long should it be slaked;

(49) were there enough laborers, working long enough hours, at a good enough wage;

(67) how many lives would be lost;

(70) would the pope live long enough;
(71) would Michelangelo live long enough;
(72) Could he, as architect of God’s church, fulfill God’s expectations?

Note: In the book these questions are not numbered, but strung together with semi-colons, with a few key paragraph breaks. It starts on p.191.

On Monuments

Protests on Monument Ave By Scott Elmquist

Due to the events in June, I plan to give the issue of Confederate Monuments a more central place in my Architectural History course this fall. This will reinforce a theme of the course: ‘rewriting history’ as a positive concept.

I though I would share the most useful pieces I’ve read. Most were published this month, but a few are from 2017.

“Monuments and Crimes”
by Dell Upton in Journal18 (2020)
”In short, historic preservation enters many conflicts over monuments, either as a delaying tactic or from a sincere, if misguided, belief that monuments are themselves “history” and that their fall is a kind of 1984-esque rewriting of the past.“

“Richmond’s Confederate Monuments Were Used to Sell a Segregated Neighborhood”
by Kevin M. Levin in The Atlantic (2020)
"The Confederate monuments dedicated throughout the South from 1880 to 1930 were never intended to be passive commemorations of a dead past; rather, they helped do the work of justifying segregation and relegating African Americans to second-class status."

"Tearing Down Statues Doesn’t Erase History, It Makes Us See It More Clearly"
by Enzo Traverso in Jacobin (2020)
”Cities are living bodies that change according to the needs, values, and wishes of their inhabitants, and these transformations are always the outcome of political and cultural conflicts.”

“What’s the Point of Beheading a Statue?”
by Erin L. Thompson in Art in America (2020)
discusses “iconoclasm from below” vs. “iconoclasm from above”

"Confederate Monuments and Civic Values in the Wake of Charlottesville"
by Dell Upton in Society of Architectural Historians blog (2017)
"This is not ultimately a conflict over monuments. It is a conflict over the values that we wish to endorse in the contemporary public realm."

"We Legitimize the ‘So-Called’ Confederacy With Our Vocabulary, and That’s a Problem"
by Christopher Wilson in Smithsonian Magazine (2017)
”Just a few years after the war, Frederick Douglass had already begun to see that the losers of the war were winning the peace because he felt that the American people were 'destitute of political memory.'"

From the UK:

“Don't worry about 'rewriting history': it's literally what we historians do”
by Charlotte Lydia Riley in The Guardian (2020)
”These statues ... are political monuments to anxieties about Britain’s status [as a declining empire] at the times that they were erected.”

“Statue wars: what should we do with troublesome monuments?”
by Tyler Stiem in The Guardian (2018)
"Our relationship to a statue, or a building, or a sign is always changing."

Institutional Statements (June 2020):

Society of Architectural Historians

National Trust for Historic Preservation

Green Building in Academia

Would you believe there’s not a single academic presenting at “the world’s premier green building event”? Take a peek at the schedule of speakers for this month’s Living Future 2020 Online Conference. While it looks like a great lineup, it’s somewhat disturbing that the organizers found no ideas coming out of our universities worth including.

I can’t say they were wrong. Is there any impactful Green Building research coming out of academia? I’m not talking about critical theory—‘Architecture in the Anthropocene’ and such—which is plentiful and sometimes interesting. I’m talking about practical ideas and scientific experimentation which would lead directly to low-energy and low-carbon architecture.

Like all professors, I get asked to perform peer-reviews of papers submitted to academic journals. Most of what I see is very weak, in execution but more problematically in ambition. Some document things happening in practice, others apply an existing modeling procedure to a hypothetical narrow circumstance. My reviews often begin: “In my view this research is of limited importance.”

Similarly, if you’re interested in understanding new knowledge in Building Science, where should you go? MIT? Purdue? No, you should go to the Building Science Corporation. Academia hasn’t found a way to take a leading role.

● ● ●

Update, August 2020: BuildingEnergy Boston 2020 (NESEA) has 108 speakers presenting next week. By my quick survey, two (!) are academics. One is from the MIT Sloan School of Management and one is from Harvard Business School (so zero from architecture and engineering).

Surface Reading

The concept of surface reading is several years old but it seems to have gained quite a bit of currency lately. Briefly, the idea of surface reading is this: when examining a text or other cultural production, the important meanings are in the foreground rather than the background. According to this line of thought, too much scholarship is too focused on the background, the obscure meanings and hidden agendas, so that importance of the foreground is lost.

Literary theory and architectural history are closely entwined, at least since the 1980s. So it’s not surprising that surface reading was conceptualized in part by Sharon Marcus, who, while not an architectural historian, has written about historical buildings and environments. And she says explicitly that surface reading is a good approach to interpreting buildings. Marcus’ book Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (1999) is notable for its interdisciplinary richness, as it draws upon history, literature, and sociology.

Surface reading, as I understand it, is principally a theory of negation, opposed to the dominant practice of symptomatic reading. The key figure in symptomatic reading is Fredric Jameson, who wanted to find the “latent meaning behind a manifest one” (and who performed a symptomatic reading of the Bonaventure Hotel). Marcus and Stephen Best frame surface reading in opposition to Jameson in the definitive article “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” They characterize Jameson’s symptomatic reading as:

“a mode of interpretation that assumes that a text's truest meaning lies in what it does not say, describes textual surfaces as superfluous, and seeks to unmask hidden meanings. For symptomatic readers, texts possess meanings that are veiled, latent, all but absent if it were not for their irrepressible and recurring symptoms.”

By contrast, Best and Marcus endorse the fact that surface reading:

“strive[s] to accurately depict the truth to which a text bears witness. Surface reading broadens the scope of critique to include the kinds of interpretive activity that seek to understand the complexity of literary surfaces—surfaces that have been rendered invisible by symptomatic reading.”

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeffrey J. Williams characterized this position as “The New Modesty in Literary Criticism.” Williams wrote:

“In part, the shift represents a generational turnover, and dispensing with some of the overblown assertions of literary theory is refreshing. But it also seems to express the shrunken expectations of academe, particularly of the humanities, and a decline in the social prestige of literary criticism.”

I agree with “refreshing” and I especially agree with “modesty.” I’m attracted to the concept of surface reading, because I want my scholarship to be modest. I tend to be cautious about making speculative claims; I don’t want to be wrong. I tend to let my historical research speak for itself. Does this reflect “shrunken expectations?” Maybe so.

Yet surface reading, it seems to me, is fundamentally limited because it is a contrary theory rather than an affirmative one. I get the importance of contrarian thinking, but isn’t it more consequential to offer new ways of thinking?

And symptomatic reading has been so powerful and so central to architectural historians of my generation that it is difficult to imagine rejecting it. For a given building, why wouldn’t you want to look ‘behind’ it to examine the psychology of the architect, or the motives of the owner, or the hidden political systems that it operates within? I think about Beatriz Colomina’s interpretations of Adolf Loos’ houses (here), or Sylvia Lavin’s reading of Richard Neutra’s treatment of his clients (here), or David Burke’s peeling-back-the-curtains of Lawn Road Flats (here). Without symptomatic reading, we’d be missing a lot!