The Thermostat Age

In 2016 I wrote a paper called “The Thermostat Age: Questions of Historiography” for the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) conference. Since it has quite a bit of original thinking, I thought I’d share it.

A quick summary:
• Steven Mouzon coined “The Thermostat Age” in his 2010 book The Original Green.
• This paper is exploratory: to test whether “The Thermostat Age” is a valid and useful concept for architectural history.
• Although architectural historians Reyner Banham, Sigfried Giedion, and James Marston Fitch have paid attention to this subject, we don’t treat the energy-intensive buildings of the 20th century as a coherent category.
• If “The Thermostat Age” is indeed a valid and useful concept, we ought to be able to reconstruct the key technologies, texts, and canonical buildings. I make a first-draft attempt.
• This exercise reveals the importance of the continuity between (loosely) the Victorian period and the Modern period. In other words, if you wanted to write an architectural history of “The Thermostat Age,” you’d include a lot of content from the 19th century (and even earlier).
• This conclusion surprised me, because in conventional architectural history there is great emphasis on the discontinuity between Victorian and Modern.
• Complexity: Engineer Peter Rumsey and scholars such as Henrik Schoenefeldt and Vidar Lerum have recently emphasized the importance of Victorian-era environmental technologies, but for a different purpose—to design lower-energy “green” buildings (in the post-Thermostat Age).
• Whether or not we adopt “The Thermostat Age” terminology, it is useful and challenging to think of highly-serviced buildings as a category (not a style) and to recognize that this category seamlessly spans the 19th and 20th centuries.

Solar Futures: The View from 1965

How did the profile of future energy sources look in 1965? Here’s a graph presented by L. P. Gaucher, researcher for Texaco, at the Solar Energy Society Conference in Phoenix, and published in Solar Energy*.

The accompanying text includes some statements that appear wrong (now, in retrospect)…
“Natural gas probably will be the very first source of energy to become in short supply.”
“For the coal industry, things look rosy.”
…and some prescient statements:
“over the longer range, say fifty to a hundred years from now, means of transmitting electric power to moving vehicles on the highways may have been perfected.”
“as the cost of liquid fuels increases, their uses for some purposes may have to give way to competing sources of energy, notably electrification.”

*Gaucher, Leon P. “Energy sources of the future for the United States.” Solar Energy 9, no. 3 (1965): 119-126.

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Previously on the blog:
Solar Futures: The View from 1979
Solar Futures: The View from 1978
Solar Futures: The View from 1973
Solar Futures: The View from 1952

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? I’m not sure about that. 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