May 21, 2022

The Greenest Building in the World (at the time)

May 21, 2022/ Anthony Denzer

Some of you surely remember those heady days for the Green Building community, the early-to-mid 2000s. Each year at Greenbuild and other meetings there was tremendous excitement for new building materials & methods, and for new buildings. Greenbuild attracted tens of thousands of people! Who will be next year’s keynote speakers? we wondered. New magazines and websites cropped up like wildflowers. And new contenders for the title ‘Greenest Building in the World’ were eagerly scrutinized. The AIA COTE top ten list was a big deal. The graph below shows that the phrase “greenest building” entered the public dialogue in the late 1990s and soared around 2000.

Lately I’ve been recalling this period, somewhat nostalgically and somewhat critically (see disclaimers below). For the benefit of the historical record, I thought it would be useful and fun to record the buildings that were considered ‘The Greenest Building in the World’ during the past couple of decades. These aren’t meant to represent my own favorite or ‘best’ green buildings but rather those that were the consensus within that community at the time. (If you disagree please comment!) And I’m not defining ‘greenest’ because this was impressionistic, and because priorities changed over the years.

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Prior to 1990, I believe the Greenest Building in the World was considered to be either the Bateson Building (Sim Van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe, 1978) or the Monterey Bay Aquarium (EHDD, 1984).

1990: Passivhaus housing in Darmstadt, Bott, Ridder and Westermeyer

1994: Heliotrope, Rolf Disch

1997: Commerzbank Tower, Norman Foster and Partners

2000: Lewis Center at Oberlin, William McDonough + Partners

2003: BedZED (Beddington Zero Energy Development), Bill Dunster, or
Solarsiedlung at Schlierberg, Rolf Disch

2004: Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford, EHDD.

2008: Aldo Leopold Center, The Kubala Washatko Architects

2010: Omega Center, BNIM Architects

2013: Bullitt Center, Miller Hull

Has the Bullitt Center been eclipsed? Maybe? I don’t know! I don’t know because the question doesn’t provoke the same excitement it used to. The Green Building community has evolved beyond its adolescence, surely for the better. As an adult, you come to realize that you can’t say whether Thriller was a better album than Sgt. Pepper’s—masterworks are incomparable.

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Disclaimers:
Yes, Greenbuild was a fully corporate affair; it commodified ecological architecture and tolerated a ton of greenwashing. LEED was poor tool for measuring sustainability.

April 08, 2022

Pevsner: Architecture and Building

April 08, 2022/ Anthony Denzer

Everybody knows the line from Nikolaus Pevsner:

“A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.”

But what follows? How did Pevsner make the argument for distinguishing architecture from ordinary building"?

He was remarkably clear-minded in his thinking. (Maybe I say ‘remarkably’ because very few architectural historians write this way anymore.) He said “the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal,” and then he said there are three ways that a building may provoke aesthetic sensations:

Firstly, in the treatment of walls, with proportion and ornament, like “the leaf and fruit garlands of a Wren porch.” This, he said, is a two-dimensional endeavor, “the painter’s way.”

Secondly, in the manipulation of the three-dimensional form, ”contrasts of block against block.” This is “the sculptor’s way.”

Thirdly, in composing spaces and movement, “the sequence of rooms,” and this skill does not belong to the painter or sculptor but to the architect alone.

These are, then, the three ways that a building may achieve the status of architecture. To conclude, Pevsner wrote:

“the good architect requires the sculptor’s and the painter’s modes of vision in addition to his own spatial imagination. Thus architecture is the most comprehensive of all visual arts and has a right to claim superiority over the others.”

Pevsner wrote this in An Outline of European Architecture (1943).

February 25, 2022

Houses of Tomorrow exhibition

February 25, 2022/ Anthony Denzer

Updated: The talk can be seen online here.

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I’m happy to promote the exhibition “Houses of Tomorrow: Solar Homes from Keck to Today,” at the Elmhurst Art Museum (outside Chicago) now until May 29. Details here.

I’m confident it’s an interesting and well-organized show. The museum’s curators consulted me when they were conceiving the exhibition and I was happy to give them some feedback. The exhibition begins with Keck’s “House of Tomorrow” for the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition, an all-glass house where Keck inadvertently ‘discovered’ the magnitude of passive solar heating. My book The Solar House (see right sidebar) includes a great deal of analysis of this discovery and of Keck’s subsequent solar houses and their importance.

I’ll be giving a talk on these matters for the museum on April 7, 2022. I’m excited and honored to be cooperating with historian Robert Boyce, the author of Keck & Keck: The Poetics of Comfort (Princeton Architectural Press, 1993). He’s the authority on Fred & Bill Keck, and I’ll probably try to close my mouth and listen!

Finally, it is fitting that the Elmhurst Art Museum is partially located in a glass house: the McCormick House by Mies van der Rohe (1952).

December 30, 2021

Best of 2021

December 30, 2021/ Anthony Denzer

My annual “Best of …” is a personal reflection which normally highlights architecture I visited during the year plus solar house news and other developments of interest. It is tempting (as it was last December) to cancel it because I didn’t travel much. But let’s keep the tradition alive. Here are a few notes in looking back on 2021.

A quick Colorado tour
In June, a lull in Covid cases permitted a short trip to Colorado to help stay abreast of current practices in high-performance and prefabricated homebuilding. We visited Simple Homes, which practices “Swedish-inspired panelized building,” but much simplified (left image below). We also toured the Alpen Windows factory (left)—very impressive products!

In Fraser (near Winter Park) we visited the SPARC house, winner of the 2021 Solar Decathlon Build Challenge. It was designed by students from CU Boulder and built in the “Swedish modular style” by Simple Homes. The homeowners were wonderful hosts and very knowledgeable. More about the house here and here.

In the News: Gregory Ain
Surprise! It was a big year for Los Angeles architect Gregory Ain (1908‒88). Sometime ago I wrote Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary (Rizzoli, 2008), a full accounting of his works and ideas. Yet revisions will be needed, because two “lost” Ain projects came into view in 2021. In each case I was called upon to comment in the New York Times.

First, in May, the Times revealed that Ain's Museum of Modern Art house (orig. 1950) was ‘discovered’ to exist in the town of Croton-On-Hudson. What a wonderful and meaningful discovery! I blogged about it here.

Then, in October, Alexandra Lange wrote the story of the restoration of the previously-unknown 1952 Marjorie Greene house. Why was it unknown? Ain gave authorship & responsibility for the house to his partners, Joseph Johnson and Alfred Day, as their partnership dissolved. (Did he actively disown the project rather than passively letting it go? This is uncertain.) Let’s credit it to Ain, Johnson & Day. The restoration architects, Escher GuneWardena, did an excellent job and I was delighted to be consulted during the restoration. Lange told the story perfectly.

Admired from afar
In the absence of travel, the fulfillment of new architectural experiences must be pursued vicariously. Here are some projects which aroused my delight and admiration in 2021:
• In Paris, the restoration of La Samaritaine (shown below), by SANAA and others
• Also in Paris, the restoration and redesign of the Bourse de Commerce, by Tadao Ando
• Also in Paris, the “massive investment in cycling infrastructure”
• Also in Paris, Sting’s performance in the Panthéon
• In LA: the renovation of Julia Morgan’s Herald-Examiner building, by Gensler
• The work of LA firm Shin Shin
• The work of Scottish firm Makar

Rest in Peace
We lost several important cultural figures in 2021, but two were particularly important to me. First was London architect Richard Rogers (properly: Lord Rogers of Riverside), memorialized by Oliver Wainwright here. When I have visited London with students in the past, Rogers and his staff were invariably generous and warm in welcoming us, discussing the work, and helping gain access to finished projects. The ‘old’ Rogers office on the banks of the Thames in Hammersmith is shown below-left. And my favorite Rogers project, the Maggie’s Centre at Charing Cross hospital, is below-right and also mentioned in Best of 2015. It shows, I think, a long-lasting influence of mid-century modern architecture from California. In the remembrances of Rogers, I was surprised to learn that he rarely drew. But upon reflection this makes some sense, because we always observed that model-making was a central activity in the Rogers office.

And secondly, I was saddened by the passing of Los Angeles architect Bernard Judge, remembered by Carolina A. Miranda here. As I mentioned on Twitter, I interviewed Bernie Judge in 2000 (for my book Gregory Ain) and found him lovely and fascinating. He described the Tahiti project with Marlon Brando as creating civilization from scratch. Here’s a bit from Judge on Ain that ended up in the book: