Source: Architecture Today {Main} Edition: Country: UK Date: Tuesday 1, September 2020 Page: 46,47,48,4 Area: 2462 sq. cm Circulation: ABC 12150 Monthly Ad data: page rate £2,140.00, scc rate £0.00 Phone: 020 7837 0143 Keyword: Princeton University Press Energy & Sustainability Daniel A Barber My path was a bit the other Limit and License way round: I decided to study architectural histoiy because I thought it would be a good Architectural historians Barnabas arena for the discussion of environmental issues. When I first started a post-graduate Calder and Daniel A Barber have programme at Yale in 2003,1 assumed there both recently published books was a robust discussion on architecture and exploring the influence of energy environment — and there was, but it was not seen as a crucial part of the discourse. on architecture. In conversation for If architects in general were not interested, AT they discuss this growing field architectural historians were even less so — though there were some great people looking into these issues. Once I started prying open the box of architecture and environment as a historical theme, it became clear that there was a rich archive just waiting to be explored. One piece of the historical archive I came Barnabas Calder What got you interested in across in the library at Yale was the catalogue the history of energy and architecture? I got for a 1958 competition for a solar house, into it in 2015, after a publisher asked me for called 'Living with the Sun'. I was perplexed a general history of architecture. I reflected on to see interest in solar house design before the the most important issues facing architecture, 1970s, when there was interest relative to the and energy use was transparently the biggest: oil crises. That set me off on my dissertation the only one where architecture's contribution research at Columbia, which eventually could be decisive in maintaining life on Earth. became a book, 'A House in the Sun: Modern So much architectural research is focused Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold on sustainability, but not much in histoiy War'. Interest in solar house heating went apart from the brief stoiy of green architecture back to before the second world war, and was or studies of vernacular building which tiy to later catalysed by concerns about energy learn technical lessons about passive climate supplies and population growth. Interest in control and local materials. Yet energy access solar houses was a sort of interdisciplinary has been the single most powerful influence arena for a broad discussion about energy on architecture at every period in human anxiety, how lifestyles would change with histoiy, from the mammoth-bone huts of the different energy sources, of strengthening Ice Age steppe — built of food waste to keep alliances through resource management, in the precious warmth of the fire — through but also as a prelude to a more focused global to modern air-conditioning systems. environmental discourse. Architecture Buildings and Energy from Prehistory to the Present C/D u Modern Architecture and Climate Design before Air Conditioning o Daniel A. Barber Pin Reproduced by Gorkana under licence from the NLA (newspapers), CLA (magazines), FT (Financial Times/ft.com) or other copyright owner. No further copying (including printing of digital cuttings), digital reproduction/forwarding of the cutting is permitted except under licence from the copyright owner. All FT content is copyright The Financial Times Ltd. Article Page 1 of 5 498630468 - ASHGOE - D178-1 Source: Architecture Today {Main} Edition: Country: UK Date: Tuesday 1, September 2020 Page: 46,47,48,4 Area: 2462 sq. cm Circulation: ABC 12150 Monthly Ad data: page rate £2,140.00, scc rate £0.00 Phone: 020 7837 0143 Keyword: Princeton University Press Barnabas Calder When you look through an Daniel A Barber That is well put: we are If we can be inspired by modernism's energy lens the past can look surprisingly haunted by a spectre. But there is at least insistence that things can change, one of different. The vast monuments of the Roman some potential for it to be a friendly ghost, if these changes likely involves a look 'back' to Empire are morally repugnant to modern not a guiding spirit. The legacy of modernism 'vernacular' and 'traditional' strategies, to eyes — produced using slave labour to might be either an opportunity or an obstacle think about what would work in the future. celebrate a militaristic political system. Yet in to progress. On the obstacle side, the received This is one of the reasons I look forward to energy terms, even a beast of a building like legacy of modernism is a general focus on your book, for its broad historical sweep the Baths of Caracalla was built far more representation and aesthetics in determining that helps us see the thread of energy from sustainably than almost all of today's most the value of architecture, and a reliance on ancient times to the present. It also opens up effortfully ethical and green architecture. fossil-fiieled building systems, in part based another topic, around questions of retrofit Janet DeLaine's remarkable research has on the premise of a universal condition, and what to do with existing building stock. shown that 76 per cent of the volume of the that every building everywhere should be Beyond the basic premise that the most baths' materials consisted of stone and conditioned to a certain norm. There is a sort sustainable building is the one that is already minerals extracted within 20 kilometres of of path dependency that has emerged such built, I wonder if you developed some the site. Brick and lime required significant that it requires a huge effort to push back insights on how to focus practice towards the heat to produce, provided by burning wood, against this industrial practice; BREEAM and energy condition of existing buildings? but while they are so visible on the ruins they LEED metrics simply aim to repurpose it — to composed only 5.9 per cent of the volume. build more or less the same kind of building, Barnabas Calder The key lesson I've learned Of course, Roman architects avoided heat just with a more efficient system. All of the on existing buildings is that we need to keep not from ethics but because they lacked formal debates of post-modernism, equally, them unless there's a pressing reason not to. significant fossil fuels. Yet it offers both hope are reliant on heavy carbon loads; we are still The current condition of the construction and a challenge to our generation that such reaching for a real alternative. and property industries is dependent on immense, robust projects could be built of But to turn to the other legacy of modern chasing economic growth through a cycle local materials and with low heat inputs. architecture, therein lies some potential for of demolition and construction which sees If you compare that with your research on change. The Bauhaus sought new terms for serviceable blocks of flats or offices being the insoluble challenge of heating the Dessau architectural value — not only resistance to demolished and replaced every few decades Bauhaus, it offers a completely inverted ornament, but the creation of a different kind by something essentially similar — a kind of architectural history: the heroic modernists of interior space that would foster a different nightmarish fast fashion for buildings, with held to represent progressive values and kind of social relation. The premise was that an enormous carbon cost. This tends to be technological innovation are, in energy terms, design could be transformative. We risk greenwashed by claims about improved the very last models we should be emulating. falling into another kind of aesthetic heroism, operational energy performance. Yet in almost Do you share my pessimistic sense that the but there is something worth recovering here all cases the problems with the demolished aesthetic ghost of modernism is a barrier — the idea that what we need is not just a buildings' energy performance would have to sustainable architecture? I know your new kind of building, but a completely been resolvable with changes to envelope and research has uncovered early experiments on different discussion, based on new values, services rather than complete replacement, modernist passive cooling and solar energy where architecture is sensitive to questions whose carbon cost will take decades to be which may offer a more cheering view. around energy and climatic adaptation. repaid in lower operational costs. Left 'Architecture: Buildings and Energy from Prehistoiy to the Present', by Barnabas Calder (Pelican, 368pp, £20); 'Modem Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning', by Daniel A Barber (Princeton University Press, 336pp, £50). Right, above The Baths of Caracalla, Rome, and the single-glazed curtain walls of the Dessau Bauhaus. Its open-plan halls were made habitable in winter by coal-fired stoves. Reproduced by Gorkana under licence from the NLA (newspapers), CLA (magazines), FT (Financial Times/ft.com) or other copyright owner. No further copying (including printing of digital cuttings), digital reproduction/forwarding of the cutting is permitted except under licence from the copyright owner. All FT content is copyright The Financial Times Ltd. Article Page 2 of 5 498630468 - ASHGOE - D178-1 Source: Architecture Today {Main} Edition: Country: UK Date: Tuesday 1, September 2020 Page: 46,47,48,4 Area: 2462 sq. cm Circulation: ABC 12150 Monthly Ad data: page rate £2,140.00, scc rate £0.00 Phone: 020 7837 0143 Keyword: Princeton University Press HKEIIill; f ill Iffrfrrmfj Ifflfffiffl !PWW Moreover, new construction energy costs are The progressive ethos of modern architecture overwhelmingly carbon-intense — concrete, sought to overwhelm any and all vernacular, "If we accept that modernism is steel, glass, and transportation of materials — regional, traditional practices that preceded it.