…in three lines. That’s a Google Ngram of every time the words “solar energy,” “insulation,” and “sustainability” were mentioned in a Google-scanned book between 1945 and 2010.
What’s it show?
I’d argue that it shows the difference between tactical thinking in response to the energy shocks of 1973 and 1979, and strategic thinking after the implications of those sank in. Between 1975 and 1980 there was an increasing interest in how you actually change building components–Trombe walls, anyone?–without really changing much about bigger picture issues.
But starting in the late 1980s thinking about buildings as integrated materials and systems moved out of the hippies-only, build-a-dome-in-the-desert realm and (gradually) into mainstream architectural thinking. By 2000 there were serious books out there about how the networks of transportation and commerce that those buildings found themselves in were if anything an even bigger part of the problem, and as the limits of changing individual elements became apparent designers and clients started thinking more and more about how design strategy might address growing energy costs. [Disclaimer: Ngrams are notorious for showing exactly what you want them to show, and yes, this clean history only emerged after messing around a bit with the terms. An illustration, not hard evidence]. [And no, my students are still not allowed to use the word “sustainable” in studio, but since the rest of the world uses it as a shorthand for “energy efficient” we’ll go with it for the moment].
And by “I’d argue” I mean “what I’m about to say in class is…” Last day of Big and Tall this afternoon, looking at issues of final and motive causation in practice today and beyond…
Congratulations to ISU M.Arch. students Mengwei Liu and Anastasia Sysoeva (and to their rock star studio critic Ulrike Passe) for snagging a spot in the AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten Awards for architecture students. The official announcement is now up on the 
One or two highlights. I always find myself drawn to the sessions on vaulting at CH events, in part because there is always a good debate about the fine-grained performance of medieval and renaissance structures. The two sides, as I understand it, generally disagree about whether masonry structures are best understood as solid shells, which lend themselves to analysis fairly easily, or as more ductile structures that move and adjust constantly by cracking and settling–a more difficult process to understand, but an idea that is attractive in that it allows us to look at a cracked structure and to relax a bit (depending on where the cracks are and whether they’re getting larger or not); in the words of Jacques Heyman, “it’s actually quite difficult to design a masonry arch that won’t stand,” since an arch that thrusts or settles will usually find, at some point, a configuration that permits equilibrium. (Don’t try this at home). In this context, a paper by Danilo Capecchi and Cesare Tocci, from Università di Roma and the Politecnico di Torino, was our version of a lighting rod, as it took the famously confident analysis of St. Peter’s dome by Giovanni Poleni and contrasted it with the lesser-known but somewhat more accurate report by R.G. Boscovich. Poleni argued that the shape of St. Peter’s was near enough to the curve of a catenary, and that the dome had sufficient double curvature, that the cracks that had developed in it by the early 1700s were not as worrying as they appeared. Boscovich, however, pointed out that the cracks indicated more serious problems in the lack of thrust resistance offered by the relatively tall drum, and that the double curvature assumed by Poleni only worked if the dome and drum were monolithic. In fact, because of the division of the drum into sixteen sections by windows, this couldn’t quite be assumed. Poleni, according to a slightly mythological history, capitulated to the desire to do something, and suggested additional iron hoops to contain the dome’s thrust above the drum. Capecchi and Tocci’s conclusions are that these hoops were, in fact, critical and that the addition of a hoop placed at the base of the dome that restrains the top of the drum, may have been the intervention that has kept the dome intact.
Back to Iowa earlier this week (after a visit to the Foster mothership in London to see former colleagues and students…) and then to Chicago and Northbrook yesterday for the annual meeting of the Western Great Lakes chapter of the Association for Preservation Technology. Wiss, Janney, Elstner hosted the session in their Northbrook offices, which are attached to their testing lab. WJE does a ton of preservation and forensic work all over the country, from the Washington Monument to Wrigley Field, and they do much of their own materials testing, which they showed off during the afternoon break. That’s a piece of steel rebar in the rig in back, wired up to show a picture-perfect stress-strain curve on the screens in front. Did it get tested to failure? Oh, yes, it did. WJE engineer, Iowa State alum, and loyal architecturefarm subscriber Rachel Will suggested I take advantage of the knowledgeable crowd to test out some new ideas about the postwar Chicago project, and I was grateful for an audience who was willing to sit out the first really great spring day in the city to talk about air conditioning, double glazing, and heat-rejecting glass during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Scenes from a morning run…In Cambridge this weekend for the Third Annual Construction History Conference, a European gathering that’s been hosted by Queens College here each year. Queens is becoming something of a sacred ground in CH, having hosted the triennial Congress in 2006 that was an important gathering for many of us, and it’s always provided a warm welcome as CHS has begun annual meetings here. I’m giving a keynote on Chicago tomorrow afternoon, in the meantime today’s agenda includes medieval brick staircases, post-tensioned floors in the 20th century, Roman building techniques, 19th century South American plumbing, and late gothic vaulting, among others. Feeling a bit like a kid heading into a LEGO store, further reports as conditions warrant…
Enjoyed hosting IIT Professor and director of the Ph.D. program Michelangelo Sabatino this week for a lecture at ISU on New Harmony, Indiana and the collision of utopian thought, vernacular building, and the efforts to reconcile modernism and monumentality after World War II. Michelangelo’s lecture and a seminar he led afterwards on the “secret history” of IIT were brilliant, as anticipated, showing how the histories we tell usually tidy things up in ways that ignore the more interesting and difficult realities of building. IIT’s history in particular is bound up with all of the racial and urban politics of the 1940s and 1950s–a theme that is becoming increasingly dominant in the preliminary research I’m doing on Chicago’s postwar skyscrapers–but even in so neat a story of New Harmony and the role of Philip Johnson and the patroness of the “Roofless Church” the relationship between architectural and social history is always richer and more complex than we can even realize.
It lived up to its billing as an overwhelming experience–sort of like being pulled headlong into a Howard Finster painting for an hour or so–and utterly immersive. The artist, Father Paul Dobberstein, was clearly enthralled by the Renaissance ideal of the garden grotto as a manifestation of both sacred place and sensual atmosphere. His work is literally encrusted with stones and gems donated from all over the planet and with sculptures of Carrara marble that make direct references to the Italian traditions of grottoes and figurative religious art.
All a bit much for someone raised with a Presbyterian preference for plain, slightly uncomfortable church interiors? Sure, but there is an absolutely impressive scale of time if not space to the place, and the sheer quantity of labor involved makes it a sacred place no matter what you think of its architecturally. It’s an odd thing to think of places like this as ‘pure,’ but they’re certainly unencumbered by the weight of any sort of academic theory, which made this a particularly refreshing jolt to the visual cortex. The Grotto is visited by something like 100,000 people every year (two others while we were there, probably not the most auspicious weather to view the glittering stones in), suggesting that there’s something here that academics often give short shrift.
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