There are two subjects that I have written a lot about over the last dozen years at TreeHugger: the future of the office, and the healthy home. These days, they are conflated because of the pandemic.
After writing that post I kept going and re-read the book in its entirety; here are some of the other lessons I was reminded of.
Banham starts with a description of environmental management before we had modern systems. Most architecture was massive. Thick and weighty structures had thermal advantages; the mass of masonry stores the heat of the fire during the day and keeps one warmer at night. “Alternatively, the thick walls of a hot climate will hold solar heat during the day, slowing down the rate to which the interior becomes hot, and then, after sunset, the radiation of that hit into the house will help temper the sudden chill of the evening.”
But not everywhere. In tropical and humid climates (like the southeastern United States), houses had elevated living floors to offer maximum exposure to prevailing breezes, huge parasol roofs, continuous porches and balconies to protect walls from slanting sun, large floor-to-ceiling windows and doors for maximum cross ventilation, tall ceilings, central halls, and vented attics.
All forgotten since the development of air conditioning, now we just move the same air around and around again inside the house. It’s why you get the same house or building anywhere in the country: you can throw energy and air conditioning at it instead of designing it for the climate. Banham writes about modern HVAC, “a neat box with control knobs and a mains [electrical] connection”:
And he wrote this fifty years ago!
All that is solid melts into MacBook Air.
Banham has a lot to say about office buildings and skyscrapers too, which is applicable to the situation today. He suggests that too little credit is given to the environmental factors in their design.
It’s no surprise that the first skyscrapers in New York City were built for insurance companies; the whole point was to bring together massive numbers of clerical workers to copy and file and type and phone customers, all tied together by subways and telephone lines and electrical wires. The file cabinet and the phone, and then the typing pool are what made the office useful; the ventilation, wiring, and plumbing make it habitable. Banham quotes a writer from 1902:
Phones, electric lights, electric typewriters and photocopiers, and then desktop computers were, until recently, fixed by wires, whether electric, telephone, or CAT-5. Filing cabinets are big and heavy. Now, like that candle, all our tools are always ready for use and perfectly mobile. When “all that is solid melts into MacBook Air” (a play on the title of a classic book about social and economic modernization), does the office building serve a useful function? Banham wrote, “Without the ability for business to proceed, skyscrapers would never have happened.” When they are no longer needed for business to proceed, will they disappear?
I suspect that this lockdown has been a real education for a lot of company managers, who are realizing that they are spending a whole lot of money and time supporting a way of working that no longer makes much sense.
What would Banham think of Passive House?
I used to think we should build like we did before Banham’s regenerative systems (see Steve Mouzon’s Original Green), writing many posts about the lessons we can learn from old buildings designed before the thermostat age. But then I saw how that “neat box with knobs” changed everything, and that in many climates, those old ways didn’t deliver the level of comfort people have come to expect. I came to realize that people are not going to be willing to live without air conditioning in hot climates or in apartments without cross-ventilation, fanning themselves on the veranda while sipping iced tea. That’s when I went from Grandma’s house to Passive House.
Here was a concept where you don’t have those “consequent bills for power consumed” because of the recognition that you really can’t separate the design of the building from its environmental constraints. Energy consumption and air movement actually define it; hitting the energy consumption targets often drives the building form and the architectural design. But this means that architects have to understand how to deal with environmental management.
And as Banham notes, architects really weren’t interested. Rather, they were “happy to hand over all forms of environmental management to other specialists, and have taught young architects to continue in this dereliction of manifest duty.”
We can and should demand more. As an example, during a recent Passive House Happy Hour, engineer and consultant Sally Godber of WARM described how she worked with Mikhail Riches on the design of a Passive House social housing project that was so smart and so gorgeous that it won the Stirling Prize, the most prestigious in the UK. (It starts at 10:30 in the video.)
It becomes so clear that if you don’t come in after the fact and say “make this work” but think of it as an integrated process right from the beginning, the architecture evolves to be both a handsome environmental structure and also an efficient, affordable project. Then you can have a healthy building with good air quality and you don’t just throw smart tech and a big heat pump at it.
This is the way we have to design everything now, so that our buildings are healthy, energy-efficient, and beautiful. I suspect that Reyner Banham would have approved.
Banham updated “The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment” in 1984; according to the publisher,
That edition might be even more relevant to today’s conditions; I have been reading the 1969 edition and the message seemed as fresh as ever: We can’t just throw technology and energy at a building anymore. The design for energy performance and comfort are inseparable from the architecture.
