Modern Architecture and Climate
Design before Air Conditioning
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects
Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design.
Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.
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Barber (House in the Sun), a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design, documents in this erudite work the ways modern architecture was used to shape climate control before the development of air conditioning. Heavily illustrated and deeply researched, the first half of the book examines the work of such architects as Le Corbusier (Unit d'Habitation, Briey, France, 1963), Richard Neutra (Northwestern Mutual Fire Insurance Building, Los Angeles, 1951), and Frank Lloyd Wright (Solar Hemicycle House in Middleton, Wis., 1948) and how they employed shading systems, louvers, and indoor/outdoor space to "acclimatize the interior... and thereby to improve the quality of life that would happen within." Barber argues that future design must focus on alleviating climate change with carbon neutral buildings, and in the book's second half he examines the evolution of new technologies for more comfortable living, including the Climate Control Project by House Beautiful and the American Institute of Architects, whose purpose was to aid architects in their work by presenting only visualizations of the complexities of climate, and the theoretical, scientific work of the Olgyay brothers and their dome-like Thermoheliodon climate control system. Academics, urban planners, and environmental designers will most appreciate this thought-provoking and detailed volume.