Architecture and Energy : Performance and Style 9781135953669, 9780415639293

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Architecture and Energy

Does energy consumption influence architectural style? Should more energyefficient buildings look different? Can that “look” be used to explain or enhance their performance? Architecture and Energy provides architects and architectural theorists with more durable arguments for environmental design decisions, arguments addressing three different scales or aspects of contemporary construction. By drawing together essays from the leading experts in the field, this book engages with crucial issues in sustainable design, such as: • • •

the larger role of energy in forming the cultural and economic systems in which architecture is conceived, constructed, and evaluated; the different measures and meanings of energy “performance” and how those measures are realized in buildings; the specific ways in which energy use translates into the visible aspects of architectural style.

Drawing on research from the UK, US, Europe, and Asia, the book outlines the problems surrounding energy and architecture and provides the reader with a considered overview of this important topic. William W. Braham is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently Director of the Master of Environmental Building Design. Daniel Willis is Professor of Architecture at Pennsylvania State University, where he is Interim Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities and a founder of the Center for Research on Design and Innovation.

For our children, Hugh Leander Braham Ryan and Zachary Willis

Architecture and Energy Performance and style

Edited by William W. Braham and Daniel Willis

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Selection and editorial material, William W. Braham and Dan Willis; individual chapters, the contributors The right of William W. Braham and Dan Willis to be identified as authors of the editorial material, and of the individual authors as authors of their contributions, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Every effort has been made to contact and acknowledge copyright owners. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not acknowledged here and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future printings or editions of the book. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Architecture and energy : performance and style / edited by William W. Braham and Dan Willis. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Architecture and energy conservation. I. Braham, William W., 1957- editor of compilation. II. Willis, Daniel, 1957- editor of compilation. NA2542.3.A698 2013 2012040742 720’.472—dc23 ISBN13: 978-0-415-63929-3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-63930-9 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-63010-5 (ebk) Typeset in Trade Gothic by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton

Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors Foreword Preface

Introduction: architecture and energy (again)

vii xi xiii xv

1

PART 1

Energy systems 1 Architecture, style, and power: the work of civilization William W. Braham

7 9

2 Architecture and life Luis Fernández-Galiano

25

3 Energy and the social hierarchy of households (and buildings) Thomas Abel

49

4 Design in the light of dark energy John Thackara

64

PART 2

Building performance

75

5 Less is less: are architects thinking too small? Dan Willis

77

6 Environmental surfing: delight and nature’s renewable energies Vivian Loftness

92

7 Adaptive architecturing Simos Yannas

106

v

Contents

8 Designing for low-energy: seeking representations of high-performance homes in post-war America Franca Trubiano

116

PART 3

Architectural aspects 9 Technics and poetics of the architectural environment Dean Hawkes 10 The formations of energy in architecture: an architectural agenda for energy Kiel Moe

131 133

151

11 Visualizing renewable resources Daniel A. Barber

164

Image credits Index

181 183

vi

Figures

1.1 Masdar Headquarters is the centerpiece of Masdar City, a zero-waste, carbon-neutral development outside Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates 1.2 The Bullitt Center in Seattle is envisioned as a living building designed to satisfy all of its energy, water, and waste needs 1.3 Charles Jencks’ “theory of evolution diagram” of twentieth-century architecture 1.4 The staggering array of new type and styles of buildings is a direct result of the increased levels of power unleashed over the last 200 years 1.5 The work enabled by buildings often involves the creation and maintenance of some kind of order (filing, scheduling, selecting) or the transmission of information that reinforces the society that builds them, such as laws, manners, and customs 2.1 Energy costs of different construction assemblies 2.2 Energy flows in the production of one ton of folding cartons 2.3 Two representations of economic flows 2.4 Diagram of the energy analysis of a wetland in Florida 2.5 Energy flows in an aggregate economic system, United States in 1976 2.6 The development of mechanical calculation 2.7 Aerial view of Seville, a compact Mediterranean city 3.1 Hualien household ecological-economic strategies 3.2 Regional human-ecosystem 3.3 Spatial convergence 3.4 Taiwan spatial hierarchy 3.5 Taiwan with its world-system context 4.1 Pavement-busting project by Depave, a non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon 4.2 More pavement busting by Depave 4.3 l’Ilot d’Amaranthes, urban community garden designed by Emanuel Louisgrand, Lyon, France (2002): aerial view 4.4 l’Ilot d’Amaranthes, urban community garden designed by Emanuel Louisgrand, Lyon, France (2002): ground-level view

10 10 12

18

21 28 29 31 35 35 36 44 54 55 57 58 59 70 71 72 72 vii

Figures

5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1

6.2

6.3

6.4

6.5

6.6

6.7

7.1 7.2

7.3 7.4

7.5

7.6

viii

The High Line weaves through the urban fabric of Manhattan 78 Marsupial Bridge, Milwaukee, La Dallman Architects 78 East River Pier 15, New York, SHoP Architects 79 (a) The Fraunhofer Institute uses passive solar heating and dynamic shading for year round comfort. (b) While conservation can shave 30–40 percent off the heating load, passive solar takes us to the level where renewables can match the demand 95 (a) Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia uses night ventilation to pre-cool highly articulated thermal mass to eliminate the need for air conditioning. (b) Shading alone can reduce air conditioning loads by 20 percent, and adding passive cooling can keep air conditioning demands to a minimum in most US climates 97 (a) The façade of this South African restaurant opens completely to connect diners with the spectacular views, sounds, and breezes of the coast. (b) In sealed buildings, forced air is necessary year round with energy and air-quality impacts 98 (a) Pelli’s National Airport building is designed for daylighting of the major public space. (b) Improvements in lighting efficiency and controls is key, but design for daylight is the big leap for zero energy 99 (a) Dockside Green closes the water cycle with spectacular neighborhood amenities (2012). (b) This Dresden installation has such fun with rainwater that tourists hope for a rainy day 100 The Vauban community in Freiburg is designed for mobility for the young, old, and professionals that have made this the highest biodiversity and concentration of children in any community in Germany 102 (a) Andreu’s Charles de Gaulle terminal and (b) Rawn’s Cambridge Library provide a cocoon of sunlight and natural materials that makes long hours fly by 103 Performance or style? 107 Solar stacks on the southern façade of Building 16 at BRE (Building Research Establishment) outside London, UK (Architect: Feilden Clegg Architects) 107 Shutters, blinds, and movable shading devices provide occupants with adaptive opportunities 108 Architect Enric Ruiz Geli explains the environmental strategies behind the unconventional look of his practice’s recent Media-TIC building in Barcelona, Spain, a head-turner of a building completed in 2010 in the city’s 22@ district 109 Twelve semi-detached houses of deliberately conventional look at Two Mile Ash, Milton Keynes, UK, completed in 1985 based on a design developed by the University of Westminster and Feilden Clegg Architects 110 St. George’s school, Wallasey, UK designed by Emslie Morgan, Borough Architect’s Department in 1961 113

Figures

8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 11.3

11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8 11.9

Lustron house living room Lustron house under construction Lustron house exterior view Le Corbusier, techniques are the very basis of poetry Robert Smythson, Hardwick Hall Christopher Wren, Library, Trinity College, Cambridge Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Plan Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea, Plan Louis Kahn, Richards Medical Research Laboratories, Philadelphia Carlo Scarpa, Museo Canoviano, Possagno Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn Pavilion, view from southwest Peter Zumthor, Kunsthaus Bregnez Peter Zumthor, Therme Vals Dean Hawkes, House at Cambridge, Street Front from west Odum hierarchy Patent bikes Forman patch shape R. Buckminster Fuller, Map of Eneropa, 2009 M. King Hubbert, “World energy,” in Fortune, February 1940 M. King Hubbert, “The mathematical relations involved in the complete cycle of production of any exhaustible resource” from “Nuclear energy and the fossil fuels,” 1956 M. King Hubbert,“Human affairs in time perspective” from “Energy and the fossil fuels,” 1949 Eugene Ayres, “Some possibilities of our future energy picture” from Energy Sources: the Wealth of the World, 1952 Ray Pioch, “Sun furnace in your attic,” illustrating one of the MIT solar houses. From Popular Science, March 1949 Max Gschwind, “Solar energy: global view” illustrating the article “Power from the sun” by Erik Hodgins, in Fortune, September 1953 Antonio Petruccelli, “A not so utopian future,” illustrating the article “Power from the sun” by Erik Hodgins, in Fortune, September 1953 Sim van der Ryn, “Energy flow in a closed habitat,” from van der Ryn et al. in The Integral Urban House, 1977

121 121 122 134 136 138 139 140 141 143 144 146 147 148 155 159 160 165 167

168 169 171 173 175 176 177

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Contributors

Thomas Abel is an Associate Professor, Tzu Chi University, Taiwan. His work is interdisciplinary, combining anthropology, evolution, and complex systems science. He uses principles and methods from systems ecology, including computer modeling and emergy analysis (ecological economics). His recent work is on the evolution of hierarchy in social structure and cultural information. Daniel A. Barber is an Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research looks at the role of architectural technologies in the infrastructural and territorial transformations of the post-World War II period in the United States. His interdisciplinary approach integrates narratives and methods from histories of technology, politics, economics, and environmentalism. William W. Braham, FAIA, is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently Director of the Master of Environmental Building Design. At Penn he has established a powerful new approach to environmental technologies in architecture, combining performance analysis, system ecology, and design. His most recent book was Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory. Luis Fernández-Galiano is an architect, Professor at the School of Architecture, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, editor of Arquitectura Viva, and architectural critic for Spain’s leading newspaper, El País. He is author of Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy, which traces the origins of architecture from ancient history through current times. Dean Hawkes is Emeritus Professor of Architectural Design at Cardiff University and Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College at Cambridge University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Architecture of Energy, The Environmental Tradition, Energy Efficient Buildings: Architecture, Engineering and Environment, and most recently of Architecture and Climate. Vivian Loftness is an architect and internationally renowned researcher, author, and educator on environmental design. She is a leading expert on the integration of advanced building systems in high-performance buildings for sustainability, productivity, and health, and is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. xi

Contributors

Kiel Moe is a registered architect and Assistant Professor of Architectural Technology at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He teaches design studios, seminars on forms of energy, and lectures on architecture and energy systems. He is the area coordinator of the Energy & Environments concentration in the Advanced Studies MDesS program. John Thackara is the author of a widely read column at designobserver.com and the best-selling book In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World. As director of doorsofperception.com, John also organizes conferences and social harvest festivals. He is a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art in London. Franca Trubiano is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and a registered architect. Franca teaches design studios and elective seminars, with research areas in construction technology, materials, tectonic theory, and architectural ecologies. Her latest book is Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice. She received her doctorate in Architectural Theory from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. Daniel E. Willis is Professor of Architecture at Pennsylvania State University, where he is Interim Director of the Institute for Arts and Humanities and a founder of the Center for Research in Design and Innovation. He is the author of The Emerald City and Other Essays on the Architectural Imagination. Simos Yannas is the Director of the Environment & Energy Studies Programme at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, where he is responsible for the MSc and MArch in Sustainable Environmental Design and the School’s PhD Programme. His latest book, Lessons from Vernacular Architecture is due for publication in 2013. He is a founding member of PLEA (Passive and Low Energy Architecture).

xii

Foreword

Two years ago I assumed the lead investigator role in a unique research project. This project, now known as the Energy-Efficient Buildings (EEB) Hub, was modeled after the Manhattan Project in that its goal was to bring together the top scientists, engineers, policy experts, and others to collaborate on solutions to reduce the energy consumption of buildings in the United States and beyond. To do so is a huge opportunity for the nation, since we use 40 quadrillion BTUs per year out of 100 quadrillion to heat, light, air condition, and operate our indoor environments. Primary funding for this effort was provided by the US Department of Energy (DOE). As initially configured, the EEB Hub included 22 organizations made up of research universities, DOE laboratories, industrial firms, economic development agencies, and community and technical colleges. Our over-arching goal was simple: to reduce the energy usage of commercial buildings in the US by 20 percent by 2020. Amid all the engineers, physical scientists, and social scientists who had proposed research initiatives for the Hub, there were only a few architects. We know that our first challenge is not the invention of new technology, but is the adoption of the best existing technology to accomplish this goal. Hence the research space in which the Hub operates is at the nexus of issues and opportunities that simultaneously involve “people, information and technology.” Furthermore, in the absence of government intervention to drive the market for these technologies, attracting early adopters is critical to making a market in the first place. I wondered then about aesthetics and the role that architecture could play in helping us to meet the overall challenge of adoption by attracting these early adopters to invest in energy-efficient buildings with new designs and styles that would appeal to them as much for their style as their technology. Thus, I turned to the Hub’s architects with a simple question: Could energy-efficient buildings, whether new or retrofitted, look distinctive by virtue of design? I have since learned that this is considered – within the architecture profession – to be a naive question. But I was thinking of other artifacts that have used a “look” so that they are readily identifiable and provide the owner with some “psychic” income. In particular, I was recalling the introduction of Toyota’s Prius hybrid as an example of a product with a design as distinctive as its underlying technology. It seemed to me that the styling of the car was a part of its early success in making the market for hybrid cars. xiii

Foreword

Perhaps I was also led to ask this question because as engineers we generally believe that “form follows function,” so buildings that use energy wisely might be easy to distinguish from those that do not. When I first asked “Should there be a noticeable style to energy-efficient buildings?” I was told that style was a forbidden word among architects. It may be useful for laypeople to categorize buildings, but it is a grossly oversimplified way to classify architecture. Architects have had to think more deeply. As the editors write in their Introduction, they have had to seek “more durable arguments for design decisions.” Yet, even to a layperson, it is obvious that there is some relationship, no matter how complex, between what buildings do and what they look like. When I look at the sorts of energy-efficient buildings the architecture profession rewards with prizes and publication, it is evident that there is intent to not only be energy efficient, but to express that quality in some noticeable way. Furthermore, energy efficiency alone is not enough; the building must also be habitable and healthy. I wondered if the design and style of the building might also have a positive effect on the health and well-being of the people who occupy it. Therefore, I am pleased that Bill Braham and Dan Willis did not entirely dismiss my question. Instead, they invited a number of distinguished scholars and theorists to ponder it from a wide variety of directions. The result is this collection of essays. Architecture and Energy takes my initial question and gives it layers of depth and nuance far beyond what I had in mind when I asked it. It also satisfies an important objective of the EEB Hub: to educate people about all the possible design dimensions of energy-saving strategies for buildings. Henry C. Foley Vice President for Research, Dean of the Graduate School, Pennsylvania State University Principal Investigator, Department of Energy, Energy-Efficient Buildings Hub, Philadelphia, PA

xiv

Preface

In the formation of an ambitious five-year, DOE-funded project to reduce the energy consumption of commercial buildings, a challenging question persists. Does energy consumption influence architectural style? Putting the question in its original form, should more energy-efficient buildings look different, and can that style be used to explain, interpret, or enhance their performance? A group of scholars and critics were invited to consider this question in a public forum at the University of Pennsylvania on January 27, 2012. This volume includes refinements of the presentations made at that event and some additional essays solicited to address other aspects of the topic. Style is something of a forbidden term among contemporary designers, and this collection is meant to provoke a reconsideration of the connections between style, performance, and design. The work was made possible by the Energy-Efficient Buildings Hub (www. eebhub.org) and supported by: the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania; the Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Pennsylvania State University; and the TC Chan Center for Building Simulation and Energy Studies. Many individuals helped make the event and book possible. At PennDesign: Mark Alan Hughes, David Leatherbarrow, Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Karl Wellman, Stacy Ritchey, Megan Schmidgal, Kait Ellis, Staci Kaplan, Tanya Yang, Sandra Mosgo, and graduate assistant David Salamon, who provided valuable editorial assistance for the book. At Penn State: Dena Lang, Brian Orland, Ute Poerschke, Katsuhiko Muramoto, Nathaniel Belcher, Barbara Cutler, and graduate assistants Moondeep Pradhananga and Daniel Miller. At the EEB Hub: Christine Knapp, Paul Hallacher, James Freihaut, Chimay Anumba, and Henry C. Foley, for asking the question in the first place.

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Introduction Architecture and energy (again)

Energy is an abstract concept. Formalized in the nineteenth century for the calculations of thermodynamics, it is a largely metaphorical term in everyday usage, where it can represent everything from personal vitality to national wealth. The term came into wide use with the increased extraction and exploitation of hydrocarbon fuels, loosely with the mining of coal in the nineteenth century and extraction of oil and natural gas in the twentieth. As technological civilization grew and became more energy intensive (and energy efficient) through that period, each shift or disruption in fuel production has prompted anxiety about the nature of the dependence, from Jevons writing about coal production in the nineteenth century, to the Limits to Growth report in the 1970s and the most recent Roadmap 2050 for “a prosperous, low-carbon Europe.”1 As Luis Fernández-Galiano observes, energy accounting quickly becomes “the philosopher’s stone that would make it possible to reconcile technology and nature, economics and ecology.”2 Energy becomes an explicit topic for architectural design in periods of fuel scarcity and/or high prices – for example, in the late 1940s, the 1970s, and the late 2000s. But as Reyner Banham (1922–1988) taught us in the 1960s, it has been equally important in periods of energy growth and abundance, when the focus instead was on power generation and labor saving, which transformed buildings in radical new ways. Banham traced the genesis of the new building types of the 1960s, highlighting design choices such as those between “exposed” or “concealed” power. He used a fable to describe the deep tension between the “structural” elements of architecture – walls, windows, roofs – and the new “powerconsuming” technologies that had invaded buildings, illustrating them with the image of a house reduced to its power-driven devices.3 In the excitement of that insight, he imagined that the power-driven environmental devices would simply evolve to replace the older, slower elements of architecture, but with the energy price increases of the late 1970s, another generation lauded the virtues of “passive” design, of environmental control accomplished with the “structural” elements of buildings alone.4 1

Introduction

Despite the appealing clarity of Banham’s opposition between structure and power, between the work of architects and engineers, the distinction has become blurred and nearly invisible in the design strategies that have emerged in the half century since his characterization. From active glass walls and responsive façades to ceiling plenums, radiant floors, and the embedding of feedback-and-response technologies in nearly every aspect of buildings, the structural and powerconsuming elements have been wholly hybridized. The high-powered buildings of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century differ visibly from previous generations of buildings in their size, shape, and capacities, with green roofs, solar panels, and wind turbines serving as the status symbols of high-performance construction. Just as the well-tailored suit or high-performance car may signify an individual of particular wealth or power, visible energy technologies alert the casual viewer to performance efficiencies that otherwise can’t be seen, distinguishing those buildings from conventional forms of construction. As Richard Stein and others hastened to explain in the late 1970s, buildings use energy for much more than heating, cooling, and lighting.5 The widespread use of glass, aluminum, and plastic, for example, require tremendous expenditures of resources for their acquisition, manufacture, transport, and maintenance, and like the conspicuous display of ornamentation in previous periods, those materials themselves have become emblems of that expenditure. In hierarchical societies whose positions and privileges are based on the control of wealth, architecture can be understood as a symbol of physical and economic power. This profoundly complicates the question of energy efficiency, which is itself a technique for increasing power, and illustrates the deeper challenges of inquiring about architecture and energy. As readers will see, complication became something of an unintended theme throughout this book. Many of our authors caution against oversimplifying the problematic relationship between architecture and energy. A few even question whether efficiency improvements are the best path to a sustainable society that consumes less energy. We also cast doubt upon a too-literal energy theory of value, of mistaking the importance of energy and the appeal of universal calculation with any kind of simple determinism. If the principles of thermodynamics and systems ecology can teach us anything, it is that design only projects likely or probable futures.

Style In discussions among the contributors, it became evident that the term “style” itself was often an impediment. The act of “reading” and interpreting the signs of architectural energy performance is a complex cultural process. Such indicators can be used accidentally, incorrectly, or even deceptively as “greenwash,” and because buildings last longer than the cycles of cultural fashion or technological change, they may simply cease to be meaningful over time. As a rule, contemporary architects and theorists distrust the use of explicit stylistic or symbolic arguments for all those reasons (as well as in reaction to the excesses of post-modernism), but it is precisely through descriptions of style that most people typically understand and discuss architecture. 2

Introduction

The matter of style has been debated since the beginning of the modern era, linked initially to historical accounts of architecture and then to theories of sociocultural change and evolution. Like styles in clothing and cuisine, what had previously been associated with specific peoples or places became a matter of choice, and then of purposeful variety, and eventually of research and “branding.” Accounts of the adoption or diffusion of new products and technologies have grown from an academic concern to the subject of marketing campaigns, while architects and architectural theorists have sought more durable arguments for design decisions, arguments based on the evolving culture of design or the role of buildings in everyday life. Despite the limitations of the term style, the contributors all agreed that energy usage affects the design of buildings, though they differed on the scale of the influence, the specifics of the outcomes, and its value as a tool for regulating either design or energy consumption. Those different positions are explored in the 12 chapters that make up this book, which fall into three different sections, describing three scales of approach to the topic.

Energy systems The first scale of approach situates the topic within larger historical or theoretical systems, drawing on anthropology, ecology, systems theory, and the philosophy of technology to understand how energy operates in design more generally. Architects often complain that the important decisions are made before they get involved in projects, which can be even truer where energy is concerned. Building energy use is influenced by many different elements, from siting and building size to the materials and methods of construction, all of which can be dictated by economic and operational factors, well before designers are ever considered. The amount of energy (meaning wealth) available to households, companies, or institutions is probably the biggest constraint on the size, location, and ambitions of a building project, and that is as much a function of global economic markets (and fuel production) as individual ambitions and successes. In this way, assumptions about the risk of future fuel scarcity and increased environmental costs become an immediate design decision, and most of the chapters in this section address the consequences of higher energy costs. Thackara considers the darkest outcome, a reduction in available energy to 5 percent of current norms, while FernándezGaliano explores the limitations of technocratic predictions and makes the case for the resilience of the compact city in an uncertain future. Building energy consumption is also strongly affected by the people for whom buildings are designed and who occupy them after they are built. The use of normalized energy-efficiency standards (per unit area of building) can conceal the dramatically different amounts of energy used for different kinds of activities and by groups with different amounts of social and economic power. Thomas Abel’s anthropological perspective makes the point that energy use isn’t just influenced by social structures, but that the specialization of labor and the resulting social hierarchies are themselves a way of increasing production and available power. This suggests a more instrumental role for architectural styles, as elements that can 3

Introduction

indicate and reinforce social distinctions, but as the chapters in the following sections demonstrate, the visual results called style operate at many levels. A number of the chapters in this section explicitly discuss or draw on the work of Howard T. Odum (1924–2002), the pioneering ecologist who used the careful tracking of energy exchanges to understand the organization of complex ecosystems. His best-known book, Environment, Power and Society, extended those techniques to human society, and contributed new concepts to the general discussion of energy in the 1970s. The foundation of his approach rests on the work of the early twentieth-century biophysicist, Alfred J. Lotka (1880–1949), who argued that Darwinian selection was a “physical principle” of thermodynamics.6 Odum extended that approach to all open, self-organizing systems and used it to develop a number of the basic propositions of systems ecology, which have been adapted and extended by the contributors to understand the encounter of architecture with resource limits. Throughout his career, Odum relied on the diagramming of energy exchanges to explain the logic and structure of complex ecosystems, and this graphic orientation may be one of the appeals his work offers to designers.7 His diagrams outline the specific boundaries of analysis and visually explain the interconnections of systems to their original environmental sources. To quantify his analyses, he refined and formalized the concept of embodied energy – coining the term “emergy” – to account for all the work and exchanges depicted in the diagrams. While FernándezGaliano shows the limitations of energy accounting when it is translated into statements of value, Odum’s emergy diagrams make visible the complex interdependencies of successful ecosystems, which may be their best purpose.

Building performance The second scale of approach addresses the measures of building energy performance itself. Efficiency and performance can be determined in different ways, focusing on annual operating energies of the building, on the energy and resources embodied in the materials of construction, or on the contribution of buildings to larger scales of production. Willis makes the link between the very human reaction to spend accumulated savings and the emergence of urban systems supported by those expenditures. Trubiano considers the production of buildings themselves and examines the work of an early advocate of industrialized or prefabricated construction as a method for achieving efficiencies. Different kinds of performance will have different effects, though many of the technologies of energy efficiency have virtually no stylistic outcome – more efficient furnaces or air handlers, for example – because they are specifically designed to provide the same outcome or preserve the same environmental services. It is largely these kinds of efficiency improvements that prompted the question about style in the first place. It can be harder to make a case for investments whose results are virtually invisible, and this is perhaps one of the reasons that more visually distinctive technologies like photovoltaics and windmills are often selected or featured. There can be a real tension between engineering evidence and what we might call the “symbolic” display of performance. This can lead to mistrust of all 4

Introduction

performance claims because of symbolic, inaccurate, or even deceptive use of such technologies, or it can prompt design teams to make less visible technologies more distinctive, bringing ducts or condensate-recovery tanks out into the open. It is one of the corollary principles of fashion that the exaggerated display of trivial features is the basis of fads, not of more enduring styles. Conversely, Loftness and Yannas explore the visual consequences of bioclimatic or passive design approaches, which maximize the environmental effects of the “structural” components of buildings and minimize or eliminate “powerconsuming” components. These approaches rely on strategies such as building orientation, daylighting, window shading, and natural ventilation, and so can have powerfully recognizable visual results. In general, bioclimatic approaches push buildings to become smaller, thinner and more like the buildings that preceded the increases of capacity through the twentieth century. Connecting habitable spaces directly with the exterior environment also produces buildings that people prefer, making them easier to explain and advocate.

Architectural aspects The third scale of approach looks more directly at architecture itself, at particular works and significant writings that illuminate the relationship between style and performance. The chapter by Moe offers the more nuanced term of appearance, bringing together the two senses of the question this book seeks to explore – how does energy affect the coming into existence of buildings (to appear) and how is it visible in the final result (appearance)? In quite different ways, these contributions make evident the complex expression of energy use in buildings, and dispel the aspiration for environmental functionalism, the hope that objective energy calculations can simply determine architectural design. It is the enduring, historical nature of the interaction between performance and style that Hawkes examines over the course of four centuries, from Smythson to the Smithsons. And while he traces the deeper continuities between buildings and climate, he also highlights the difficulty of situating mechanical services within that architectural account. Kahn’s formal embodiment of the opposition between “served” and “servant” spaces in the Richard’s Medical Labs galvanized a generation of designers, but as Hawkes notes, in all of Kahn’s subsequent buildings “he chose to suppress rather than express their mechanical systems.” That ambivalence between buildings and mechanical equipment, between architecture and engineering, continues to characterize the discussion of energy and architecture. Ultimately, that is the purpose of this collection, to demonstrate that the connections between style, performance, and design are not readily resolved by claims about energy efficiency or environmental factors. It is not a simple matter of representation, of finding the right “look” for an optimal design. New methods of analysis and new techniques of construction will certainly change the appearance of buildings, but designers still have to situate those changes within social, cultural, and political contexts. As Barber argues, “the design fields have become an important discursive location for debating, understanding, and thinking about environmental complications, and about energy in particular.” 5

Introduction

After style A provisional conclusion to the collection only became evident as the chapters were assembled and as the contributors responded to requests to address the organizing question about style. As the limitations of style for understanding environmental performance were revealed, it became apparent that other kinds of concepts frequently provided more powerful “discursive locations” to discuss energy in architecture, and were commonly being used instead of stylistic descriptions. Among the most common are claims about climate and region, which subsume narrow concerns about energy within broader social, cultural, and economic arguments. From Vitruvius to the Olgyays to Eneropa, it is frequently argued that buildings (and energy systems) should be adapted to the climate of their location, and this underlies some of the most substantial criticisms of the high-powered buildings of the late twentieth century, that they ignore their climate by using cheap energy.8 The concept of an architecture specific to its geographic region combines the argument about the importance of local climate with advocacy for the use of locally available materials, methods of construction, and cultural traditions.9 Both ideas combine claims about energy and resource efficiency with specific local forms, materials, or patterns of settlement. The appeal to climatic or regional identity accomplishes much of what was asked of an energy-efficient style, while the notion of regional self-sufficiency draws on powerful moral and political sentiments. Most of the chapters in this book address the fitting of buildings to their climate, while others argue that the city or region is the proper scale at which to address energy or resource efficiency. It is fitting that the EEB Hub was itself formed as a regional entity, and the immediate conclusion of this collection will be a project to consider (again) the influence of climate and region on energy and architecture.

Notes 1 W. S. Jevons, The Coal Question, 2nd edn., London: Macmillan, 1866. D. L. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Universe Books, 1972. ROADMAP 2050: A Practical Guide to a Prosperous, Low-carbon Europe, www.Roadmap2050.eu, accessed August 27, 2012. 2 L. Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 181. 3 R. P. Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969. 4 R. P. Banham, “A home is not a house,” Art in America, 2, 1965, 70–79. For an explanation of the passive approach, see E. Mazria, The Passive Solar Energy Book, Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1980. 5 R. G. Stein, Architecture and Energy, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977, pp. 91–107. 6 A. J. Lotka, “Natural selection as a physical principle,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8, 1922, 151–154. 7 M. T. Brown, “A picture is worth a thousand words: energy systems language and simulation,” Ecological Modelling, 178, 2004, pp. 83–100. 8 “Now we shall proceed aright herein if first we observe in what regions or latitudes of the world our work is placed. For the style of building ought manifestly to be different in Egypt and Spain, in Pontus and Rome.” Vitruvius, On Architecture [De Architectura], Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931. 9 V. Canizaro, ed., Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.

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Part 1

Energy systems

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Chapter 1

Architecture, style, and power The work of civilization William W. Braham

Introduction As a rule, contemporary architects distrust the whole concept of style, even though it is through stylistic explanations that commentators, policy makers, and the general public have been taught to understand architecture. New buildings are commonly described in terms familiar from fashion reporting, with new “looks” anticipated almost seasonally, and each newly sustainable or energy-efficient building examined for signs of stylistic coherence. To really understand the connections between style and energy, we need to examine the deeper role of energy in the modern era, and the genesis of the concepts of architectural style and type. The development of modern styles and types of buildings is a fundamentally social process, one that is bound up with the dramatic growth in population and the evolution of global culture and markets that characterize modernization. Distinctions among styles make visible the socio-economic orders that develop to enhance productivity. Drawing on theories of self-organization and cultural evolution helps situate the discussion about building energy efficiency within the larger “work of civilization” when it encounters circumstances and limits beyond its immediate control. Energy efficiency is a tactic for slowing the process of overshooting environmental limits, but the urgent work facing our civilization is to use the time we gain to build richer, more resilient kinds of buildings that serve the common good.

Styles Net-zero has become one of the latest building styles to appear on the scene, and its formal features are rapidly becoming evident. Especially notable are the large, flat roofs of photovoltaic panels that extend to the maximum area allowed on the site, and that provide the on-site renewable energy needed to satisfy the net-zero 9

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formula. The Masdar Headquarters in Abu Dhabi and the Bullitt Center in Seattle are two recent examples. But net-zero notwithstanding, these are high-powered buildings that provide all the remarkable services expected in contemporary settings: climate control, artificial lighting, hot and cold water, waste disposal, electric power, and ready access to data and telecommunications networks (Figures 1.1–1.2). Net-zero buildings continue the steady increases in capacity that have characterized buildings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unlike merely energy-conserving or energy-reducing buildings, these projects exemplify

1.1 Masdar Headquarters is the centerpiece of Masdar City, a zero-waste, carbon-neutral development outside Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture.

1.2 The Bullitt Center in Seattle is envisioned as a living building designed to satisfy all of its energy, water, and waste needs, Miller Hull Partnership. 10

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the ambitions of “sustainable development,” increasing power while reducing utility costs and environmental impacts. They have become architecturally distinctive by making their power collection visible and intelligible to the man on the street. Unfortunately, most power-consuming aspects of buildings contribute little to the ornamental visual characteristics generally associated with contemporary accounts of architectural style. Buildings from previous stylistic periods are regularly upgraded to contemporary performance standards, while their explicit stylistic features are untouched or even enhanced. Eighteenth-century buildings receive contemporary conditioning, plumbing, and lighting, even high-tech windows with stylistically consistent divided lights, while buildings from the midtwentieth century are given more efficient systems that wholly preserve their external visual qualities. Architectural historians have used the term style for many different scales of description, from the style of a particular architect or building, to the characteristic styles of a school, a country, a culture, or a whole period of artistic development and its elusive zeitgeist.1 The concept of style may be easier to understand when we consider the terms used in other fields that also debate their categories of classification. Genres of literature, biological species, and architectural styles are all used to detect order within richly complex phenomena, and ultimately to offer explanations about the mechanisms underlying their appearance. In biology, for example, morphological descriptions of species gave way to those based on evolution after Darwin’s work on natural selection was published. As the zoologist Alec Panchen argues, evolution is the theory that explains a particular classification of biological life, one based on the evidence of genetic descent, and it overturned earlier distinctions based on other kinds of similarities.2 It isn’t that the earlier classifications were wholly wrong – arms, wings, and flippers still share obvious qualities – but that a better theory emerged to explain the differentiation of species. Cultural evolution operates with very different mechanisms to biology – it has no “genes” for a start – but like biological species, literary genres and architectural styles offer theories about which mechanisms of cultural production are important. In Charles Jencks’ evolutionary diagram of architectural styles through the twentieth century, the staggering varieties of styles are organized into six traditions: “logical, idealist, self-conscious, intuitive, activist, and unselfconscious (80% of environment),” which taken together make the common-sense point that architects and architectural culture are the critical mechanism of variations in contemporary architectural styles (Figure 1.3).3 Like the architectural historians that preceded him, Jencks sought principles that would explain his categories, citing the influence of “training, friendships, the marketplace, specialization, ideology, and taste,” but noting that individual architects may nevertheless work in more than one of these traditions. This is partly attributed to the “rule” that designers need to reinvent themselves every ten years in order to remain in the public eye, but he goes on to explain what can only be called the law of variation in style: These traditions are “based on a curious truth: the specific words to which these attractors refer are not as important as the fact that they are as opposite as possible.”4 By which 11

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he means that much of the purpose of twentieth-century styles is to be recognizably distinct from other styles. The 400 architects, 100 trends, and 60 movements charted in Jencks’ diagram of the twentieth century demonstrate that such categories have largely become a technique for differentiating among designers in the increasingly crowded marketplace for professional services. Architects no longer talk much about style, because it has lost most of the meaning it had in the slower-paced, less-crowded development of architecture in the pre-modern period. Since at least 1828, when Heinrich Hübsch first asked “in what style should we build?” architects have increasingly come to understand style as a tool of marketing or branding, and it is largely in this spirit that the question about the style of energy-efficient buildings is posed.5 As descriptions of style have proliferated into the multiplicity of competing trends, movements, and lifestyles, they have lost their ability to reveal much about deeper cultural developments or other factors like energy or environmental effects. As Jencks himself observed: One would have thought the ecological imperative might have been monopolized by the Activist tradition, but it has been taken up by all of them in different ways. For instance, the Classicists, following Leon Krier, have created an ecological movement known as the New Urbanism. It is based on the tight village planning of a previous area, and it is mostly Classical and Vernacular in 12

1.3 Charles Jencks’ “theory of evolution diagram” of twentiethcentury architecture.

Architecture, style, and power

style; its green credentials are presented with historicist wrappers. Then there are Post-Modern versions of green architecture, with SITE, Ralph Erskine and Lucien Kroll; High-Tech versions usually called Eco-Tech (or Organitech); the Biomorphic versions of Ken Yeang. And there is the madly optimistic corporate-governmental version of the Sustainability Movement led by Amory Lovins. [. . .] In any case, the point is that green architectures, in the plural, are coming from everywhere while we might have thought the ecological issue would be taken over by just one or two movements.6 The two examples cited previously, Masdar and Bullitt, exemplify this stylistic flexibility, and their flat photovoltaic roofs fit equally well into the quite different stylistic palettes of AS+GG and Miller Hull. Some sloped roofs would be needed to make them conform to the Classical dictates of New Urbanism, but they demonstrate the weak connection between energy strategies and contemporary concepts of style.

Types Since styles (or traditions or trends or movements) have lost their ability to explain much more than positioning among the top 20 percent of architects, we might turn to other concepts to understand the role of energy in the “unselfconscious 80 percent” of the built environment. The concept of building typology has had an equally contested usage in architectural discourse, but as Alan Colquhoun argued, the “theory of type opens up the discussion of architecture at a deeper level than that of style.”7 Typology is contested because it has mostly been offered as a way of rationalizing design methods, which puts it at odds with the imperatives of artistic individuality by which contemporary architects are distinguished. The importance of artistic freedom was implied in Jencks’ dismissive observation that the majority of construction is simply shaped by “building regulations, governmental acts, the vernacular, planning laws, mass housing, the mallification of the suburbs, and inventions in the technical/industrial sphere.”8 These impersonal factors impede individual expression, but the connections between architecture and energy operate at just those deeper, typological levels, in the constraints, opportunities, and excesses of the “unselfconscious 80 percent.” As with biological species or literary genres, there are different theories of building typology, each developed for a different purpose. Zoning and energy codes, for example, are largely based on typologies of use or occupancy – residential, retail, manufacturing, office, etc. – because the activities housed in a building mostly produce the effects the agencies are trying to regulate, such as noise, traffic, and pollution. Conversely, the typologies employed in construction codes are commonly based on classes of materials and methods of assembly – steel frame, bearing wall – while designers and architectural historians are more likely to talk about typologies of form, of bar-buildings or high-rise towers. The choice of a particular kind of typology depends on the question being posed, but the underlying mechanisms are rarely made explicit and the categories are generally assumed to be simple, clear, and permanent. A fixed concept of building types suppresses 13

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any possibility of innovation, so it is little wonder that their use in design methods has been resisted and they have been relegated to a regulatory role.9 The concept of building type was introduced to the architectural discipline by Quatremère de Quincy in the Encyclopedia he published in 1825.10 As Sylvia Lavin demonstrates, type was the result of his long search to identify the original architecture. As that search faltered, he turned instead to the abstract principle of original types: In every country, the orderly art of building was born from a pre-existing seed. Everything must have an antecedent; nothing whatsoever comes from nothing, and this cannot but apply to all human inventions. . . . Thus did a thousand things of all sorts reach us; and in order to understand their reasons, one of the principal occupations of science and philosophy is to search for their origin and primitive cause. This is what ought to be called type in architecture as in every other area of human invention and institution.11 Quatremère identified the cave, the tent, and the hut as the idealized original types, and associated each with a form of social organization – hunters, gatherers, and farmers – suggesting just the kind of connection with human activities that we are seeking. His larger purpose, however, was the regulation of “caprice and chance” in design, and he conceded that the original types were realized only through the complex and messy forms of copying used in design, by “all the degrees of moral imitation, imitation by analogy, by intellectual relationships, by application of principles, by appropriation of manners (styles), combinations, reasons, systems, etc.” Quatremère’s theory promised a method for stabilizing the design process, but simply identifying idealized original types could not avoid the stylistic complications with which they were realized. In our current understanding, typologies are used to characterize more fundamental differences among buildings – high-rise, strip mall, or split-level house – while styles are used to describe surface characteristics and palettes of materials and details. It was, however, the concept of style to which Gottried Semper returned in order to more fully explain the genesis of different kinds of architecture. His massive treatise on Style (1860–1863) didn’t focus on the original “seed” or type, but on the factors influencing the material realization of buildings.12 He acknowledged the similarity of his approach to contemporary investigations in the “natural sciences and comparative linguistics,” and had been directly inspired by the preevolutionary system of classifying species developed by the biologist Baron Cuvier.13 Like Quatremère, he saw his work as a contribution to the particular challenges of contemporary design. Semper hoped that the “question of how new architectural styles arise” would provide a “theory of artistic invention” for the development of a new architectural style suited to the age. Semper defined style as “the accord of an art object with its genesis, and with all the preconditions and circumstances of its becoming.” 14 His emphasis on becoming is decisive, and though he was often misunderstood as a simple determinist, he argued that “every technical product is the result of purpose and 14

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material,” by which he meant “natural principles seeking formal expression,” as well as the actual materials and the tools or procedures applied to them.15 He insisted on the freedom of the artist, and argued against the simplistic application of Darwin’s just-then-published theory, which some theorists had already used to suggest that “architectural styles cannot be invented at all, but evolve in different ways in conformance with the laws of natural selection, heredity, and adaptation from a few primitive types (Urtypen).”16 The concepts of type and style are wholly overlapping efforts to answer the simplest of questions: why are some groups of buildings similar to each other and so different from other kinds of buildings? Why do those similarities persist in some cases for long periods of time, but change so quickly in other periods?

“Construction” of types and styles The concepts of type and style both offered theories of development that could also be used as methods for design, but as the pace of change accelerated through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the lessons learned from earlier periods seemed less and less applicable, overwhelmed by new materials and methods of production, new modes of transportation, patterns of settlement, more people, and more buildings. The challenge to designers was made starkly visible in the well-known debate about standardization between Hermann Muthesius and Henry Van de Velde at the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in 1914. Muthesius argued that “only through standardization can [architecture] recover that universal significance which was characteristic of it in times of harmonious culture.” Van de Velde instead pleaded for the open-ended experimentation of designers, arguing that “the desire to see a standard type come into being before the establishment of a style is exactly like wanting to see the effect before the cause.”17 In sympathy with other progressive architects they sought the “style which would end the styles” for a new period of harmonious culture, but the pace of change only intensified in the economic boom and subsequent crash that followed World War I.18 In the excitement of the 1920s powerful “recall to order,” avant-garde architects seemed to have finally moved beyond the use of historical styles, although they continued to struggle with the challenge of determinism. Was the new style an inevitable outcome of industrialization, of what Siegfried Giedion called “anonymous history,” or was it invented by designers?19 In their Purist manifesto of 1921, Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant lauded the process by which the kind of typical commercial objects [objet-type] sought by Muthesius were developed through mass production and mass markets: When examining these selected forms, one finds a tendency toward certain identical aspects, corresponding to constant functions, functions which are of maximum efficiency, maximum strength, maximum capacity, etc., that is, maximum economy. ECONOMY is the law of natural selection. It is easy to calculate that it is also the great law which governs what we will call “mechanical selection.” Mechanical selection began with the earliest times and from 15

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those times provided objects whose general laws have endured; only the means of making them changed, the rules endured.20 Detlef Mertins has charted the history of efforts through this period to develop wholly “constructivist” design approaches that would free designers from either the burden of historical precedents or the determinisms of “mechanical selection.” The publication of books such as D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form in 1917 or Raoul Francé’s Die Pflanze als Erfinder [The Plant as Inventor] in 1920 heralded an array of biologically inspired explorations. New approaches called biotechnics, cosmobiotechnics, and biotechniques continued the long history of exchanges between design and biology, picking up from Semper’s interest in Cuvier to Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright’s reading of Herbert Spencer. Mertins designates them all as “bioconstructivist,” meaning they were not meant as formal or metaphorical techniques, but sought to imitate the actual processes with which biological life was produced.21 The proposition of these approaches echoed that framed by Semper and Quatremère a century earlier: If the process of architectural “becoming” [gestaltung] was properly understood and could be translated into a design technique (typological, stylistic, bioconstructivist, etc.), designers could produce an architecture adapted to its time.22 The Purists also insisted on the freedom of the artist-architect to operate with the products of mechanical selection, to pick and choose, but was it enough to understand the law of “maximum economy,” could that alter the outcome? The process they describe could just as easily have been quoted from “Darwin among the machines,” written by Samuel Butler in the 1860s just after he read The Origin of Species, though Butler drew the opposite conclusion. He recognized the blind drive of mechanical selection, and if the remarkable pace of development continued, he argued that machines would eventually become independent of human control: Day by day . . . the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.23 The products and environments of modern life have been “selected” by larger and larger populations of people operating in ever more complex, technologically facilitated arrangements. The process is much less a matter of individual design choice than the dynamics of many choices made by many different people, and it is from those dynamics that new types and styles of buildings emerge. Ultimately, the first condition of a new style is even having the power and resources to build. The amount of available power, in all its forms, drives the other processes. Elements of particular styles – materials, details of construction, etc. – can be readily understood, but the more complex, indirect choices that precede the conception of buildings – why did this institution have the resources to build in this location – can’t be explained by simple causes or even by single chains 16

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of causation. They require what biologists call selection causes, explanations based on the challenges and opportunities of surviving in complex environments.24 As Quatremère, Semper, and Giedion taught us, the “construction” of architectural types and styles is fundamentally a social process, one that operates within the material economy of local and global ecosystems. To understand the connection between energy efficiency and architecture in the twenty-first century, we must examine the deeper role of energy in the genesis of the high-powered buildings of the modern period, what Hans Rosling calls the “200 years that changed the world.”25 That is the environment that has generated and “selected” the highpowered types and styles of buildings today.

200 years that changed the world Buildings can be viewed as thermodynamic engines. They modify the climate by their configuration and transform available energy to support the activities of occupants. In the last 200 years, the work of construction and operation has shifted from the limited reservoir of renewable energy flows and human power to the much greater capacities of fossil fuels. As a result, buildings have increased their capacities and rates of consumption in virtually every dimension, from the work required to obtain, prepare, transport, and assemble the highly refined materials of their construction to their capacity to regulate their internal climates and to deliver even more highly refined flows of information and entertainment. This has been a classic growth-phase, involving the rapid proliferation of relatively inefficient buildings with the emphasis on innovation and variety. Most accounts connect modernity with the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century. Siegfried Giedion linked architectural modernism to the first graphic representation of movement in the fourteenth century, while Lewis Mumford located the beginning of the modern, technological era in the thirteenth century, arguing that “the clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern world.”26 However, the concern about origins can sometimes obscure the astonishing condition they are trying to explain: the explosion of human population and technical capacity that began in the early nineteenth century. Questions about the types and styles follow directly from the increasing numbers of buildings required, changing means of construction, and new patterns of mobility and settlement. There are no simple explanations for historical events of this scope. In his book on “the natural history of innovation,” Stephen Johnson has likened the situation to “Darwin’s Paradox,” the great naturalist’s puzzlement over the richly complex and productive ecosystems of coral atolls that occur in the middle of otherwise barren areas of the ocean.27 However they first get started, the process unfolds over many generations: individual species find viable niches, then alter the local environment by their activities, which in turn creates new opportunities, supports other species, and steadily increases the populations and varieties of creatures that can be supported. The term ecology was originally invented to explain the role of environmental selection in the evolution of species, but it has since become clear that not only do individual species evolve, but by shaping 17

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their environments to their advantage they cause the environment itself to adapt and change. The different capacities of contemporary buildings each have their own stories of invention and refinement, but the staggering array of new types and styles is a direct result of the increased levels of power unleashed over the last 200 years. High-powered buildings are an expression, a symptom, of the excess energy fueling the growth in size and complexity of human civilization (Figure 1.4). These kinds of evolutionary explanations have to be translated to cultural contexts with care, not only because human institutions and technologies result from open-source, promiscuous processes of design, but because self-organization is itself not deterministic. It can help explain complex events for which simple, instrumental explanations are inadequate or incomplete, but it neither accounts for every aspect of a situation, nor guarantees that the results are optimal. Applying the language of evolutionary refinement to individual design products like buildings remains largely metaphorical until the scales, environments, and mechanisms of selection are explained. A properly environmental approach should remind us again that buildings are merely tools used by human households and institutions in social, cultural, and economic activities, each of which have their own dynamics. Investigating the mechanisms of socio-cultural evolution has been the work of anthropologists such as Thomas Abel, who reminds us that “In state societies, households differentiate themselves by the alliances they form, the assets they control, and the technologies they command, all within an ecological and demographic context.”28 The key to understanding those arrangements is available power.

18

1.4 The staggering array of new type and styles of buildings is a direct result of the increased levels of power unleashed over the last 200 years. Highpowered buildings are an expression, a symptom, of the excess energy fueling the growth in size and complexity of human civilization.

Architecture, style, and power

Abel’s focus on energy draws directly on the thermodynamic principles of systems ecology developed by H. T. Odum, and also on a long tradition in anthropology, which examines the role of energy and technology in the development of hierarchical and complex social organizations. This has included a strongly deterministic streak, exemplified perhaps by the work of Marx, but described most baldly in the formula presented by Leslie White in the 1940s: E 3 T → C, in which C represents the degree of cultural development, E the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year, and T, the quality or efficiency of the tools employed in the expenditure of the energy.29 As Abel noted, “this position has been criticized for its directionality, its developmentalism, its teleology, its apparent faith in progress,” but it highlights the fundamental role of energy and energy conversion.30 For historians of technology, this kind of determinism inspired the compensatory development of social constructivism, while anthropologists developed a variety of more nuanced formulations such as evolutionary ecology, sociobiology, coevolution, cultural Darwinism, and cultural evolution.31 In one of the more complete accounts of cultural evolution, Johnson and Earle argue that growing populations create new kinds of problems (resource shortages, pollution, internal and external conflicts) that are addressed by technological advances (tools, weapons, agriculture, and including new kinds of buildings), which together demand new social and political arrangements that then support larger populations, require further social and technical solutions, and so on.32 Assigning population pressure the central role has been much debated among anthropologists, because the particular “carrying capacity” of a region is itself dynamic, linked to both the external environment, available technologies, and the internal consumption patterns of the population. But even acknowledging the interaction between consumption, population, and environmental limits doesn’t explain the goal or purpose of growth, or the role of energy, which brings us to the thermodynamic basis of systems ecology. Systems ecology is still a developing field, and rests on a number of foundational principles developed by H. T. Odum and his colleagues and students. Among the most important principle is that systems of all kinds seek to maximize their power. This was a refinement of the evolutionary argument that Alfred Lotka advanced in the 1920s: “the advantage must go to those organisms whose energycapturing devices are most efficient in directing available energy into channels favorable to the preservation of the species.”33 Odum generalized that proposition to include all self-organizing, open thermodynamic systems, animate or inanimate, and extended Lotka’s corollary observation that when environmental limits are encountered, it is “available power” that provides the critical advantage, not energy or energy efficiency. In the final form of the principle, Odum asserted that “During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.”34 19

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In common usage, the terms energy and power are interchangeable, but the difference is critical. Energy is the capacity to do work, while power is the rate at which that energy can be converted to work. So energy efficiency is a technique for increasing power delivery. However, in 1955 Odum and Pinkerton demonstrated that maximum power delivery occurs at intermediate levels of efficiency.35 This is not as abstract or counterintuitive as it sounds. In everyday circumstances we constantly trade energy for power, wasting a bit of energy to accomplish work at a more useful rate. The slower we drive a car or ride a bike, for example, the greater the fuel efficiency – but why drive at walking speeds? We drive fast enough to make the extra expenditure worthwhile. In a successfully interconnected ecosystem, the energy “wasted” to achieve a useful rate of work supports the rest of the system in direct and indirect ways. When resources are abundant, waste or excess serves different purposes than when resources are limited. The boom in available power that characterizes the modern period has largely derived from the unleashing of the energy stored in fossil fuels, enabling growth at many scales and the testing of variations that might not have existed under tighter conditions. Excess energy can be invested in tools, cars, buildings, social institutions and other infrastructures that capture more of the flows of available energy or that participate in larger networks of production. As resource limits are encountered, increased efficiency can work at both scales, enhancing the immediate utility of energy transformations and building larger networks to reinforce production in other ways. In cultural evolution that process has involved the hierarchical division of labor and the management of increasingly refined forms of information to support those hierarchies, resulting in ever more complex social, political, and economic arrangements. Odum argues that production hierarchies, like food chains and specialized labor, are a direct result of self-organization for maximum power. They are another kind of technique for increasing the accomplishment of useful work, which enable more complex arrangements that further increase the available power. However, the term work can seem ambiguous when applied to buildings. The mechanical work of assembling buildings or the thermodynamic work of heating and cooling are readily quantified (and consume fuels), but how do we account for the rest of what we call “work” in everyday language –attending meetings, writing memos, repairing automobiles, preparing meals, commuting? Much of the daily work that is enabled by buildings involves the creation and maintenance of some kind of order (filing, scheduling, selecting) or the transmission of information that reinforces the society that builds them, such as laws, manners, and customs. That is the “work” of civilization (Figure 1.5).

The work of civilization This is why the question about style (or type) is so interesting. Architectural styles make visible the construction and maintenance of socio-economic orders, putting efficiency discussions in a larger context. Buildings can be efficient in the commonly understood sense, using less energy to provide the same amount of services, or by serving society at some other scale, even if that energy is expended 20

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1.5 The work enabled by buildings often involves the creation and maintenance of some kind of order (filing, scheduling, selecting) or the transmission of information that reinforces the society that builds them, such as laws, manners, and customs. Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Jennifer Ross files medical records.

on buildings that are larger, less efficient, or not as obviously productive. While efficiency experts scoff at the idea that there could ever be too much energy efficiency, we already accept many different degrees of “waste” in the different privileges of a hierarchical society. 36 For building design this is most evident when codes regulate efficiency independently of size. We readily allow households or institutions with more wealth to build larger (or multiple) buildings, as long as those buildings don’t exceed the established energy-use intensity per unit of area. We similarly regulate the miles-per-gallon of automobiles, not the number of miles they can be driven, and both formulations implicitly acknowledge the value of some degree of social and economic inequality (and the limitations of regulation). Consider as well the buildings that serve symbolic roles, such as the White House, or that provide mass entertainment, such as football stadiums and concert venues. How do we evaluate their efficiency? The point isn’t to impeach the measurement of building energy efficiencies altogether, but to remember that buildings are constructed to serve social and economic purposes. Styles are part of the “work” of civilization, which allows hierarchies, excesses, and claims about efficiency to be made visible, even if they are misinterpreted or used as “greenwash.” At the social scale, simple measures of energy efficiency lose much of their meaning and we have to turn to questions about wealth and the common good – when is a building too big, too expensive, or otherwise inappropriate? In one of the more comprehensive treatments of the social role of energy, R. N. Adams examined the emergence of political power and social hierarchies, coining the term “energy form” to describe the full range of material and social structures “capable of doing work.” As he explained: Energy is seen both in the broader context of including all mass-energy forms relevant to the doing of work and as a major variable in the evolution of life 21

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in general and therefore the human species in particular. Any form of energy, or “energy form,” whether solar, biochemical, human, mechanical, nuclear, neural, or what you will, that operates in societal contexts can be seen on the one hand as an object to be controlled and manipulated by man and on the other as an independent variable in which human activities merely form a part.37 The “independence” that Adams describes is the individual’s experience of ecological and social self-organization, which architects encounter at many different scales. The size and capacity of buildings correspond to the occupation and class of the clients, which depends as well on the wealth of the civilization in which they live. It is not metaphorical to say that social and economic power translate directly to the capacity to build, but only a small part of that capacity is directly controlled by individuals. Perhaps the clearest illustration of an “energy form” beyond the control of architects is location, which is dictated by real-estate markets and municipal regulations that create and enforce the spatial concentrations of power.38 We say that land is expensive because it is scarce, but it is only scarce at the urban centers of regional production hierarchies. Our common-sense judgments about waste and excess can be understood as techniques with which to debate and regulate the equity and effectiveness of such hierarchies. Part of the challenge is that those social judgments were formed in less populous societies shaped by the pursuit of maximum power. There are too many examples of otherwise reasonable, just societies that have exceeded the limits of their local ecosystems, so we need new kinds of accounts for societies with global reach.39 The importance of reconsidering the question of style is to situate the discussion about building energy efficiency within the work of civilization when it encounters circumstances and limits beyond its immediate control. Putting the case more directly, energy isn’t important because it is scarce, it is scarce because it is important. We collectively grow, consume, and build up to the point of scarcity. According to the principle of maximum power, the acquisition of energy and the rate at which it can be transformed into useful work is a primary driver of self-organization. That is a “blind” process that tests environmental limits by bumping into and overshooting them.40 Energy efficiency is a tactic for slowing the process of overshooting. The urgent work facing our civilization is to use the time we gain to build richer, more complex energy-forms that serve our collective, common good. Those will determine the future styles of power.

Notes 1 H. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, New York: Dover, 1950, pp. 6–9. 2 A. L. Panchen, Classification, Evolution, and the Nature of Biology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 3 C. Jencks, “Jencks’s theory of evolution: an overview of twentieth-century architecture,” The Architectural Review, July, 2000, p. 77. 4 Jencks, “Theory of evolution,” p. 79.

22

Architecture, style, and power

5 H. Hübsch, In What Style Should We Build? The German Debate on Architectural Style, Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute,1996. 6 Jencks, “Theory of evolution,” p. 79. 7 A. Colquhoun, “L’idea di tipo,” Casabella, 44, 1980, p. 16. 8 Jencks, “Theory of evolution,” p. 78. 9 M. DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, New York: Continuum, 2002. 10 A.-C. Quatremère de Quincy, “Type,” Encyclopédie Méthodique 3, Paris, 1825, Translation, Oppositions, 8, 1977, pp. 147–150. 11 Quatremère de Quincy, “Type,” p. 148. 12 G. Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts: Or Practical Aesthetics, Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2004, p. 53. 13 B. Cache, “Gottfried Semper: Stereotomy, biology, and geometry,” Perspecta, 2002, pp. 80–87. 14 G. Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 269. 15 Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, p. 107. 16 Semper, Four Elements, p. 268. 17 U. Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970, p.28. 18 Colquhoun, “L’idea di tipo.” 19 S. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History, New York: W.W. Norton, 1948, p. 17. Joseph Rykwert, “Sigfried Giedion and the notion of style,” The Burlington Magazine, XCVI, 1954, pp. 123–124. 20 A. Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, “Le Purisme,” L’Esprit Nouveau, 4, 1921, pp. 369–386. 21 D. Mertins, “Bioconstructivisms,” In NOX: Machining Architecture by Lars Spuybroek, London: Thames & Hudson, 2004. 22 For a discussion of the concept of gestaltung through this period, see: D. Mertins and M. W. Jennings, “The G Group and the European avant-garde,” in G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926, Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2010, pp. 3–20. 23 S. Butler, “Darwin among the machines,” The Press Newspaper, June 13, 1863. This was developed into the “Book of machines,” in S. Butler, Erewhon, London: A. C. Fifield, 1915, pp. 235–75. 24 R. N. Adams, The Eighth Day: Social Evolution as the Self-organization of Energy, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1988, pp. 1–4. 25 H. Rosling, Gapminder World, www.gapminder.org, accessed August 21, 2012. 26 Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, p. 17. L. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1934, p.14. 27 S. Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, New York: Riverhead, 2010. 28 T. Abel, “Understanding complex human ecosystems: the case of ecotourism on Bonaire,” Conservation Ecology, 7, 2003, n.p. 29 L. A. White, The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization, New York: Grove Press, 1949. 30 T. Abel, “Complex adaptive systems, evolutionism, and ecology within anthropology: interdisciplinary research for understanding cultural and ecological dynamics,” Georgia Journal of Ecological Anthropology, 2, 1998, p. 10. 31 W. E. Bijker, T. Pinch, and T. P. Hughes, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. For developments in anthropology, see Abel, “Complex adaptive systems,” p. 10. 32 A. W. Johnson and T. Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, 2nd edn, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. 33 A. J. Lotka, “Contribution to the energetics of evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 8, 1922, pp. 147–151. 34 H. T. Odum, “Self-organization and maximum empower,” in Maximum Power: The Ideas and Applications of H.T. Odum, edited by C. A. S. Hall, Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1995, p. 311.

23

Introduction

35 H. T. Odum and R. C. Pinkerton, “Time’s speed regulator: the optimum efficiency for maximum output in physical and biological systems,” American Scientist, 43, 1955, pp. 331–343. 36 D. Owen, “The efficiency dilemma: if our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?” New Yorker, December 20, 2010, p. 78. See D. Willis’ chapter in this volume for more discussion of Jevons’ paradox. 37 Adams, The Eighth Day, p. 7. 38 See T. Abel’s chapter in this volume. Also, C. A. Doxiadis, “Ekistics, the science of human settlements,” Science, 170, 1970, pp. 393–404. 39 J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, New York: Viking, 2004. 40 D. H. Meadows, J. Randers, and D. L. Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update, 3rd edn, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004.

24

Chapter 2

Architecture and life1 Luis Fernández-Galiano

A man-made world: the artificial around us Manufactured environment: planetary frontiers We live in a fabricated world. Under human impact, the planet has been transformed to such a degree that geologists propose a new name for the age that begins with the Industrial Revolution: after the Pleistocene and the Holocene, the Anthropocene – a term coined by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Paul Crutzen – would be the third epoch of the Quaternary Period, characterized by the radical anthropic modification of the Earth’s crust.2 The actions of our species, which since the time of the Neolithic Revolution and the appearance of agriculture 8,000 years ago have been responsible for considerable alterations in ecosystems, have accelerated vertiginously in the past two centuries. Through the consumption of fossil fuels deposited over hundreds of millions of years, humanity has multiplied its capacity to shape the globe to satisfy the growing needs of an ever-expanding population. In doing so we have altered the carbon cycle in the same way that artificial fertilizers, without which the planet could not feed seven billion people, have radically modified the nitrogen cycle. Through great works of engineering, urban construction, mining, and agricultural exploitation, we are reshaping a world where already nearly everything is artificial. How could we possibly speak of architecture today without putting it in this context? On the planet today there are more planted trees than wild ones, and there is more biomass in humans and cattle than in all the other large animals combined. A single engineering project can move more ground than rivers drag with them to the sea, and our actions are transforming the morphology of the coasts, the hydrologic cycle, the chemistry of the oceans, and the fluctuations of climate. In a remote past, changes in the availability of energy brought on substantial mutations in the way the world functioned; leaps in the level of atmospheric oxygen 2,400–2,600 million years ago gave rise to the appearance first of complex cells, then of large organisms. The Anthropocene could well be the third great oxidation of the planet if the collective intelligence of humanity manages to bring on a transition from fossil to renewable sources of energy, and to continue the process 25

Luis Fernández-Galiano

of reshaping the world through geoengineering. But while this visionary project materializes, we would do well to try as much as possible to maintain the conditions that allowed the stability of the Holocene, as the scientists concerned about “planetary frontiers” advise, and prevent the gradual, barely perceptible changes from exceeding thresholds or limits beyond which mutation is sudden, irreversible, and probably catastrophic. In this endeavor, the role of urban construction and territorial engineering is essential, because the artificial environment we inhabit is shaped in great part by the nature of these practices, by their disciplinary foundations, and by the processes through which they are executed.

Challenges and risks: from climate to energy Humankind’s formidable capacity to alter the environment has come with huge challenges and huge risks. Climate change caused by carbon dioxide emissions, by now much documented with solid scientific proof, is the most notorious of them, but not at all the only one. The progressive depletion of fossil fuel reserves is another of the risks that constitute a challenge, in this case of a colossal dimension considering how industrial production, the urban model, and transport systems all critically depend on oil and gas. The two processes are closely related, to be sure, since the emissions responsible for climate change are associated with the use of fuels, and in turn the melting of Arctic ice produced by the rise of temperatures is opening up new maritime channels in the north of America and Eurasia, creating access to large reserves of fossil fuels. In the short run, the mutation of the climate will benefit the northern zones of our hemisphere, but to a larger extent bring harm to the millions who live in the deltas of the great rivers, which will flood with rising sea levels, and to the countries with more temperate climates such as Spain, which will suffer desertification. In the middle run, the growing scarcity of fossil fuels will force everyone to look for transition formulas that work to lead us from the current economy, dependent on energy deposits, to one reliant on energy flows, and therefore to the progressive shift from using up reserves to tapping renewable sources. Carrying out this process, which requires profound transformations in production and in the territory, and doing so in a way that would ensure the planet’s capacity to maintain ten billion people – ten times the world population at the start of the Industrial Revolution – is a challenge loaded with risks, because while it excludes a bucolic return to a romanticized pre-industrial past, it demands certain instruments of planetary governance that have yet to come into existence. What we have come to call globalization has created a tight network of material and immaterial webs – from production and transport to finances and communications – that make us all interdependent, but it has not yet forged the political and institutional mechanisms that would guarantee the stability of the system, threatened as it is, as much by the geostrategic mutations brought on by the decline of the West vis-à-vis the emerging countries of Asia and the rest of the world, as by the deterioration of ethics and responsibility in most ruling elites. Although the process will indeed have winners and losers, the dramatic likelihood of convulsions sparking military conflicts makes it now necessary to concentrate on preserving a stable and sustainable global system. 26

Architecture and life

The science of heat: preserving the existing The effort to prevent the planet from losing its balance probably requires an acknowledgment of the physical limits to growth, which have an important energy dimension. Both demographic and economic growth are definitely limited by the availability of food and primary commodities, and the supply of both has a significant spatial component, because cultivation and extraction – like transformation, distribution, and consumption – must be interpreted in territorial terms. Nevertheless, the food fed to people and the raw materials fed to industry could be seen as solidified energy flows, and even space lends itself to quantification in energy terms if we consider the force necessary to defend it and the work needed to build the communication networks that make it accessible. In this way, energy presents itself as an analytical tool with which to evaluate the cost of products and processes, and also to estimate the limits set by the availability of renewable sources. Thermodynamics then emerges as a scientific instrument at the service of social planning, and even as a new paradigm that modifies the landscape of thought by introducing entropy and irreversible time. The building and maintenance of the physical environment, which requires enormous quantities of high-quality energy, ought to be the object of special attention because territorial infrastructures, as much as urban fabrics, are costly artifacts in the thermodynamic balance. We are often reminded that the heating and cooling of buildings and the fuel of vehicles – two variables closely related to urban and territorial models – are responsible for half the energy consumption in contemporary industrial societies, but rarely is it mentioned that both city building and the construction of transportation networks require equally huge amounts of energy, which accumulates in them like valuable thermodynamic capital in need of protection against the erosion of time, obsolescence, or abandonment. Regenerating what already exists – for which a collective appreciation based on custom or beauty is indispensable – seems to be an efficient energy strategy as it uses part of the thermodynamic gain to maintain the capital deposited in the structures built by previous generations. Even the monetary or social capital incorporated in institutions and social customs can be interpreted as immaterial deposits of energy invested in the past, extending the thermodynamic pertinence of conservation into the symbolic domain, which spreads beyond the material terrain to subtly penetrate the intangible sphere of the virtual. Accounting for these energy investments, for the flows, assemblies, and extractions of the man-made world now becomes a central tool for design.

Econometrics and energy flows: technical alternatives and scenarios in the mirror of thermodynamics Specific methods versus statistical methods: process analysis and input–output analysis The energy value of an object tends to be determined either through an analysis of its specific production process or by using the general statistical information that appears in input–output tables. Both methods arrive at a figure that represents 27

Luis Fernández-Galiano

the energy cost of the good – whether an automobile, a pound of bread, a book, or a ton of aluminum – and we call these calculations energy accounting or analysis.3 Process analysis is the determination of the energy cost of a good from the sum of the energy used in its fabrication and that used in the production of the materials it is made from or which intervene in the process. Since these in turn result from processes in which elements fabricated through the use of energy intervene, the analysis must be repeated at several progressively decreasing layers until a sufficient approximation is judged to have been reached. Input–Output (I–O) analysis pursues the same objective through the exploitation of the monetary data that appear in tables, from which the contribution to each economic sector of all the rest can be deduced. By introducing some kind of equivalence between money and energy units at some point of the process (and methodologies differ precisely in when this should be done), the system enables us to determine the energy intensity of each branch of production, and thus, of its products. Although process analysis uses physical units exclusively, and I–O analysis either monetary units or physical and monetary units simultaneously, the formal structure of one is identical to that of the other, since I–O analysis is mathematically equivalent to a process analysis repeated an infinite number of times.4 Furthermore, obtaining physical data from a money-oriented accounting process is but the materialization of the original intentions of I–O analysis. After all, when Leontief first came up with I–O tables, he conceived them as an instrument with which to represent the physical flows through the production system, using only money data on account of their greater precision and availability, besides facilitating sectorial aggregation (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2).5

Predicting the future: energy scenarios, economic scenarios To these analyses and the resultant energy valuation of the cost of goods have been attributed two large groups of themes whose introduction could be beneficial:

28

2.1 and 2.2 The energy value of an object – a carton or an element of a building – can be obtained by analyzing its production process and adding the different energy costs of each of the stages to arrive at a final number that permits the comparisons for technical decision making. 2.1 Energy costs of different construction assemblies: on the left, a concrete waffle slab, costing 1.96 GJ/m2; on the right, standard steel construction costing 3.33 GJ/m2.

Architecture and life

2.2 Energy flows in the production of one ton of folding cartons. The rectangles indicate processes; the ovals, quantities in tons; the triangles, process energy in megajoules (10–6 joules or 10–3 gigajoules); squares, transportation energy. The final result is 51.8 GJ/ton of cartons. Energy analysis can also be based on the monetary data contained in input–output tables, which are transformed into their energy equivalents based on the flows between economic sectors.

Paper stock

Logging

Chemical industry

Waste paper 1.94t

Wood & chips 1.38

Chemicals

921

5356

860

576

Negligible

25

Pulpmills

Waste pulp 1.20

Kraft pulp 0.56

Kraft pulp 0.07

1994

2617

334

853

403

50

Paperboard mills

Papermills

Ink manufacturer

Unbleached kraft 0.89

Overwraps 0.03

Printing ink 0.01

29270

1306

_____

1126

50

_____

Folding box fabrication Folding boxes 1 tonne

5700

345

29

Luis Fernández-Galiano

predicting economic futures and evaluating technological alternatives. The pressure of events in the past few years was such that an immediate question acquired priority in each of these groups: on one hand, the prediction of the demand and price of energy; on the other, the comparison of different production and energysaving methods. This does not, however, prevent the more general formulation cited above from maintaining its validity. With regard to predicting the economic future, the value that the exploration of alternative energy scenarios has acquired is notorious. The explanation for this must be found in the following common beliefs: 1 2

3

In perfect market conditions, economic analysis and energy analysis would yield the same image of the future. To the extent that it works with physical magnitudes, energy analysis is not affected by the possible imperfections of the market that seriously distort economic analysis. Consequently, energy analysis is preferable as a tool for forecasting and planning, since its predictions are more trustworthy and cover greater time horizons than those derived from econometric analysis.

Needless to say, such a chain of logic has several broken links. Nevertheless, what is more important than the weakness of this or that element is the poor quality of the material itself. Underlying the entire reasoning is the conviction that energy flows in the economic system, unlike monetary flows, have a physical, objective, and unalterable character. Both, however, have a social, cultural, and even symbolic dimension that makes forecasts of them uncertain, and more so the further away in time. As Leach writes, “the future is opaque, a dark mirror, and no less for energy analysts than for the rest of humanity.”6 Surely it is redundant to recall that human needs are more socially than biologically determined, that even identical needs can be satisfied with goods of different energy makeup, and that similar goods can be produced through techniques of very different energy-consumption intensity.7 The three links that unite the subject to energy consumption – needs, the goods that satisfy them, and the energy intensity of these – are therefore broken. If we add to all this the fact that econometric energy analysis is still an infant field, the orphan of notorious successes and even of conflicting results, we can understand why the growing complexity of the models used can only be attributed to a desire “to give the impression that models have a much stronger scientific base than they do” (see Figure 2.3).8 In fact, in most cases the “scientific forecasting” of energy futures conceals the existence of a conscious and deliberate plan to dress voluntary decisions with an aura of inevitability. The presentation of what is free as if it were necessary is summed up by Daly in the following words: “forecasting sounds objective and scientific, whereas planning sounds subjective and arbitrary, even socialist: from here comes the tendency to speak of forecasting when we are referring to the planning of the future.” His warning is therefore totally valid: 30

Architecture and life

I

A B C D

E F G H

SECT.

SECT.

SECT.

SECT.

REST.

EST.

ENER.

REST.

DEMANDA FINAL

K

L J

495

5927 0

3659

0

83

299

2 1 0 0

299 48 5 0

459

2

0 559

0

0 0

0

225

304

0

I B

E K

A

F

C

G L H

D J

18 212

1 60 40

41

3

30 26

1

23 0

2.3 Two representations of economic flows. Above, a sequential representation: analyzing the flows between each sector, the energy sector, the other sectors, and the final demand; the example shows the flows of the sector of building construction. Below, layered representation, a variant in which the thickness of the lines is proportional to the dimension of the flows. The example used for this “octopus” diagram it is the iron and steel sector. The top part of every element represents the interior flows, and the lower part, the exterior flows. The flows are designated with 12 letters, and the regular economic definitions using the following letters: final demand, I + J; intermediate inputs (A + K + F) + (C + L + H); intermediate outputs (B + K + E) + (D + L + G).

31

Luis Fernández-Galiano

Lawmakers and citizens ought to be aware of the starting hypotheses and logical fallacies of forecasting, so as not to be deceived by a technical façade that hides a rationality not too different from the ancient Greek practice of predicting the future by interpreting the entrails of birds.9 The foregoing discussion does not mean to say that energy analysis has nothing to offer to the investigation of the economic future. Its contribution, however, belongs more to the field of “exploratory” calculations than actual predictive ones. 10 Mayer’s conclusions point in this direction and constitute, in my opinion, a balanced and convincing approach to the problem; In short, we believe that econometric energy models are best treated as policy tools which generate order of magnitude estimates of our energy future and as pedagogical tools which demonstrate that factors which affect variables such as the demand for energy do so in very complicated ways. Unfortunately, we also feel that both order of magnitude estimates and interaction demonstrations can be obtained by simple “back of the envelope” calculations and do little to justify the elaborate structure of the econometric energy models.11

Technological alternatives: from net energy to shadow prices The other field where energy analysis has proved increasingly popular, technological evaluation, presents a similar panorama of disproportionate ambitions and unnecessary complexities interspersed with wise intuitions and clarifications of previously dark links.12 As we know, technological evaluation tries to create a framework for making technical decisions where economic externalities of the sort that do not affect the market are taken into account. In this way it incorporates “synchronic” externalities – environmental costs, social distortions, etc. – as well as “diachronic” ones – exhaustion of resources, intergenerational inequalities, etc. Several indicators have been elaborated to quantify the hidden damages that a given economic activity causes on its contemporaries or on its descendants, with the aim of preserving – through precautionary measures – both the equity between current economic agents and that between current and future ones. But none of the methods used has proven fully satisfactory, among other reasons because it is extremely difficult to evaluate heterogeneous costs and revenues without some kind of value judgment. Given such extraordinary precariousness in methodology, the introduction of energy computations promises a system of technological evaluation with a firmer and more objective base. Net energy and pay-back time analyses are the most popular, and mainly address energy-saving or -production technologies, but can be applied to any other technological process.13 The evaluation of net energy computes the energy cost of the production installation or the degree of energy saving, and compares it to the amount of energy that the method would produce or save in the course of its useful life, deeming preferable whichever system incurred less energy cost for a given magnitude of energy made available. 32

Architecture and life

Evaluation based on pay-back time determines the moment at which the energy invested in the system is equal to that supplied by it – after which point the system begins to produce net energy – and holds technologies leading to shorter pay-back times to be the most adequate. The two methods yield different results, since they start with different premises. The first ignores the cost of future uncertainty, considering energy units to be equivalent regardless of whether they are near or remote in time, and favoring systems with a low initial investment, even if these are amortized over a longer period. The second does not consider the energy produced after pay-back time, and therefore favors systems that amortize quickly, independent of the total initial energy investment. One way to overcome the incongruity between the methods is by introducing a third procedure, life-cycle analysis, which uses the current value of net energy and so favors technologies that yield higher net energy profits. These are expressed in terms of their net present value through the established discount rate. Thus the method becomes consistent, but only at the cost of allowing an essentially arbitrary variable, the discount rate, to intervene. In any case, as Yokell points out, the main problem undermining the foundations of any of these methods is that “energy cost is only one component of total resource cost . . . the simplicity of a physical ranking is destroyed by the necessity to assign weights to the various components of cost.”14 So much for a technological evaluation system founded upon a solid physical base through energy analysis. It appears to bring unconsidered connections to light and to suggest the advantages and inconveniences of this or that technology, but everything is nuanced by the arbitrary way of determining the weight to attribute to different characteristics. If we understand that this arbitrary assignment of relative degrees of importance is a free fixing of the social value we collectively assign to each factor, then energy analysis formally identifies itself with the fixing of the shadow prices that Lange introduced to economic thought in 1938, a large part of which remains valid today in the theory and practice of technological evaluation.15

Thermodynamics and economy: an energy theory of value? In the effort to place energy analysis at the heart of both economic forecasting and technological evaluation, there is an underlying and persistent conviction that rarely surfaces explicitly, but nonetheless constitutes the true theoretical base of the operation: the identification between value and energy content. An energy theory of value is indeed present in the works of the ecologist Howard T. Odum and in those of his followers, among whom we at least ought to mention Bruce Hannon and Martha Gilliland. Odum’s first important book, Environment, Power and Society, features a chapter on economics which, after stressing that energy is an element necessary for all processes, explores the relationship between the circulation of money and the circulation of energy, concluding that though the economy influences flows, energy is “the quantitative principle that serves as a guide for the events occurring in systems.”16 Two years later Hannon would speak 33

Luis Fernández-Galiano

of “an energy standard of value,” and soon after this Gilliland would follow suit, propounding energy analysis as the key tool for economic decision-making.17 The latter expressed her view of the problem in words which most energy analysts could take as their own: My thesis is that internal factors such as labor, capital, and technological progress have dominated as limiting factors on production since about 1900, but that external forces, namely those associated with the quality of raw energy sources, will limit production at least through the year 2000. Over the long term then, energy flow [including a measure of its quality] can become a value measure.18 Of course, such formulations do not constitute a direct, explicit defense of an energy theory of value. Energy analysts like Slesser have argued that their “school,” unlike Odum’s,19 is not dependent upon the acceptance of an energy-based theory of value, and Gilliland herself, though she followed Odum in everything, wrote: Contrary to what many critics of energy analysis have said, it is not opposed to a theory of value based on utility. Energy analysis simply maintains that value, as a last resort, is restrained by the physical laws which regulate the flow of energy, and that these limitations have gone unnoticed because the cycle of production and consumption is only a part of the system of energy flows (see Figures 2.4 and 2.5).20 Nevertheless, as these critics have convincingly argued, a conceptual gulf exists between conventional energy analyses which use economic units and those which use physical units. The latter, to the extent that they advocate assigning resources over the base of non-economic categories, must presuppose an energy theory of value. As David A. Huettner emphasizes, the direct assignment of resources governed by principles of energy content yields the same economic effect as the indirect assignment that would be achieved if prices were fixed in accordance with energy content. Independently of what energy analysts affirm, if inputs and outputs are assessed in energy terms, if alternatives are evaluated and compared in energy terms, and if the base of this information is subsequently acted upon, then the saying about all roads leading to Rome seems to hold true.21 Rome, in this case, is none other than an energy theory of value. In effect, to continue quoting Huettner, in energy accounting “prices are formulated as if energy were the only limited resource . . . all non-energy resources are contemplated as transformed energy, and in this world of a single merchandise all derived products are assessed in accordance with their energy content.”22 It seems useful to compare this conception of the introduction of thermodynamics in economics – which in the final analysis comes from H. T. Odum – with that 34

GOODS, SERVICES, ELECTRICITY

820 TOURIST USE

RAIN AND POTENTIAL ENERGY

BLDGS. BOATS

BREAD

ROCK BASIN

$

$

1.3

$

$ .041

4.4 WATER

RECREATIONAL EXPERIENCE AND SERVICE

TOURIST $

KINETIC ENERGY

17 ROCK AND SOIL

DOWNSTREAM WATER

NUTRIENTS

1.1

NUTRIENTS ORGANIC MATTER HEAT

RECYCLE

FISH HERBIV. PLANTS

SOIL

CARNIV. TOP CARN.

4660

52

.87

DETRITUS MICROBES

1067 328

3593

126

.036

DETRITIV.

57.5

FUELS HUMAN SERVICE 12

$1.1 X 10

INDUSTRY 6000

ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS CONSUMER HUMAN SERVICE

SUN 5280 AGRICULTURE

11,297.6

2.4 and 2.5 The ecologist Howard T. Odum has been the most visible defender of a thermodynamic analysis of the economy, which shows the relationships between energy and monetary flows. 2.4 (top) Diagram of the energy analysis of a wetland in Florida. In the development of the tourist industry monetary flows become intertwined with energy flows. 2.5 (bottom) Energy flows in an aggregate economic system, United States in 1976.

35

2.6 The development of mechanical calculation is associated with both astronomy and economics; the desire to alleviate the fatigue of the laborious computations of the astronomer or the accounting officer is as important as the conviction that the chaotic sublunary world may be governed by the same laws that govern the harmonious movement of the stars. a. (top) John Napier developed tables of logarithms and a system of multiplication with a box of cubes (the "bones of Napier”, built in 1614) in order to help astronomers, like his contemporary Kepler, in compiling tables of planetary motion. b. (middle) The famous mechanical calculator of Blaise Pascal, completed in 1645, was intended to facilitate the work of his father, a tax inspector. The latest two gears are not decimals, since there no 10 French coins at that time. c. (bottom) The Leibniz calculator, developed in the last third of the 17th century, was a prototype of those that followed and a mechanical metaphor of the author’s thinking.

36

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which emerges from the work of another great founder of energy economics, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.23 Whereas the former understands value to be exclusively determined by productive considerations of supply, the latter pays attention to the conditions and nature of demand. Indeed, Georgescu-Roegen, who has spoken of thermodynamics as “a physics of economic value,” has made a point of stressing that energy is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for assigning values, which requires the intervention of demand factors, particularly those involving the enjoyment of life.24 “The true ‘product’ of the economic process is not a material flow, but a psychic one – the enjoyment of life by every member of the population.”25 In the final analysis, “Physical laws (including those of thermodynamics) constrain man’s activities but do not dictate values by themselves.” 26 Values, in contrast, take shape in the intersection between the material world and the mental world, between supply and demand, between reality and permanently changeable desire.

Methodological dilemmas: limits and heterogeneities Whatever attitude is adopted in the face of theoretical problems arising from the question of value, energy accounting raises another set of methodological obstacles. Such difficulties were detected early on, even prior to the contemporary development of analysis methods. Back in 1962, Carlo M. Cipolla referred to energy accounting in these words: “Despite its apparent simplicity, this system of account is somewhat problematical. It contains all sorts of obstacles and traps and can be dealt with only by allowing a considerable margin of approximation.”27 His assessment remains valid today. The methodological problems of energy accounting involve, on one hand, defining the limits of the object being analyzed, and on the other, its very heterogeneity. With regard to limits, the difficulty arises as much from ambiguity in determining the degree to which the energy flows that have intervened in the production of a good must be traced – accounting for only the most immediate flows is not the same as including the indirect, most remote ones – as from the double countings that are inevitably introduced in the calculation when it incorporates processes increasingly removed from the initial one.28 Different authors have warned us about these risks. Gerald Leach, for example, has declared that as long as the limits are not established with precision, energy analysis will remain “arbitrarily inconsistent, uncertain and subject to great variations.” 29 While acknowledging that “energy intensities are a potentially powerful tool for the analysis and prediction of the energy use of economies,” John L. R. Proops reckons that “enthusiasm for their application must be tempered with caution, so that double counting of energy inputs, and its consequent confusions, is avoided.”30 This warning remains valid today. As for the heterogeneity of the object being analyzed, it can be understood in two ways: in terms of the actual physical diversity of the different forms of energy; and in terms of the economic diversity that assigns different values even to physically equivalent energy magnitudes. As Yokell has pointed out, “‘Energy’ used in an economy is not a single-valued quantity. Not only does its thermodynamic 37

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quality vary widely, but its economic characteristics are various as well.” 31 The physical and economic homogenization of the energy account stumbles upon major difficulties of both a conceptual and a statistical nature. It is in the diverse procedures used to carry it out that one most finds disparities between the methods, in which lie the root of many of the gross discrepancies between results that are, alas, the rule rather than the exception in energy accounting. A good example of these types of discrepancies is the calculation of the energy cost of an automobile, carried out – on the basis of the same data – through the two methods mentioned at the start: process analysis and I–O analysis.32 Whereas process analysis generates a global figure of 32,200 MJ, I–O analysis yields only 4,640 MJ. An intermediate method developed at the University of Illinois, whereby I–O analysis is modified to take into account the fact that different industrial users pay different prices for the same fuel (the modification lies in the introduction of physical energy units at an earlier stage than in conventional I–O analysis) leads to a third figure: 19,000 MJ. This result is greater than that obtained through I–O, reflecting the fact that the large consumers pay less for energy and therefore receive more for the same cost. It is still below the figure obtained through process analysis, however, possibly because in a given branch of industry the cost of the main product – for reasons having to do with economies of scale – is less than the average cost incurred in the branch. Using this lesser cost results in an undervalued energy content. As we can see, even if we start off with the same statistical information and level of aggregation, and even if we clearly mark out the limits of the computation, the mere attempt to homogenize energy accounting by changing from monetary to physical units can yield results so divergent that they are of a different order of magnitude. Another eloquent example of the unreliability and opacity of data derived from energy analysis can be found in the field of construction. Two process analyses of the same dwelling executed by two different authors, Mackillop and Chapman, produce results as divergent as 170 and 365 GJ.33 My own indirect calculations, through I–O analysis, of energy consumption in construction during a given year yield 3.98, 4.64 and 7.04 Mtec, depending on whether I use intermediate consumption, production value, or final demand. Other, more direct, computations of the same magnitude, using another variant of I–O analysis, lead to values of 4.70 and 5.05 Mtec, depending on the statistical information provided by two different official organisms.34 Obviously, the uncertainties caused by statistical discrepancies are trivial in comparison to those arising from methodological dilemmas. .

The calculation mechanism: energy and money under the sign of Leibniz In sum, through physicists, engineers, and ecologists, energy accounting has opened up new and stimulating perspectives for economic science, illuminating areas in the shadows and deepening environmental awareness. Nevertheless, due to its numerous theoretical and methodological gaps, we must guard against giving it excessive value when analyzing, evaluating, and making economic and technical decisions. 38

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In this sense I agree with Yokell when he warns us of the danger of endorsing a logically fallacious methodology just because it produces conclusions we now sympathize with. For in a not too distant future the situation could be reversed and the same energy analysis would yield results we would reject.35 Finally, more important than logical or theoretical fallacies is the actual mechanism of the method, which excludes all considerations that cannot be quantified and processed in a mechanical manner. In this it adheres to the tradition of Jevons, who admired Laplace or Soddy, who wrote Cartesian Economics.36 We know of Jevons’ endeavor to arrive, in his construction of a mechanistic economy, at a quantification of pleasure – an idea, incidentally, already addressed by Plato: “If you had no power of calculation you would not be able to calculate on future pleasure, and your life would be the life, not of a man, but of an oyster or palmo marinus.”37 Very well, this is not too different from the intention of energy accounting to express the most complex and contradictory economic realities in calories or mega-joules in order to solve the ambiguities, conflicts, and dilemmas of social choices by applying the maxim Leibniz offered for the solution of all rational disputes: let us count (see Figure 2.6). Besides being illusory, the intention reveals the insertion of energy analysis – which after all is simply “accounting” – in the conceptual world of mechanistic rationalism, the common substratum of capitalism and contemporary science. Lewis Mumford has emphasized how the contribution of capitalism to the picture of the mechanical world was to . . . make quantity not only an indication of value, but also a criterion of value. In this way, the abstractions of capitalism preceded the abstractions of modern science. . . . The power that was science and the power that was money were, after all, the same kind of power: the power of abstraction, of measurement, of quantification.38 The normalized empire of the merchandise, with the suppression of qualitative differences and the extirpation of the particular, local or singular, is effected through the scientific or mercantile imposition of calculation, and whether this is expressed in money or energy units is of little importance. The technocratic dream of the redemption of economic arbitrariness through scientific objectivity is, in the best of cases, an innocent illusion, and in the worst, a nightmare befitting Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. François Fourquet has written that “capital is capable of making equivalent all species of natural and social energy forms,” stressing the relation between the mercantile universe and the first thermodynamic law on which energy accounting, precisely, is based, and provocatively adding: “Capital is Joule’s law.”39 Such a definition is of course a caricature. Like all caricatures it exaggerates and deforms real features. In our case these features allow us to discern that the face of money and the face of energy are two sides of the same social coin: money and energy flows are countable abstractions that can be used as much to illuminate as to dim a specific social reality. But they can never be used as substitutes, with their 39

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machine logic, for the specific qualitative and changing processes through which the transformation of society and life is channeled.

The cultural crossroads: excess and entropy The technical alternatives at our command in this age of uncertainty are social alternatives, or better still, cultural options that cannot be reduced to a mechanical scale, whether energetic or monetary. All illusions about a technology reconciled with nature in this manner must therefore be dismissed. There is no room in the quantitative and mechanistic universe of the first principle of thermodynamics for the qualitative plurality of hopes and desires, for the fears and habits that form the fabric of human existence. Only entropy can break down the limits of the narrow framework of computation and situate choices and decisions in the broader context generated by the introduction of a cultural dimension. As Georgescu-Roegen has explained: And paradoxical though it may seem, it is the Entropy Law, a law of elementary matter, that leaves us no choice but to recognize the role of the cultural tradition in the economic process. The dissipation of energy, as that law proclaims, goes on automatically everywhere. This is precisely why the entropy reversal as seen in every line of production bears the indelible hallmark of purposive activity. And the way this activity is planned and performed certainly depends upon the cultural matrix of the society in question. . . . The exosomatic evolution works its way through the cultural tradition, not only through technological knowledge.40 Such protagonism of the cultural dimension penetrates through this entire argument like a fine but tenacious thread.41 My earlier book, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy, emphasized the cultural character of exosomatic energy consumption, in which we include buildings, as opposed to the merely biological nature of endosomatic consumption; it stressed how entropy introduces irreversible and historical time as the support of cultural tradition; it marked the difference between the genetic channel and the cultural channel in the transmission of information and situated architecture in the latter; it deemed thermodynamic architecture to be that which, by giving priority to the existing domain, makes time and memory the cornerstones of its theory; it attributed greater importance to the fact that rehabilitation architecture engages in dialogue with the cultural, and not only with the natural or technical realm.42 The cultural dimension has been made starkly visible here by narrating the genesis of energy accounting between the rival poles of energy on one hand, which is quantitative and ahistoric, and entropy on the other, which is qualitative and cultural. The ideas of “culture of energy” and “culture of entropy” have been used profusely throughout.43 Such metaphorical denomination is faulty in the way it associates “culture” with “energy”; the energy paradigm is characterized precisely by its ignorance of a cultural heritage. Yet the formulation is helpful, as it allows us to guess that the opposition between the two paradigms takes place in a field that is wider than an exclusively natural or technological one. 40

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Indeed, the confrontation between energy and entropy is more than a mere technical clash between waste and conservation. Energy and entropy are welldifferentiated social, ethical, and intellectual options, and as options can be freely – and perhaps arbitrarily – chosen, or not. Nevertheless, there is a temptation to use models extracted from the natural sciences when defending a cultural decision, which then appears “natural” or necessary (as opposed to a “contrived” one that does not adapt to the given model). The temptation is accentuated by the fact that the thermodynamics of open systems, as Margalef points out in commenting on the works of Prigogine, predicts that “an [open] system is to evolve by decreasing the amount of energy exchanged for every unit of structure maintained.” This means that living systems “are to minimize exchanges with the exterior, especially of energy, and consequently minimize the increase of entropy in relation to the maintenance of a biomass unit.” 44 But attempts to apply these predictions to human societies must be abandoned, no matter how tempting it is to make analogies and establish the historical inevitability of a possible “culture of entropy.” 45 Ludwig von Bertalanffy writes that “a great deal of biological and human behavior is beyond the principles of utility, homeostasis and stimulus– response, and . . . it is just this which is characteristic of human and cultural activities.” 46 Eric Jantsch, in turn, has attributed this uniqueness of human activities to energy consumption, arguing that since man is the only creature that uses exosomatic tools requiring much more energy than the living parts of the system, “sociocultural systems obey the laws of biological life only partially. . . . If self-organizing systems from chemical dissipative structures to ecosystems are self-limiting, technology represents a world of equilibrium structures whose growth does not limit itself.”47 This lack of self-limitation in sociocultural systems is probably the strongest reason why we should not assume that entropy – in the energy/entropy dilemma – would necessarily be favored by our culture in the particular historic crossroads it is fast approaching. In the cycle of ecological succession, the brief initial period of waste is generally followed by a prolonged stage of “orthodox succession” governed by the predictive and economical use of resources, but we also know that human societies obey such biological patterns only partially: Human beings tend to use and waste as quickly as the availability of resources allows. Only the pressure of necessity, competition, motivates them to use resources more cautiously and efficiently. But the regime of unpredictive exploitation reappears as soon as a new resource or external energy source is discovered. The race is resumed, precisely, in a new initial phase of maximum power use that has nothing to do with efficiency.48 A century and a half after Carnot’s Réflexions, the thermodynamic dilemma of power versus efficiency remains the touchstone of our at once natural and contrived culture, which debates between physical limits and the tendency to break them, between efficiency and power, conservation and waste, entropy and energy, necessity and desire. 49 No physical or biological law can impose the entropic 41

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paradigm. If ever the latter manages to tinge the fabric of our culture, we will have to look for the cause in the gradual encroachment of a desire to persist through self-limitation.

Our horizontal Babel: the sprawling city An urban humanity: the built globe Already more than half of humanity lives in cities, and the urbanization process advances at so vertiginous a rate that we will soon be able to describe the planet as a built globe, with its population agglomerated in metropolises and the surrounding environment transformed into an artificial landscape. The city, that extraordinary invention of our species, has grown and multiplied under the pressure of the demographic and productive explosion brought on by fossil fuels, without the formidable development of telecommunications – as Edward Glaeser has stated – diminishing the convenience or the desire of living close to one another.50 Crucibles of scientific and technical innovation, and to the same extent scenes of intellectual and artistic mutations, cities are our most valuable heritage: a wealth that rests not only in its buildings but also in its people, because even more valuable than its urban fabric is the dense social tapestry that weaves together the interests, ideas, and affections of its inhabitants. In this network of connections lies the essence of the urban, and from this mesh of relationships comes its potential and lure, manifested in the territory like a magnetic field that is irresistible to rural populations, a multitude of iron filings dragged beyond remedy toward the metropolitan magnet. These centripetal forces responsible for the migrations from countryside to city are expressed in the exponential growth of both the urban dimension and the pathologies associated with scale, provoking the contradictory emergence of other centrifugal forces that push large sectors of the population to remote suburban peripheries, where the qualities of civic life are denatured or weakened. At the same time, the dispersal of constructions degrades the natural environment, altering its morphology by modifying its uses, and colonizing the landscape by filling it with irreversible works of engineering and architecture. What elsewhere I have called horizontal Babel, formed by sprawl, is thus neither real city nor countryside, and yet the contemporary exuberance of energy has allowed it to spread through five continents, driven by metropolitan malaise and the nostalgia for nature while undermining civic virtues and pastoral beauty. The tension between the urban gravitation that brings us together and the centrifugal urge that pulls us toward the peripheries produces a vibration of the essential fiber of the debate on territory and landscape, which has its ominous protagonist in that boundless and characterless city, and the most visible cause of our environmental crisis in its planetary metastasis.

Ecosystems and flows: suburban processes In ecological terms, the conventional interpretation of the city is as an organism that feeds on its surroundings. Inscribed in a long tradition of biological metaphors, 42

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but equipped in this case with a solid analytical and quantitative base, the description of urban organisms that crystallizes in the studies of Howard and Eugene Odum presents these as receivers of a continuous flow of energy and materials that enables them to feed their populations, heat and cool their buildings, and transport people and goods – besides building and repairing their physical fabrics – and also as emitters of waste and heat; in thermodynamic terms, as receivers of negative entropy or negentropy that gives them the capacity to maintain their form or, in Spinoza’s formula, “persevere in being.”51 This organic view of the city, which in likening it to a living being holds that it must have nourishment – or in physical terms export entropy – requires an exact definition of its limits, something unfortunately less precise in the urban than in the biological sphere, where the skin of an animal or the membrane of a protozoan forms a relatively clear-cut boundary between the individual and the environment that sustains it. Naturally, it could be argued that living organisms should not be understood exclusively as individuals either, because they are an inextricable part of populations and these in turn subsist in dynamic equilibrium with others of different species in symbiotic or trophic relationships. All told, contemporary sprawl, along with the colonization of interurban space by huge transport, production, and consumption infrastructures – from airport cities, container ports, or logistical centers to industrial complexes, commercial centers, or theme parks – have turned cities into organisms with blurry edges, not even nodes of communication networks, and can only be described as higher-density zones in a built continuum. The first conurbations have given rise to vast territories that are compactly occupied, fogging the boundaries of cities and making urban ecology give way to territorial ecology in the search for a larger-scale field that allows a better understanding of the material and energy bases of the sustainability of human settlements: a scientific, economic, and social endeavor that turns our attention from urban fabrics to the infrastructures that organize the territory.

Healthy density: the compact models When we consider the city under the ecological prism, in the current context of energy scarcity and climate change, no parameter is more decisive than density. The compact city, which is not so much the metropolis of skyscrapers as it is the classical Mediterranean town, is the territorial occupation model most readily described as sustainable: that which incurs fewer material and energy expenditures in raising urban infrastructures, which because they are shared by many, are less costly; that whose buildings consume less non-renewable energy and resources, both in construction and in maintenance during their useful lives, thanks to the advantageous shape coefficient that compactness gives when the relation between the area it encloses and the volume enclosed is reduced; and also that whose density reduces the time and the cost of vehicular commuting by providing the direct contact that is the sign of urban life and the engine of the intellectual, artistic, and interpersonal communication that makes cities drivers of social change (see Figure 2.7). The sprawling city, in contrast, which historically arose from the garden city, associated with a return to nature, paradoxically turns out to be less 43

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green than the compact one, precisely owing to the greater material and energy costs needed for its vast infrastructures, inefficient constructions, and long commuting times. All this is not to say, of course, that the compact city can do without taking nonrenewable resources and energy from the environment, whatever way we set the limits between them, or without dumping residues and emitting carbon dioxide into it. The dream of self-sufficiency, which once nourished so many anti-urban utopias, now comes true in projects for new cities like the well-known Masdar, which the team of Norman Foster is building with the aim of making a town that produces its own energy, recycles all its wastes, and emits no carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – thus avoiding consumption of non-renewable resources and global warming – but it will take some time before all the objectives are met. While we wait for that day to come, cities will have to continue exporting entropy (or importing negentropy), and the familiar compact town will continue to be our best option for communal life: a solution that is perhaps still suboptimal in the ecological sphere, but probably unsurpassable in the social and cultural, providing spaces for intense and spontaneous interpersonal relations of the kind that make ideas circulate and stimulate innovation, attracting financial capital with its dynamism and human capital with its opportunities and quality of life, all of these being characteristics intimately linked to density. 44

2.7 Aerial view of Seville, a compact Mediterranean city.

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Ordinary and mortal: traces of life Docile or rebellious acceptance of the planet’s limits could be an intellectual exercise preparing us for the more difficult and painful acceptance of the temporary limits of our own lives and the perishable nature of our material works. We describe architecture as a three-dimensional art, but we should really situate it in a fourdimensional space because, in the end, time is as important as the three coordinate axes that place works in the world and regulate the balance in our inner ear. Time – that fourth dimension which “also paints,” in Goya’s words – “also builds,” giving buildings the patina of age and eventually eroding structures as it wears away our organism, in a process that we can decelerate through the maintenance and constant repair of works and bodies, but which we do not know how to stop other than by freezing persons or projects in soulless urns.52 Even so, it is easier to accept our mortality, however unfathomable the idea that the individual conscience disappears, than it is to accept the mortality of our works, and thus that of architecture itself, because we hold on to the conviction that we leave marks in the world, engraving our vital paths on the planet’s memory. But the globe is an amnesic sphere where entropy imposes its obstinate law, ruining constructions, decomposing materials, and erasing footprints, which in a wink of geological time will have vanished like a trace of smoke. Notes 1 This chapter contains the first publication in English of a chapter on “Econometrics and Energy Flows” from the book El fuego y la memoria, written in 1982. It was included because the argument of that piece speaks so directly to the topic of this book, though the textual references and notes have not been updated. Instead, the chapter has been contextualized with the excerpts “A man-made world” and “Our horizontal Babel” from a lecture given by Fernández-Galiano in 2012 upon his elevation to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. 2 P. Crutzen first used the term Anthropocene in print in a newsletter of the International GeosphereBiosphere Programme, 41, 2000. 3 Sometimes, especially in the study of energy installations, reference to the analysis of net energy is made in order to emphasize that we are talking about the energy balance of the installation (net e. = e. produced by the installation – e. necessary to build and maintain the installation). When efficiencies are calculated by means of the second law of thermodynamics instead of the first, as is habitual, it is common to use the term entropic analysis. (Efficiency according to the first law = energy supplied or transferred by the system / energy provided to the system; efficiency according to the second law = minimum energy theoretically necessary / energy really consumed.) 4 As we know, the tables relate the production X of the sectors N where the economy is disaggregated 2 –1 with the final demand Y through a matrix A of coefficients N , in such a way that X = (I – A) Y. –1 2 3 Now, (I – A) = I + A + A + A . . ., which is no other than the matrix expression of a process analysis. 5 W. Leontief, Input–Output Economics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. 6 G. Leach, “Net energy analysis: is it any use?” Energy Policy, 3, 1975, pp. 332–344. 7 In the world, exosomatic consumption of energy is already 20 times more than endosomatic, even with the former taking place through very different combinations of foods, which can be produced by using a range of techniques of varied energy intensity. See Eric Jantsch, The SelfOrganizing Universe, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980, p. 276. 8 L. S. Mayer, “The value of the econometric approach to forecasting our energy future,” in Energy Use Management, New York: Pergamon Press, 1978. 9 M. Daly, “Energy demand forecasting: prediction or planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 43, 1976, pp. 4–15.

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10 E. F. Schumcher, Schumcher on Energy, London: Jonathan Cape, 1982, p. 61. 11 Mayer, “Value of the econometric approach.” 12 In my opinion the two most useful collections of articles on this topic are Energy Analysis (1977), ed. John A. G. Thomas, and a compilation of texts published in the magazine Energy Policy, and Energy Analysis: A New Public Policy Tool (1978), ed. Martha W. Gilliland, which bring together the lectures delivered at a Symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Both books are published by Westview Press, Boulder, CO. 13 A major milestone in the dissemination of energy analyses was the passing in the United States of Public Law 93-577 (Federal Non-Nuclear Energy Research and Development Act of 1974), which requires an analysis of net energy for all energy technologies that receive federal government support. The methodological problems it gave rise to, however, led to its being judged “virtually inapplicable” (Leach, “Net Energy Analysis” see note 5) and useful only “to provide employment to scientists and computer programmers” (Yokell, see note 14 below). 14 M. Yokell, “Physical efficiency and economic efficiency as criteria for ranking energy systems,” Energy Use Management, New York: Pergamon Press, 1978. 15 O. Lange and F. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism, New York: McGraw Hill, 1938. 16 H. T. Odum, Environment, Power and Society, New York: John Wiley, 1971. 17 Bruce M. Hannon, “An energy standard of value,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 410, 1973, pp. 139–153. Martha W. Gilliland, “Energy analysis: a tool for evaluating the impact of end use management strategies on economic growth,” in Energy Use Management, New York: Pergamon Press, 1978, pp. 613–619. 18 Gilliland, “Energy analysis,” pp. 613–619, p. 617 19 Malcolm Slesser, “Energy analysis,” Science, 186, 1977. To speak of a Slesser “school” is at any rate hyperbole. Unlike in the case of Odum, who despite his extravagances has a very original and influential line of thought, I believe that neither the modest Energy in the Economy (London: Macmillan, 1978) nor the more academic Biological Energy Resources, written with Chris Lewis (London: Spon, 1979) justifies the use of that term when referring to the work of Slesser. 20 Gilliland, “Energy analysis.” 21 David A. Huettner, “Ultimate limits on the uses of energy analysis,” in Energy Use Management, New York: Pergamon Press, 1978. 22 Huettner, “Ultimate limits.” 23 Odum, Environment, Power and Society. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Besides their respective works of 1971, two subsequent articles have been particularly influential: Georgescu-Roegen, “Energy and economic myths,” Southern Economic Journal, 41 (3), 1975, 347–381; and H. T. Odum, “Energy, ecology and economics,” Ambio: Energy in Society: A Special Issue, 2 (6), 1973, 220–227. 24 Prigogine and Stengers have equally stressed that thermodynamics is not about the “nature of heat or its action on bodies, but about the use of that action.” Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, New York: Bantam Books, 1984. 25 Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law. 26 Huettner, “Ultimate limits.” 27 Carlo M. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962. 28 This is what happens in the methodology of Odum, which irremediably leads to multiple countings, on different levels of analysis, of the same energy flows. 29 Leach, “Net energy analysis.” 30 J. L. R. Proops, “The use and abuse of energy intensities,” in Energy Use Management, New York: Pergamon Press, 1978. 31 Yokell, “Physical efficiency and economic efficiency.” 32 M. T. Woo et al., “Methodology for energy analysis,” in Energy Use Management, New York: Pergamon Press, 1978. 33 A. Mackillop, “Low energy housing,” The Ecologist, 2 (12), 1972, 4–10; P. F. Chapman, Fuel’s Paradise, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. 34 tec is the energy equivalent of a ton of coal, which varies slightly according to the type of coal. Approximate equivalences are 1 MJ = 28,000 tec, or 1 tec = 36 3 10–6 MJ, therefore, 1 Mtec = 36 MJ.

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35 Yokell, “Physical efficiency and economic efficiency.” 36 William Stanley Jevons, commonly known for the Jevons Paradox, the proposition that increases in technological efficiency tend to increase the consumption rather than decrease it. The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines, London: Macmillan, 1865. Frederick Soddy, Cartesian Economics: The Bearing of Physical Science Upon State Stewardship, St. Albans: Fleetville, 1922. 37 Philebus, 21 (quoted by Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process). Nevertheless, as early as 1912, and in the context of sympathy for utilitarian approaches, Otto Neurath wrote a perceptive text that presents the methodological limitations of trying to use maximization of social pleasure as a decisive instrument of economics, arriving at the conclusion that in view of the contradictions that arise, “the choice may be made with the help of an inadequate metaphysical theory . . . [but] tossing coins would be much more honest.” (“Das Problem der Lustmaximus,” in O. Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973, pp. 113–122). Although he shared with the other members of the Wiener Kreis a fascination for science, Neurath did not believe that economic decisions could be based on quantitative data alone. Referring to a hypothetical alternative, for example, he wrote: “There are no units that can be used on the basis of such a decision, neither units of money nor hours of work. One must directly judge the desirability of the two possibilities. To many it seems impossible to proceed in this manner, and yet it is only in this field that we are not used to it. For even in the past one has not started from units of teaching or sickness in order to decide whether new schools or hospitals should be built” (“Wesen und Weg der Socialiserung,” Empiricism and Sociology, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973, pp. 135–150). 38 L. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, New York: Harper, 1934. From a different standpoint, Werner Sombart had made the same connection between economic calculation and science when he said that double-entry bookkeeping was “born of the same spirit as the systems of Galileo and Newton,” and that in it one could already glimpse “the ideas of gravitation, the circulation of the blood and energy conservation” (Le Bourgois, 1926, p. 313; quoted by Fernand Braudel, Les Jeux de l’Exchange, Paris: Colin, 1979, p. 510). 39 F. Fourquet and L. Murard, Los equipamientos del poder, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1978. 40 Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, pp. 18–19. 41 Needless to say, we are referring to culture in the broad sense, that which includes artifacts and social practices, uses and tools, objects and rites, not culture in the sense that seems to be more widespread nowadays, which hardly even embraces the arts and the letters. Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law, p. 19. 42 L. Fernández-Galliano, Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. 43 Terms taken from C. Maffioli, Una strana scienza, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1979, p. 142. 44 R. Margalef, La biosfera, entre la termodinámica y el juego, Barcelona: Omega, 1980, pp. 30, 149. This prediction, says Margalef, is in accordance with his own view – maintained as well by Odum and others – whereby ecological succession emerges as “the materialization of a tendency to maintain the maximum mass of organized matter with a minimum change of energy in the metabolism” (p. 160). 45 The text profusely and emphatically warns us of the danger of the theoretical destruction of mechanicism leading to a general adherence to equally reductive biologistic conceptions. Margalef, La biosfera, see especially chapter 1, paragraph 2; chapter 3, paragraph 4; and chapter 5, paragraph 6. 46 L. von Bertalanffy, General System Theory, New York: Braziller, 1968, p. 109. C. O. Weber has expressed a similar idea very concisely: “Homeostatic balance makes it possible for us to live, but contributes little to our living well” in “Homeostasis and servo-mechanisms for what?” Psychological Review, 56, 1949, pp. 234–249; quoted by R. Arnheim, Hacia una psicología del arte: Arte y entropía, Madrid: Alianza, 1980, p. 368. 47 E. Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980, p. 280. 48 R. Margalef, La biosfera, p. 163. Now, says Margalef, “the amount of available energy will much determine the manner in which the interaction between man and the rest of the biosphere is to continue. With the period of waste now behind us, we will be able to return to the form of succession in which minimized energy exchange is a guarantee of persistence. This direction in the changing of systems is the only one that allows predictions, which are not encouraging” (p. 214).

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49 See Maffioli, Una strana scienza, p. 101. 50 E. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 51 B. Spinoza, Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. III, ed. and trans. E. Curley, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 6. 52 “El tiempo también pinta,” Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746 – 1828).

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Chapter 3

Energy and the social hierarchy of households (and buildings) Thomas Abel

Introduction Of all the technologies and assets that are produced in our current world, few rival in importance the structures built for work and living. Buildings are structures for shelter, locations for the delivery of electricity, water, and electronic information; they are settings for the gatherings of people; they are secure sites for the storage of equipment, furnishings, food, and valuable documents; and finally they provide living and working space, places for nurture in youth, rest in old age, and cooperation in production of all kinds. The styles of buildings are a form of social expression that must be conceived in relationship to these features and functions, and ultimately with theory that is both cultural and ecological. In order to fully understand the connections between architecture and energy, the activities of people must be placed within appropriate larger scales of natural and economic production and consumption. The fundamental “units” in a model of social structure are households. Households are active agents that control assets and information that they use to define themselves and to negotiate positions of social and economic power. In any regional landscape, a hierarchy of households emerges, or “self-organizes,” in relation to its context of regional humanecosystems, economic production, and larger economic world-systems.1 Household hierarchies and the features and function of households within them are not static over time. Functions change as human-ecosystems undergo “successional” patterns of transformation. In the growth years of fossil fuel usage, social self-organization included the rapid expansion of human living space, and the spatial (particularly vertical) concentration of work and living space in city centers. In a period of peak fossil fuel usage and the transition to renewable resource flows, architecture will have to contribute to different functions and support the emergence of new (diminished) social hierarchy. This transition can only be understood within its larger context of regional and world-system self-organization, 49

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utilizing principles of systems ecology and focused particularly on energy and resource flows.

Systems ecology Over his career, the famed ecologist H. T. Odum proposed three new energy laws. His Fifth Law of Thermodynamics, known as the “hierarchy principle,” states simply that “energy flows of the universe are organized in an energy transformation hierarchy.” 2 His Fourth Law explains why hierarchy emerges: throughout the universe, when energy gradients exist, systems self-organize to reduce them. Gradient reduction may occur simply, as in diffuse heat conduction, but above a certain threshold of gradient, self-organized structures appear that hasten dissipation. This is accomplished by building structures that amplify the intake of energy as they use and degrade the energy in work. A useful flow of energy (power) does work that increases system production and efficiency. It does not simply dissipate energy as quickly as possible, but in a way that is self-reinforcing. Odum called his Fourth Law of Thermodynamics the “maximum power principle,” arguing that “during self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.”3 Odum’s theories of self-organization had a number of influences. Meteorology and ecology were two, one living and one not. In the emergence of Florida thunderstorms, morning heating leads to updrafts of moisture-laden air that form ubiquitous small clouds or cumuli. 4 Minutely distinct, some are amplified or “selected,” pirating the moisture energy of neighbors. By this process over an afternoon, a few large thunderheads emerge, which amplify the capture and dissipation of daytime heating. Each summer day these thunderheads, lacking any information of past form, will from nothing self-organize anew. Forest succession offers a living demonstration of self-organization and the structured, DNA-guided patterning of species in ecosystems that results. 5 The trajectory of succession begins with fast-growing, energy-grabbing plant species that compete furiously to cover open ground. The early cover transforms soils by accumulating biomass, holding rainwater, and attracting insect and animal species. Shrub and tree species later emerge, attracting a growing diversity of animals. After many more years, climax trees of great longevity anchor a forest rich in diversity of plant and animal species that allows for the capture of the many available energies of sun, wind, rain, and soil, and that perform the complex dance of nutrient cycling, which prevents the loss of scarce organic nutrients to wind or runoff, in all, permitting the perpetuation of the forest. Climax forests, however, are not eternal, and parts or wholes are regularly lost to internal or external perturbations from pest or calamity, restarting the succession process. With such models in mind, we can interpret our own history and current situation. In the past, early pre-state and state societies lived by consuming storages of natural production. These include the renewable resources of plant and animal biomass. But they also include the slow-renewable resources of forest timber and topsoil, which would take generations to recover after use by our 50

Energy and the social hierarchy of households

ancestors. This historically has led to both population movements and cycles of growth and collapse of human populations when movement became impossible.6 Over the last 200 years, new energy sources have been added to the renewable and slow-renewable resources of our past. Fossil fuels, combined principally with metals, timber, and concrete, have led to unprecedented surges of growth in human civilization. That growth has followed very closely the trajectories of growth found in other self-organizing systems of weather and, especially, ecosystems. When new energies are abundant, growth is fast, competition is high, diversity is low, and construction of material infrastructure is quick and shoddy. As energy acquisition begins to decelerate, diversity appears, chains of production and consumption emerge in a cooperative division of labor, feedback to energy capture and use leads to efficiency and maintenance, and population growth slows. This occurred in England in the Long Depression of 1873–1896, as coal acquisition slowed and peaked, and was repeated in the US in the 1920s–1930s, when coal acquisition decelerated, later to reaccelerate when oil brought extraction innovations and transport efficiencies. 7 When the transition from acceleration to deceleration of resource capture has been quicker than the span of human life, some groups and individuals have resisted successional changes and attempted to cling to competition and inequality.8 Oil provided a second burst of fossil fuel growth in the last century, leading to the boom years of the 1940s and 1950s as US and then world oil growth accelerated. During growth years, people and ideas are encouraged (reinforced or “selected”) that maximize the use of resources for rapid growth. People like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman are products of the 1940s and 1950s, the booming years of oil growth. Their cousins were David Ricardo, John Stewart Mill, and Thomas Malthus in England during the early acceleration of coal mining and use that was wed to industrial production (1800–1875). When resources are available, ideas like theirs amplify individual innovation, competition, and capital accumulation for investment in growth. Later, as resource growth decelerates and peaks, different ideas are needed. Ideas about cooperation, maintenance, efficiency, division of labor, and equity can all prolong prosperity in times of high resource use, even without growth. How does ecosystem climax differ from fossil fuel peaks? Ecosystem climax is sustainable indefinitely, though it is inevitably perturbed in part or whole. This has been the focus of Holling’s research and his “adaptive cycle” model. 9 Unlike earlier succession models that largely did not take into consideration collapse and reorganization, the “adaptive cycle” model makes it clear that cycling is the norm as perturbations from both larger and smaller scales are inevitable. Fossil fuel peaks, however, differ from the succession model, even when they include adaptive cycling and reorganization. Fossil fuel peaks are simply peaks, or at best plateaus, which are by their nature finite in duration and followed by declining energy sources. Odum and Odum label these two periods “transition” and “descent.” 10 The energies of sun, wind, and rain do not disappear with forest contraction or collapse, although the ability of once-forested land to capture those resources does diminish 51

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as forest cover is lost. But the forest (in some form) will gradually return as it passes again through succession. In contrast, fossil fuel-based civilizations will diminish following the peak/plateau of fuel capture and use. A number of strategies, including efficiency increases, reuse, and reorganization can extend the prosperity of the growth era for some time, but human population decline must coincide with energy decline, and human production must refocus on local or regional resources.

Households and social hierarchy in human-ecosystems Inequality among households is the effect of hierarchical systems of material provisioning, found historically in all modern states and their more immediate predecessors. It is the outcome of strivings by households to best position themselves in concert within the emerging opportunities of productive “divisions of labor” originally developed in intensive agricultural states. As in all self-organizing systems, small differences become amplified when growth is possible. In step with agricultural intensification, therefore, emerging production specializations in processing and distribution, combined with specializations for technology production, all offered opportunities for households to seek to improve their standings vis-à-vis their neighbors. Marx and Marxist utopian visions notwithstanding, evolutionary mechanisms of status, dominance, and coalition formation have led to inequality as the inevitable outcome of energy self-organization.11 No less than among the forbearers of our natural lineage, the ecosystems themselves that they inhabited, or the regional landscapes of city and surrounding rural areas that subsequently emerged, humans today organize into hierarchies. At the macro or system scale the function of a hierarchy is to maximize power. While inequality may be morally offensive to some, the succession model shows that the emergence of hierarchy within ecosystems leads to whole-system energy gains, recycling of materials, mutualistic relationships, and the production of enhanced services to the whole, provided especially by the presence of food webs capped by apex predators.12 In human coalitions hierarchy also leads to relative gains for members and kin. The characteristic emergence of household hierarchies can be illustrated with an example from our recent research, which has adapted the principles of systems ecology to the analysis of social systems and cultural evolution. It has enabled us to rigorously articulate and understand the hierarchy of households as they have organized themselves over time on natural landscapes.13 Most recently we have applied hierarchy theory and systems ecology to the study of social structure in Taiwan.14 Analysis indicates that human energy hierarchy is often heterogeneous in space, composed of sometimes loosely articulated regions that have specialized functions. Each region has its own social hierarchy and its own environmental base.15 The research focuses on households and the assets they control as the basic structural unit in systems with humans. It includes additional insights from worldsystems theory by Wallerstein, as elaborated by Abel. 16 The results provide empirical evidence for hierarchies that details more precisely their form and function, and which suggest alternate depictions of hierarchy in the Energy Systems Language developed by Odum and his collaborators. 52

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For systems researchers, human-ecosystems are systems of living and non-living sources, flows and storages of energy, materials, and information joined in a hierarchical web of interactions. The material function of social structure/hierarchy within human-ecosystems is paramount.17 As Odum says in his maximum power principle, “in the competition among self-organizing processes, network designs that maximize empower will prevail.”18 For this discussion, social structure refers to individuals and groups, differentiated by income, resource control, coercion control, and economic function. People in households use their memories and symbolic culture to reproduce that social structure at great energy savings.19 This model of structure, defined by division of labor and political-economic hierarchy or inequality, has a long tradition in social science that includes Adams, Durkheim, Hawley, Marx, Spencer, White, and many others.20 For these social scientists, and for this chapter, social structures are political as well as economic. The approach advocated here is household-focused, while it simultaneously tracks the technological-economic functions controlled by households within human-ecosystems. Figure 3.1 is an example of a household type found in Hualien County, on the east coast of Taiwan, showing the most critical inputs, both natural and purchased. In this approach, the “units” of social structure are households, and those households may possess ownership or controlling rights to corporations. Most households in a production hierarchy do not control businesses, but instead are literally producers of people, or in market economies, of labor for hire. Households are commonly studied with economic methods. However, these generally do not capture the “free” inputs that households, especially rural or indigenous households, receive from their countless interactions with their natural environment, which can be found in Figure 3.1. To understand the totality of these resource flows, Odum developed a form of analysis based on “emergy” (for “energy memory”), which is a form of ecological economics that accounts for all of the work that contributed to the production of any source of energy, material, or information.21 Emergy analysis provides a means to judge and compare both environmental and economic flows to households. A nation, county, or city can be represented as in Figure 3.2, composed of a production hierarchy of households. Some households are owners or managers of great capital assets (on the right), while other households use modest storages of assets to reproduce themselves and their labor (on the left). In accordance with fundamental principles of a hierarchy, the entities to the right are fewer in number, have longer turnover times, larger spatial scales, higher search/exploration ability, higher maintenance cost, can take more varied inputs and/or from varied sources, have larger feedback effects, and produce products of higher “quality” – a word redefined by Odum to reflect the great convergence or concentration that was necessary to produce the product or service.22 Notice that each household has the same basic structure of autocatalytic production of storage. They contain material assets, the family members themselves (in a division of labor), and the cultural models (explicit and implicit knowledge and beliefs, which include understandings of place, household, and built structures for living and work) that they use in their own reproduction, which 53

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3.1 Hualien household ecological-economic strategies. This figure is a product of research into the impact of ecotourism development on households in rural Taiwan. Depicted is a household, with many inputs both ecological and human-made. Emergy ecological economics allows for measurement and comparison of each flow.

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3.2 Regional human-ecosystem. A regional human-ecosystem contains nested hierarchies of natural production (food webs), economic production, and households. Here the household hierarchy is expanded for emphasis. Each household, as in Figure 3.1, contains storages of people and assets that feed-back to their own production. This is sometimes called an autocatalytic structure that allows for rapid growth when resources are available. Additionally, feedbacks exist between households and to economic and natural production processes. In other words, people support processes that contribute to their own reproduction. In this diagram, households to the right own or control corporate or political assets. They are fewer in number, have longer turnover times (e.g., as corporate dynasties), take more and varied inputs, and have larger feedback effects, as predicted by Odum’s theory of hierarchy (see text).

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all draw on the same suite of renewable, slow-renewable, and non-renewable resources. Within a production hierarchy the household entities self-organize or self-assemble (a process analogous to “community assembly”). As with ecosystem analysis, it is argued that this process will reduce competition, moderate the availability of resources to entities, and to the larger system, modify or maintain habitats, and increase diversity of households.23 While the rhetoric of “free-market” capitalism exalts competition, the reality of oligopolies and cartels, emergent economic entities at larger spatial scales that dramatically reduce competition, has been just the opposite as world-system growth has decelerated toward climax.

A spatial hierarchy of households While Figure 3.2 is a reasonable representation of socio-cultural hierarchy and division of labor, it lacks an explicit representation of the spatial hierarchy and spatial convergence that occur in cities. Odum was particularly interested in the self-organization of human-ecosystems that contributes to the convergence and upgrading of resources on a regional (and larger) spatial scale. Figure 3.3 depicts such a regional system with one center and several smaller centers of convergence that feed into the larger center. Huang has advanced this research with regards to the self-organization of the Taipei basin, and my research on worldsystems addresses this topic at the largest scale of human political-ecological organization.24 One problem with the systems diagram in Figure 3.3, however, is that towns and cities at scales 2, 3, and 4 lack their own environmental resource base. A second problem is that while each town or city possesses its own social hierarchy, they are not visible in the diagram. In other words, even large cities have some farmers or fishermen in their peripheries, which should share location 1 in the social hierarchy with farmers and fishers from other regions. Figure 3.4 is an alternative diagram that resolves these issues. Each of the four spatial regions centered on the named towns or cities has its own environmental base. Furthermore, each possesses a social hierarchy. Of great interest for this research is the proposition that different regions possess different mixes of households at different scales. This is here indicated by the different sizes of storage symbols.

Household emergy research Emergy analyses were conducted for households in Taiwan, and in particular for Hualien County, Taiwan, as part of a research project of whale-watching ecotourism, and as part of a survey of county industries. 25 Results are depicted graphically in Figure 3.4. Here we see that the numbers of people and the assets they control, represented by the sizes of “consumer” and “storage” symbols respectively, differ spatially, from rural areas and small towns (top) to the regions that contain urban centers, Taipei and Kaoshung, at the bottom. It should be noted that in Figure 3.4 the number of households furthest to the left is much smaller than would be expected from energy hierarchy theory. In forest ecosystems, for example, the first scale is the largest in pyramids of biomass and number. In human-ecosystems this first scale, composed primarily of farmers and 56

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3.3 Spatial convergence. This figure from Odum depicts the spatial convergences of energy, materials, and information that relate towns and cities into a spatial hierarchy. As materials, energy, information, goods, and services converge and diverge spatially, a number of principles of organization emerge. As hierarchy increases so does turnover time, territory of influence, pulsing intensity, income density, and transformity (used with permission).

(a) Hierarchical levels

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Each line marks an inward and return pathway Background level (b) Centers and energy flow Energy Source

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(c) Material flow Background concentration 1 2

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Spatial pattern of hierarchy with transformed energy becoming more concentrated in centers. (a) Spatial pattern of converging pathways; (b) energy systems diagram showing transformations and transformity increasing to the right; (c) diagram of energy-driven processes concentrating materials to the right and recycle to the left.

fishers, should contain the largest concentration of people and households. If we collapse the regional hierarchy in Figure 3.4, we can see that Taiwan in total is absent households at this scale. The riddle is solved by placing Taiwan within a world-system as a high-tech semi-periphery (Figure 3.5). Within the world-system, the left-most household scale is filled by households in agriculture-exporting countries in the world-system periphery, such as Vietnam, Thailand, or Indonesia. Figure 3.5 depicts Taiwan within the larger world system. At this scale alone, we can find ultimately the completed form of energy hierarchy predicted by Odum. Notice in Figure 3.5 that thicker flows of emergy move toward the right and toward the world-system core. Return flows (feedback) are smaller, which indicates the injustice of world resource flows that are only discernible by calculating emergy 57

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3.4 Taiwan spatial hierarchy. This figure depicts the regional spatial hierarchy of Hualien County within Taiwan. Flows differ at each location in this spatial hierarchy of convergence and feedback. Each area has its unique environmental inputs, which are represented by the four distinct “production” symbols, and flows from sun, wind, rain, tide, and uplift to each. Only some areas receive direct inputs from international markets, which are selectively fed-back as needed. Households (and the businesses they may control) attract different resources related to their different roles in the production hierarchy.

trade values.26 Natural resources are almost always underpaid in the market due to the free contributions to their production from their natural systems. Taiwan is more fortunate, in emergy terms, being a net importer of agricultural products and exporter of services and high-tech goods. Still, emergy exchange with Taiwan’s world-system context places Taiwan at a disadvantage to core countries.

Hierarchies and the world in transition Odum and Odum provide us with many recommendations for our current times of “transition” and approaching “descent.” 27 These should be considered in relation to the current state of Hualien County and Taiwan. Their first and most fundamental recommendation for nations and the world is to reduce sizes of human populations. In a world with less net energy to accomplish real work, it will be impossible to support the large populations that have emerged with the expansive use of fossil fuels, especially oil. Taiwan currently has 23 million people, and by 58

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3.5 Taiwan with its world-system context.

some accounts is the second most densely populated nation in the world. It appears that Taiwanese are feeling the stress of their numbers as population growth has dramatically decelerated and will become negative in the next 15 years. This is a hopeful sign, though not welcomed by the central government, which typically has its own concerns for labor, armed forces, and care for an aging population. A second recommendation for nations and regions that will need to learn to live on less fossil fuel is to recognize the place of cities within regional landscapes. Cities are sometimes mistakenly seen as entities in themselves. Modern “city-states” like Singapore and Hong Kong enhance that myth. But cities are in reality the centers of hierarchies. Human social-economic presence in space is 59

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hierarchical, with convergences from the reaches of a landscape to centers that we recognize as towns and cities. Towns and cities themselves are further organized into hierarchies, which converge finally to major city centers. We see this hierarchy in the diagrams of Figures 3.4 and 3.5. We need to recognize the interconnected nature of rural and urban, and additionally the essential inputs that we receive from other nations. Recommendations for transition therefore include the reintegration of center with periphery, of urban and rural. 28 Where they have grown apart in legal privileges and taxes they should be rejoined. Money and work – as well as innovative architectural design strategies – should go to reinvigorating rural towns, their schools, and needed infrastructure, for people will return in number to these towns during descent. The lesson to learn: centers need to feed-back to peripheries in order to maintain themselves. That is the principle of maximum power. It is to our benefit, within cities, to ensure that rural regions and “periphery” countries flourish. Feedback includes things like ecosystem conservation, restoration, and management. It should also include transfers of knowledge and debt relief. And it should ensure the sovereign right of nations to protect their own diversity of people and industries. Social theory that focuses on energy cannot miss the importance of the transitioning of energy supply. “Transition” will be a great challenge in the highly urbanized landscape of the west coast of Taiwan. On the east coast, “behind the mountains,” in Hualien and Taidong counties, the situation is better, but the above recommendations still apply. Furthermore, surrounding the larger cities, for example Hualien City in Hualien County, the focus should be on eliminating commutes to work and creating walking satellite towns from what is now emerging suburban sprawl. Public transportation between satellite towns is absent and will be needed. As the cost of transportation increases, each of the towns and cities in Figure 3.4 will need to become more self-sufficient, producing a diversity of needed goods, not single products for export to the larger centers. Taiwan and especially Hualien County is fortunate to have hydroelectric power, and electricity will continue to be available, although in lesser quantity. Electricity use should prioritize communication between regions, and provide continued support for information production in the central city of Hualien, with dissemination to the region. A peaceful transition and descent should be everyone’s goal. Gradual changes in social hierarchy should include contraction at all scales and globally. To continue to receive the countless “free” inputs from nature, it will be vital to maintain Taiwan’s many diverse ecosystems and all ecosystems globally, with their great stores of renewable resources, the world’s natural capital. These and many other recommendations can be made. Transition and descent will be challenging times. It was the Odums’ aspiration that with understanding these changes could remain “prosperous” in the older sense of that word, which does not in itself imply growth. Rather, prosperous living is raising and educating families in secure homes fundamentally joined to their regions of the supporting earth.

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Energy and architecture Architecture in the US has closely followed the principles of ecosystem selforganization, especially the trajectories of fossil fuel use over the last two centuries. The booming years of suburban housing and city center high-rise construction in the 1950s and 1960s were fueled by cheap energy in construction and transportation. House and urban construction was fast and inefficient, and much has since been replaced or allowed to deteriorate. This is the fast cover of early succession as competition was fierce among development companies to cover the landscape with their products. Fast-forward to today, when new construction ethics have emerged. Green roofs, building skins, sun-screens, gray-water usage, photovoltaics, net-zero, and passive design are becoming common everywhere. Life-cycle analyses trace the histories of construction components, and assist with material recycling and reuse. Energy efficiency in production and living has gained much attention, as have maintenance, retrofit, and renovation, rather than new construction.29 Buildings for home and industry need to be conceived spatially, within their hierarchies of production and convergence (Figure 3.4). Past depictions of spatial hierarchy did not capture regional heterogeneity in function, did not identify regional social hierarchies, and did not recognize regional differences in environmental resource base. These features are all captured in the spatial hierarchy diagrams included here (Figures 3.4 and 3.5). People and households evaluated locally must be placed within appropriate larger scales of production (Figure 3.5). To understand self-organization, it is always necessary to look for the largest scale, in this case the world-system, though as social hierarchies contract in space, new smaller spatial scales can be expected. Emergy analysis provides a tool for identifying the permeable boundaries of that largest system. In the coming transition, architecture will need to contribute to cooperation, mutualism, diversity, energy conservation, recycle and reuse, to local networks and their supporting ecosystems. These are new forms of valuable feedback, which together maximize power – they amplify the capture and use of valuable resources that support us all and will into the future. An appropriate architecture of this century must support the reorganization of people and work within changing ecosystems and human systems.

Notes 1 I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1974. 2 H. T. Odum, Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Decision Making, New York: Wiley, 1996, p. 16. 3 Charles A. S. Hall, ed., Maximum Power: The Ideas and Applications of H.T. Odum, Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1995, p. 311. 4 H. T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 223–224. 5 E. P. Odum, “The strategy of ecosystem development,” Science 164, 1969, pp. 262–270. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society, p. 54. 6 T. Abel, “Pulsing and cultural evolution in China,” in Proceedings of the 4th Biennial Emergy Research Conference, ed. M. Brown, Center for Environmental Policy, University of Florida,

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7 8 9 10 11

12

13

14 15 16

17

18 19 20

21 22 23 24

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2007. R. B. Gill, The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life, and Death, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. J. Perlin, A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. J. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. G. McGrane, An Emergy Evaluation of Personal Transportation Alternatives, Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 1994. In England this was the classical economists before the Keynesian revolution in the 1930s, while today it is the neoclassical economists following Milton Friedman. C. S. Holling, Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management, New York: Wiley, 1978. H. T. Odum and E. C. Odum, A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies, Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2001. R. Axelrod and W. D. Hamilton, “The evolution of cooperation,” Science, 211, 1981, pp. 1390–1396. C. Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. E. Fehr, U. Fischbacher and S. Gachter, “Strong reciprocity, human cooperation, and enforcement of social norms,” Human Nature, 13, 2002, pp. 1–25. P. Gilbert, “The relationship of shame, social anxiety and depression: the role of the evaluation of social rank,” Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, 7, 2000, pp. 174–189. P. H. Rubin, “Hierarchy,” Human Nature, 11, 2000, pp. 259–279. Food web refers to the feeding relationships between species or aggregations of species that share many characteristics. Highly aggregated food webs are called food chains. Apex predators are top-level predators (top carnivores) with no predators of their own, residing at the top of their food chain. T. Abel, “Testing principles of spatial hierarchy: what households research has to say,” paper presented at the 5th Biennial Emergy Research Conference, Gainesville, FL, 2009. T. Abel, “The ‘locations’ of people and households within the culture-nature hierarchy of Hualien County, Taiwan,” paper presented at the 6th Biennial Emergy Research Conference, Gainesville, FL, 2011. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society. Odum, Environmental Accounting. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I. T. Abel, “World-systems as complex human ecosystems,” in World System History and Global Environmental Change, ed. A. Hornborg, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 56–73. The concept of “social structure” has become a problematic term in the social sciences with the rise of post-modern and post-structuralist theorizing. While most would agree that societies and economies are productive in terms of products and services, when social scientists talk of social structure they more often refer to patterns of communication and social interaction, rather than production. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture, New York: Basic Books, 1973, p. 144. C. Crothers, Social Structure, New York: Routledge, 1996, p.114. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society, p. 37. Abel, “Testing principles of spatial hierarchy.” R. N. Adams, The Eighth Day: Social Evolution as the Self-organization of Energy, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1988. E. Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, New York: The Free Press, 1893. A. H. Hawley, Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986. K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, 1867. H. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1876. L. A. White, The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959. Odum, Environmental Accounting. Odum, Environment, Power, and Society. C. G. Jones, J. H. Lawton, and M. Shachak, “Positive and negative effects of organisms as physical ecosystem engineers,” Ecology, 78 (7), 1997, pp. 1946–1957. S.-L. Huang, H.-Y. Lai, and C.-L. Lee, “Energy hierarchy and urban landscape system,” Landscape and Urban Planning, 53, 2001, pp. 145–161. T. Abel, “World-systems as complex human ecosystems.” T. Abel, “Evaluating local human-ecological impacts of whale watching ecotourism in Taiwan,” Research Report, Tzu Chi University, Science and Technology Policy Center, 2009. T. Abel, “Testing Principles of Spatial Hierarchy: What Households Research Has to Say,” The 5th Biennial

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26

27 28 29

Emergy Research Conference, Gainsville, FL, January 31–February 2, 2008, Center for Environmental Policy, Gainsville, FL. Abel, “World-Systems as Complex Human Ecosystems.” C. Ferreyra and M. T. Brown, “Emergy perspectives on the Argentine economy during the 20th century: a tale of natural resources, exports and external debt,” International Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development, 6 (1), 2007, pp. 17–35. Odum, Environmental Accounting. Odum and Odum, A Prosperous Way Down. Ibid. H. C. Foley, “Challenges and opportunities in engineered retrofits of buildings for improved energy efficiency and habitability,” AIChE Journal, 58 (3), pp. 658–667.

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Chapter 4

Design in the light of dark energy John Thackara

When the new Italian Prime Minister, Mr. Mario Monti, gave his acceptance speech to the Italian Senate before Christmas 2011, he used the word “growth” 28 times and the word “energy,” well, zero times. Why would this supposed technocrat neglect even to mention the biophysical basis of the world’s economy? Energy, after all, is at the heart of an industrial growth society, of industrial production, of our cities, our transport systems, our buildings and infrastructure, our food and water flows, the internet – they all critically depend on oil and gas.1 Mr. Monti is not toiling alone. President Obama, in his 2012 State of the Union message, stated, soothingly, that “we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.” Mr. Obama was not lying. A life-critical choice has already been made. “We” have chosen today’s business-as-usual over any pretense that we will leave the world better for our children. In fact, we have committed to leave it much worse. In announcing that the US needs to develop “every available source of American energy,” the president let it be known that this includes oil and gas, stating, chillingly, that he will “sign an Executive Order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects.”2 Mr. Monti, Mr. Obama, and their peers are better described as theocrats than technocrats.3 Their principal job is to keep us in thrall to a mirage – an economy that expands to infinity in a finite world. If economic growth were like money and could be willed into existence, then Mr. Monti’s calls for growth would be heeded. But the economy, which contains real-world activity, is joined at the hip to society’s underlying energy system. In order to grow, industrial economies require a cheap and abundant supply of energy, especially oil. When the costs of oil increase significantly, this adds extra costs to transport, mechanized labor, and industrial food production, among many other things. When this pricing relationship diverts discretionary expenditure and investment away from the rest of the economy, it causes debt defaults, economic stagnation, recessions, or even longer-term depressions. And that’s why Mr. Monti and the rest of us are in trouble. 64

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The world is not in danger of running out of oil completely in the short or even medium term. The peak of a mountain, after all, is the top, not the bottom. Many barrels of oil remain in the ground and under the sea. But because the quality of what’s left is declining, it cannot drive growth with the same gusto as before. Industrial civilization grew up using oil that, when it did not literally gush out of the ground, was easily extracted using oil-powered machines. In 1930, for the investment of one barrel of oil in extraction efforts, 100 barrels of surplus or net energy were obtained for economic use.4 Since then, as we have burned our way through the high-quality and easy-to-access fuels, that happy ratio has declined. It takes energy to obtain energy – the very commodity that is now in shorter supply – and extracting energy gets harder and more expensive every year. A lot of the best oil left, for example, lies deep under the sea; oil companies are not drilling there by choice. The ratio of energy input to output for today’s oil fields is down to 1:20 and declining. In the case of tar sands, it’s 1:4 or less.5 When our leaders talk about change, but implement the opposite, as is happening now, they often use the promise of technology as cover. They are happy to scoff at the very mention of resource constraints. By 2050, they assure us, the world’s energy needs could be met by wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, and sustainable forms of bio-energy.6 All that is missing is the will and determination to make it happen. Our energy predicament is deeper than that. Nearly all renewable energy strategies suffer from an existential flaw. They take rising global energy “needs” as a given, calculate the quantity of renewable energy sources needed to meet them, and then hand the job of implementation over to someone else. Ahead of the Rio+20 Summit in 2012, for example, Britain’s environment minister stated that the world “needs 50 percent more food, 45 percent more energy, and 30 percent more water” by 2050.7 And she went to the Rio+20 summit to put those demands on the Earth Summit table. Take that, tree-huggers. If our leaders were leaders, rather than politicians, they would say “wait a minute, how important are all these supposed needs, anyway?” Instead of that, they plow ahead as if the transformation of international energy systems can feasibly be achieved without environmental or social cost. Poor countries are expected to “share” their energy resources without complaint. Expensive and materially heavy energy arrays are to be dumped into wilderness areas – such as arid lands in Spain and France, or the deserts of North Africa – on the assumption that these lands are “empty” or “useless.”8 The political class, and its in-house techno-optimists, also ignore a logical inconvenience: It takes a lot of fossil fuels and money to deploy “renewable” energy systems. 9 Refitting global infrastructures on a large enough scale to run industrial society as it is configured now would require massive investment of energy, materials, knowledge, labor, and money. Even in a booming world economy such resources would be hard to mobilize. However, in the deflationary global crisis we are in now it is implausible at best that even a fraction of the needed funds will be found. Insanely, the same growth-at-all-costs global economy that caused today’s energy crisis is assumed to be the engine for its resolution. 65

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Clean-energy advocates do not help their case by persistently underestimating the task at hand. In all economic activities, energy that you can measure – such as the electricity bill of a building, the cost of filling up a car, or the overheads of a hospital – are only one modest part of the bigger picture. A new technique called systems energy assessment (SEA) measures the total energy demand of business and daily life activities that we take for granted. Phil Henshaw, a pioneer in SEA, describes these hidden energy uses as “dark energy.”10 Henshaw calculates that what is traceable “is generally less than one fifth of the true total, even when tracing by the most careful analytical efforts.” For every barrel of oil equivalent that’s counted today – if they are counted at all – four times that number are consumed invisibly by the system-at-large. Even as its replacement remains perpetually out of reach, the production of primary energy is peaking right now, if it has not done so already. This is not doomer speculation. In a report last year called Sustainable Energy Security , Lloyds of London, the epicenter of global risk management, warned, “an oil supply crunch is likely in the short-to-medium term.”11 Another capitalist hotspot, the World Economic Forum, described peak oil this year (2012) as one if its “Seeds of Dystopia,”12 and the US Army, itself not traditionally a doomer hotbed, stated in its most recent Joint Operating Environment [JOE] report that “by 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear . . . we simply aren’t going to replace this with renewables.”13 If these predictions are on target – and who would argue with the finest minds in global finance, or with the most sophisticated military ever known? – then our energy-intensive global economy has entered the phase of decline. Peak oil does not mean that we’re going to run out of the stuff completely. It means that from now on we will have to use a bit less oil every year in a world whose growth-based economies depend on us using a bit more each year. It doesn’t add up, and that’s why Mr. Monti incanted the word “growth” with such fervor.

Getting real: our 5 percent energy future We are not talking here about small adjustments. In 1971, as Cutler Cleveland recalls, a geologist called Earl Cook evaluated economic and social development in terms of energy “captured from the environment.” 14 Cook discovered that a modern city dweller, in 1971, needed about 230,000 kilocalories to keep body and soul together. This compared starkly to a hunter-gatherer 10,000 years earlier, who needed about 5,000 kilocalories per day to get by. That gap has continued to grow. A New Yorker today needs about 300,000 kilocalories per day once all the systems, networks, and gadgets of modern life are factored in. That’s a difference in energy needed for survival, between simple and complex lives, of 60 times – and rising. Given that degree of mismatch between our escalating energy appetites, and a declining supply, resource efficiency is not a lifestyle choice. We’ve splurged on energy for 200 years because we could. The growth-at-all-costs economy grew because it could. We drove two-ton trucks to collect a pizza because we could. Now that we can’t, the nature of the playing field is changing. 66

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John Michael Greer describes this process as “catabolic collapse.”15 This is what happens when a society, by the time it realizes the scale of the changes that have to be made, has exhausted the material, financial, and cultural resources needed to make them. In all probability, this long-form implosion is already under way. For design, this means letting go of the idea that our energy crisis is some kind of problem to be solved. Rather than dream of a global switch to renewables that cannot and will not happen, the wiser course is to focus our creative efforts on low-energy successors to today’s gas-guzzling systems. Our focus should be services and infrastructures that require 5 percent of the energy throughputs that we are accustomed to now. That’s the energy regime we’re likely to end up with, so why not work on that basis from now on? Is 5 percent impossible? On the contrary, for 80 percent of the world’s population, 5 percent energy is a lived reality today. For people living at what some people call the “bottom of the pyramid,” this reality is usually described as poverty, or a lack of development. But 30 years as a visitor to countries throughout the “developing” world has opened my eyes to a startling fact: their 5 percent can deliver the same value and quality as our 100 percent. Healthcare is one example. 16 Post-peak medicine will look, and be, quite different from what we know today. Successful models to learn from already exist. A system-wide focus on community-based health and prevention is massively cheaper than the doctor-focused, pay-per-procedure system. A key principle, in poor countries especially, is that physicians are based in neighborhoods, not in clinics or hospitals. In poor countries, furthermore, community healthcare is designed to be carried out by people themselves. In Venezuela’s Integral Community Medicine program, for example, doctor-teachers move into the countryside and poor urban areas to recruit and train doctors from among peasants and workers. In other very poor, mostly rural, often war-scarred regions – such as Guatemala, Colombia, and Mozambique – primary healthcare is provided on the spot in communities that would otherwise have no health infrastructure.17 The lesson here is that the basic human right of access to medical and healthcare in time of need is not dependent on a high level of economic development with its associated energy intensity. Venezuela and Cuba, for example, are not rich countries, but healthcare reaches the majority of their populations.18 Another example of 5 percent systems that can sustain life well is food. In the industrial world, the ratio of energy inputs to the system, relative to calories ingested, is 12:1.19 In communities that practice subsistence agriculture, the ratio is closer to 1:1. This is not just a rural phenomenon; worldwide, 800 million people grow food in cities.20 In less industrialized societies than ours, where food is grown using fewer energy inputs at each stage, an important consequence is that fewer middlemen are involved in the distribution of agricultural produce. In poor countries, local markets and distribution points for food often have a radius of about ten miles or less – a distance similar to that of the food webs that once fed our cities.21 Wherever political upheaval and economic destabilization are more advanced than they are yet in our own cities, a plethora of informal markets are a common feature of a dynamic shadow economy. 22 For some writers, this is our 67

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future, too; from street vending to P2P networks, the future is the informal economy.23 The lesson here is that people who are poor in material terms have learned, by necessity, how to create value without destroying natural and human assets. “Undeveloped” communities do not have access to, nor can they depend on, the high entropy support systems of the industrial world. Given these constraints, they have to rely on local assets that already exist: soils, trees, animals, landscapes, energy systems, water, and energy sources.24 This is not to underestimate the survival challenges faced by poor people on a daily basis; but to the extent that a sustainable economy is one based on local production, human labor, and natural energy, then the poor people of the world are further ahead on the learning curve than the rest of us.

Sponge design If sustainable life-support systems, such as community health or food, need so few outside resources, where does that leave traditional forms of city planning and development? At the level of ideas, concepts, and strategies, top-down design is still in demand. In 2010, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, asked ten architects to project 20 years into the future and dream up “the world’s most sustainable post-Kyoto metropolis.”25 Later, an enormous exhibition, also in Paris, entitled The Fertile City: Towards an Urban Nature, explored nature in the city from multiple perspectives: historical, social, cultural, botanical, ecological.26 The most evocative proposal came from a team of Italian architects who proposed to enlarge the city and lay it out as a “porous sponge,” wherein waterways are given pride of place.27 In cities that have yet to feel the constraints of energy transition, similar big ideas are already feeding into live projects. For the conurbation of Bordeaux, which has big plans to become a major European city, “nature is one of the major projects of the decade ahead.” The city has invited five multidisciplinary teams to develop projects during a six-month “competitive dialogue” that will explore how best to transform 55,000 hectares into natural areas. Several areas of intervention have been identified: the heart of the city; major adjacent agricultural and forest areas; enhancement of wetlands or flood plains; and the allocation of wastelands. Each team is required to develop its project collaboratively with municipalities and other local actors.28 This is surely the first time that urban agriculture, in particular, has been embraced by a northern city on such a large scale – and not just as decoration or amenity. The teams are required to use the concept of resilience and the design principles of permaculture in their urban planning, landscape, economy, tourism, and ecology proposals. The composition of the five teams is a fascinating illustration of the many different disciplines that will need to collaborate. They include specialists in architecture, geography, economics, agronomy, ecology, planning, development, landscape, sociology, tourism, hydrology, philosophy, history, and storytelling. Where grand projects of the Bordeaux kind are still feasible, turning our cities into sponges will certainly make it easier to grow food in them. Sponge-like cities 68

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need less heating and air conditioning. Energy can be saved by treating water on the spot, rather than in far-away treatment facilities. The point is that Bordeaux is an exception. Neither Paris-as-a-sponge, nor Fertile Cities elsewhere, are plausible scenarios if they can only be realized by vast investments by the state. As the catabolic collapse of the old economy gathers pace, such vast resources will simply not be available in the 5 percent energy future that awaits us. Large-scale transformations of cities do not have to be capital-intensive; they can also be achieved by a multitude of small steps. One set of sponge-designing steps, for example, would be to multiply the ecological interventions into the built fabric that are already beginning to be made. The ecological corridor idea, for one, imagines a network of components across an urban water or food catchment in which a variety of green spaces are linked with river corridors and associated tributaries.29 The concept incorporates aspects of sustainable urban drainage, river restoration, and flood management. Chicago’s Growing Water proposal takes the blue-green corridor idea further.30 Organized by UrbanLab, the Growing Water project proposes that the city multiply and intensify its grid of parks, green boulevards, and waterways to save, recycle, and grow 100 percent of its own water. The project envisions a series of about 50 “Eco-Boulevards” throughout the city. These long strips of publicly owned land would be transformed from gray infrastructure – roadways and sidewalks – into restored green infrastructure: an interconnected network of open spaces and conservation land such as parks, wetlands, preserves, bio-conduits, and native landscapes. By naturally managing stormwater the system would return extracted water back to Lake Michigan. The city’s Eco-Boulevards would function as a giant “Living Machine.” Microorganisms, small invertebrates, fish, and indigenous plants would treat 100 percent of Chicago’s wastewater and stormwater naturally.31 These ecological treatment systems, which make use of natural bioremediation processes modeled after wetlands, come in two types. The first, a hydroponic system, would use aquatic and wetland ecological processes to treat wastewater in reactor tanks that require indoor greenhouse conditions to work best. A second type, a wetland Living Machine, would use marshes, wetlands, prairies, and forests in which low-energy biological processes filter stormwater naturally. The idea overall is to stitch together nearly every possible open space, natural land area, and public conservation zone. The Growing Water Team envisions that while several Eco-Boulevards will be designed to replace roads and sidewalks entirely with green infrastructure, several others would be engineered to contain a healthy balance of gray and green infrastructure, especially along commercial roadways where vehicular mobility is vital. The Eco-Boulevards would re-make the city in the image of its own motto, “Urbs in Horto” – City in a Garden.

Sweat equity infrastructure In a 5 percent energy future, blue-green corridors and Eco-Boulevards have the potential to be much cheaper than the interstate highways and hydroelectric dams that President Obama says he wants to build. An alternative to such federal 69

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megaprojects is what one might call sweat equity infrastructure. This is where the metabolic energy of people is harnessed on a large scale to build the “green infrastructure” that we need. There are precedents, after all. Wonders of the world from ancient times, such as the Great Pyramid in Egypt, were built without fossil fuels. An enormous variety of water-management system technologies employed by ancient civilizations, including the Hittite Ponds of Hattusa, the Nomad Cisterns in Antalya, and the Ancient Greek method of water conservation used no pumps and no fossil fuels.32 Water systems built three millennia ago, such as the fiamran Canal, basically made out of clay, continue to be used today. Green infrastructure in a post-peak age will not involve the building of huge new concrete structures interspersed by massive pumps. On the contrary, a lot of the work needed to turn our cities into sponges will involve the dismantling of obstacles, or the digging up of hard surfaces. “Our problem is concrete,” states Depave, a non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon.33 There are between 100 million and two billion on- and off-street parking spaces in US cities alone. These impervious surfaces prevent rainwater from entering the soil and instead divert it to nearby waterways. Depave promotes the removal of this unnecessary pavement from urban areas to create community green spaces and mitigate stormwater runoff (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). In this way, writes Tod Littman in his Pavement Buster’s Guide, “road and parking pavement area can often be reduced significantly in ways that are cost effective and maintain adequate levels of accessibility.”34 The Arizona-based Watershed Management Group (WMG) is based on a similar barn-raising model.35 The organization builds green infrastructure that uses living, natural systems to provide environmental services. These include capturing, cleaning, and infiltrating stormwater; creating wildlife habitat; shading and cooling streets and buildings; and calming traffic. Typically, 15 WMG volunteers might

4.1 Pavement-busting project by Depave, a non-profit organization based in Portland, Oregon. 70

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4.2 More pavement busting by Depave, which promotes “the removal of unnecessary pavement from urban areas to create community green spaces and mitigate stormwater runoff”.

transform someone’s back garden from a sterile, black-plastic and rock-laden heat island into a runoff-capturing garden of native plants, organic mulch, and, in time, living soil. WMG programs provide citizens with the skills and resources they need to manage the natural resources within their own watershed.36 Success of development is measured by the health of ecological systems, the prosperity of people, and the strength of communities.37 In France, artists and designers have been involved in similar groundbreaking projects at a local level for many years. In Lyon, for example, the designer Emanuel Louisgrand creates productive gardens on abandoned sites in different parts of the city.38 Each intervention is unique to that place and time (Figures 4.3 and 4.4). Understanding what makes each place unique, and then defining tools and infrastructures that can be adapted to it, is what makes this true sustainable design. The modern city has been shaped by the availability of cheap oil and resources, and plentiful credit. Massive resource and energy flows have been used to build skyscrapers, heat and cool buildings, move and treat water, feed people, and move them and their goods around. The end of energy abundance throws the continued livability, and therefore growth of cities, into question. The need to adapt city fabrics physically, in preparation for climate change, is an additional challenge. But change is already under way. Resource efficiency is, at heart, a social process, not a technical one. The service and design projects touched on above are motivated in part by necessity, of course, but also by respect for the value of natural and social ecologies. In these cases, 5 percent energy is a given, not a 71

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4.3 l’Ilot d’Amaranthes, urban community garden designed by Emanuel Louisgrand, Lyon, France (2002): aerial view. Emanuel Louisgrand, galerie Tator.

4.4 l’Ilot d’Amaranthes, urban community garden designed by Emanuel Louisgrand, Lyon, France (2002): ground-level view. Emanuel Louisgrand, galerie Tator.

choice, but the constraint can lead to creativity. The search for ways to preserve, steward, and restore assets that already exist – so-called net present assets – is often more engaging than the profligate use of resources to make new infrastructures from scratch. Thousands of groups, tens of thousands of experiments. For every daily lifesupport system that is unsustainable now – food, health, shelter, mobility, clothing – alternatives are being innovated. What they have in common is that they create value without destroying natural and human assets. In practical ways, these 5 percent solutions re-connect city dwellers with the soils, trees, animals, landscapes, energy systems, water, and energy sources on which all life depends.

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Notes 1 “Why is economic growth so popular?” November 25, 2011: http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/ 2011/11/why-is-economic-growth-so-popular.html (accessed April 2012). 2 Romm, J. “What Obama would say if he were the Teddy Roosevelt of climate change”, February 7, 2012: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/07/419015/obama-teddy-roosevelt-of-climatechange (accessed April 2012). 3 “The miracle of solvency,” December 29, 2011: http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/12/the-miracleof-solvency (accessed April 2012). 4 WWF et al. The Energy Report, 2011: http://assets.panda.org/downloads/101223_energy_report_ final_print_2.pdf (accessed April 2012). 5 Hall, C. A. S. and Klitgaard, K. Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy. New York: Springer, 2011. 6 “Set greener goals at Rio+20: Caroline Spelman,” February 9, 2012: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/2012/feb/09/greener-goals-rio-caroline-spelman?CMP=twt_gu (accessed April 2012). 7 Pavlik, B. “Could green energy kill the desert?” 2009: http://www.latimes.com/news/science/ environment/la-oe-pavlik15-2009feb15,0,6845781.story (accessed April 2012). 8 “Can we invest our way out of an energy shortfall?”: http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/12/19/can-weinvest-our-way-out-of-an-energy-shortfall/#more-11412 (accessed April 2012). See also: Hall and Klitgaard, Energy and the Wealth of Nations. 9 http://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/new-metrics/measuring-total-impacts-business (accessed November 2012). 10 http://www.greenprophet.com/2012/03/2800-year-old-earthen-well (accessed November 2012). 11 “Global risks 2012”: http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2012 (accessed April 2012). 12 “The Joint Operating Environment 2010”: http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/ JOE_2010_o.pdf (accessed April 2012). 13 Moitoza, Z. “A new energy boom?” February 8, 2012: http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/201202-10/new-oil-boom (accessed April 2012). 14 “Energy transitions past and future” July 1, 2008: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4238#more (accessed April 2012). 15 Greer, J. M., “How civilizations fall: a theory of catabolic collapse,” 2005: http://www.dylan.org.uk/ greer_on_collapse.pdf (accessed April 2012). 16 http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2011/09/5_health_the_ri.php (accessed April 2012). 17 http://challenge.bfi.org/2012Semi_Finalist_HealthPromoter (accessed April 2012). 18 http://revolutionarydoctors.com (accessed April 2012). 19 http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2011/09/5_health_the_ri.php (accessed April 2012). 20 Pimentel, D. and Pimentel, M. “Sustainability of meat-based and plant-based diets and the environment”, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 78 (3), 2003: pp. 6605–6635; Church, N. “Why is our food so dependent on oil”, Energy Bulletin, http://www.energybulletin.net/node/ 5045 (accessed April 2012). 21 http://www.ruaf.org (accessed April 2012). 22 http://www.othermarkets.org/index.php?tdid=10 (accessed April 2012). 23 http://www.theinformaleconomy.com (accessed April 2012). 24 http://www.toronto.ca/health/tfpc (accessed April 2012). 25 https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/ewre/Public/MSc%20posters%202010/SkiltonPosterMAKSI MOVIC.pdf (accessed November 2012). 26 Samuel, H., “Grand Paris: architects reveal plans to transform French capital”, March 12, 2009: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/4980639/Grand-Paris-Architects-revealplans-to-transform-French-capital.html (accessed April 2012). 27 http://www.vtpi.org/pavbust.pdf (accessed November 2012). 28 http://www.lacub.fr/nature-cadre-de-vie/55-000-hectares-pour-la-nature (accessed April 2012). 29 http://watershedmg.org (accessed November 2012). 30 Skilton, D., Maksimoviç, C., and Graham, M. “Implementation of blue-green corridors in urban environments”: https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/ewre/Public/MSc%20posters%202010/Skilton PosterMAKSIMOVIC.pdf (accessed April 2012). 31 http://www.livingdesignsgroup.com (accessed April 2012).

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32 Laylin, T. “What modern society can learn from a 2,800 year old earthen water well,” March 26, 2012: http://www.greenprophet.com/2012/03/2800-year-old-earthen-well (accessed April 2012). 33 http://depave.org (accessed April 2012). 34 http://www.vtpi.org/pavbust.pdf (accessed April 2012). 35 http://www.lavoutenubienne.org/?lang=en (accessed April 2012). 36 http://watershedmg.org (accessed April 2012). 37 WMG’s excellent guidebook, Green Infrastructure for Southwestern Neighborhoods, is available online: http://watershedmg.org/sites/default/files/greenstreets/WMG_GISWNH_1.0.pdf (accessed April 2012). 38 UNESCO “Cévennes: French peasants restore their ancient lands,” 2000: http://portal.unesco. org/science/en/ev.php-URL_ID=3061&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (accessed April 2012).

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Part 2

Building performance

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Chapter 5

Less is less Are architects thinking too small? Dan Willis

The crucial fact about sustainability is that it is not a micro phenomenon: there can be no such thing as a “sustainable” house, office building, or household appliance, for the same reason there can be no such thing as a one-person democracy or a single-company economy.1

Thinking bigger, thinking broader I think I know what “green architecture” should look like. And since I do, I see no reason to withhold the information from the reader while I describe the laborious thought processes that led to my conclusion. Green architecture should look like the three projects pictured in Figures 5.1–5.3. The first project, the High Line in New York City, was constructed between 2006 and 2009 and is by now well known. It was designed by a team including architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, and landscape architects Field Operations.2 Their design transformed an urban eyesore – an abandoned elevated railway – into a 22-block-long linear city park with wildflower fields, woodlands and grasslands, vestiges of the original railroad tracks, and benches that emerge out of the concrete plank paving for seating and sunning. The project in the second photograph, the Marsupial Bridge, is located in Milwaukee, and is probably less familiar. It was designed by the architects La Dallman, and built in 2005–2006. The architects’ design weaves a pedestrian bridge within the structure of a former railroad viaduct, and also includes a “Media Garden” at ground level, below the bridge. The third photograph, of the East River Esplanade and Piers, is also in New York City. It was designed by SHoP Architects. The Esplanade and Piers is representative of the efforts many cities have made in the past few decades to reclaim their waterfronts for public uses. Phase 1 of the project was completed in 2011.

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5.1 The High Line weaves through the urban fabric of Manhattan.

5.2 Marsupial Bridge, La Dallman Architects, Milwaukee, WI. 78

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5.3 East River Pier 15, New York, SHoP Architects.

Here is what they have in common: • • • •

They’re not buildings They’re big (measured in blocks or tenths of a mile, not square meters or feet) They’re in cities They reuse and reinvigorate existing infrastructure that was abandoned or underutilized

Part of my argument in favor of these projects as exemplars of “greenness” stems from my belief that design professionals have been expending too much effort on the design of energy-efficient objects (buildings certainly, but also cars), while paying insufficient attention to the social, cultural, economic, and technological contexts in which those objects operate. Our efforts to create a more green society are hampered by the unintended consequences of thinking too narrowly, of thinking too small. Take two nearly identical beautifully designed and cleverly engineered LEED Platinum-rated buildings. Place one in the periphery of a city, or in a rural area, where everyone who works there or visits the building is likely to drive to it. Compared to its fraternal twin in a dense city, where people walk to work or use mass transit to get to the building, the first building will be responsible for the consumption of a great deal more energy. 3 Examined as isolated objects, the two buildings may appear to consume almost exactly the same amounts of energy and resources, but considered as integrated parts of a complex system, their impact on our overall societal energy usage will be strikingly different. Every new building in the suburbs, every project that contributes to sprawl, encourages further sprawl. Every Prius or Leaf automobile sold helps to perpetuate the belief that we can address our environmental concerns and energy needs with no significant changes to our behavior. Making more energy-efficient cars or buildings may be difficult, but changing ingrained societal patterns of behavior is even more difficult. Part of the appeal of technical solutions to energy consumption is that they 79

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avoid painful political battles and difficult moral judgments – which is not to say that moral arguments would be particularly effective. The low-density desert sprawl of Phoenix, Arizona is widely known to be an environmental catastrophe, yet between 2000 and 2009 almost half a million new residents moved there.4 There are real reasons why people choose to live and work in low-density, lowrise environments. There are strong incentives for someone to prefer suburban over urban living. Some of these are due to physical realities for which there are no easy technical or political solutions. Building many houses at once on huge swaths of clear-cut level land is more cost effective than building one-off residences on isolated sites in cities. Construction costs per square foot are substantially lower in places like suburban Houston than in metropolitan New York.5 Buildings in northeastern and midwestern cities subject to harsh winters with multiple freeze–thaw cycles, as well as to hot, humid summers, require more sophisticated heating and cooling equipment, vapor barriers, windows, and insulation – all of which drive up their cost in comparison to residential construction in the Sunbelt. But even within the same metropolitan region, the attractions of suburban living lure middle-class residents out of the center. Ready access to outdoor space allows suburban homeowners to plant gardens, build tree houses, host large outdoor parties. People like having control over a piece of property. “Deck chefs” want to barbeque on a patio, gardeners want to display their talents for their neighbors, parents want backyards with swing sets and swimming pools for their children, dogs need room to run, and nature lovers enjoy seeing deer and hummingbirds outside their windows. Tinkerers desire garages in which to restore old cars, polish boats, fix their kids’ bikes, or invent things. In addition, suburban neighborhoods usually have extensive social and physical infrastructure for childfocused activities: spacious public swimming pools, free tennis courts, soccer leagues, swim teams, and Little League baseball. People also love the freedom they believe their cars grant to them. Substantial portions of our national and global economies are fueled by automobile-induced sprawl. Lowes and Home Depot stores exist to serve a market that is almost entirely dependent on the dominance of owner-occupied suburban housing. Unfortunately, many pro-sprawl/anti-urban incentives in the US are the unintended consequences of federal and state government policies, such as income tax regulations that include generous home mortgage interest deductions.6 At the local level, zoning ordinances, because they attempt to segregate buildings by how they are used, may promote sprawl as a side effect. Preservation policies that severely constrain new construction may inflate urban property costs beyond the means of middle-class residents. For political reasons, our governments have chosen to keep the costs of automobile travel artificially low, taxing gasoline and other auto-related purchases below the level needed to maintain our infrastructure of roads and bridges. We also direct a disproportional amount of the funding we do allocate for infrastructure to rural areas. According to the economist Ed Glaeser, Over the last twenty years, transportation funding for the ten most densely populated states has been half as much, on a per capita basis, as funding for 80

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the ten least dense states. In the [2009 federal government] stimulus package . . . the ratio is the same. We’re using our infrastructure money more to make rural America accessible than to speed the flows of people within dense urban areas.7 Many of these policies stem from an American anti-urban philosophy that can be traced back at least as far as Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, believing that cities were “pestilential to the morals, health and the liberties of man” designed and built his 5,000-acre rural estate, Monticello, outside of Charlottesville, Virginia.8 The “disappear into the woods” ethos shared by survivalists, militia members, and Ted Kozinski (the Unabomber), found early expression in Henry David Thoreau’s writings, which extolled the virtues of the isolated cabin in the woods. Our most famous American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, was no fan of urban density. Wright’s prairie houses symbolize the desire to extend horizontally across the flat plain, the antithesis of the vertical striving demonstrated by the visionary urban ziggurats in Hugh Ferriss’ The Metropolis of Tomorrow. 9 Wright’s residential masterpiece, Fallingwater, was designed to provide Edgar Kaufmann with a wooded retreat where he and his guests could be “one with nature,” far from his urban home and bustling department store. Wright expressed his own preference for seclusion by creating and occupying two isolated retreats, the first in rural Wisconsin, the second in the desert near Scottsdale, Arizona. Jefferson had a point. Cities have their characteristic maladies: air pollution, noise, crowds, crime, rats, cockroaches, inconsiderate neighbors.10 It is hard to feel that you are the autonomous king of your castle in the sorts of apartments most middle-class renters can afford. The poor quality of many urban public schools also propels middle-class families to suburbia. These problems present real difficulties for architects, urban planners, and other designers or policy makers who might wish to promote, for environmental reasons, urban living and working. Thus, our current image of “green” or “sustainable” architecture is dominated by stand-alone buildings on isolated sites. The LEED certification system emphasizes the energy and resource conservation attributes of buildings that are, for the most part, treated as individual objects. Our national student green design competition, the Solar Decathlon, requires teams of students to design and build small, solar-powered, single-family detached houses. The “Solar D” rules also require that all photovoltaic panels and solar collectors fit within a tight “solar envelope” that surrounds the house.11 Because the Solar Decathlon is a competition, it makes sense that each entry must be evaluated individually. But the emphasis on individual stand-alone object buildings, each with their own separate, buildingintegrated power source, is also emblematic of a cultural “blind spot.” Why would anyone construct a village of small houses and then decide that they must individually generate all their own energy, as opposed to exploring shared energy production? Why constrain energy-producing components by tying them to the size, shape, and orientation of a house? Universities and other enlightened institutions have embraced the idea that their new buildings should be LEED-certified, but relatively few have explored more 81

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radical ideas, such as turning their entire campuses into energy generators, or building affordable faculty/employee apartments within walking distance to discourage driving.12 Ironically, this last idea, of the campus as a pedestrian-based live–work–learn environment, we owe to Jefferson and his plan for the University of Virginia. Jefferson may have disliked cities, but he was aware of the advantages of proximity, and of the need to think of a community as a whole, rather than as a random collection of individual objects.

A self-reinforcing loop Nearly everyone is familiar with the statement, widely attributed to Albert Einstein, that “the problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” Nearly everyone who reads a version of this statement assumes that it does not apply to the kind of thinking they do. I’ve taken the position that the statement does apply to the work of architects, and our failure of thinking with regard to the environmental effects of our craft has been our willingness to conceptualize buildings as isolated objects. Or, as New Yorker writer David Owen puts it, we have exhibited the “willful determination to study small pictures instead of big ones.”13 The quote from Owen comes out of his book, Conundrum, which instantly gives away its central thesis through its ponderous and alarming subtitle: “How scientific innovation, increased efficiency, and good intentions can make our energy and climate problems worse.” Owen is a firm believer in rebound effects, and his book is basically a “rebound” argument that technical solutions to our energy and climate problems won’t work. His interest in these matters began as Owen was writing his 2010 New Yorker article on “Jevons’ Paradox,” named for the British economist William Stanley Jevons.14 In 1865 Jevons published a book entitled The Coal Question, which contained the following statement (with a bit of paraphrasing by me to put it in the terms we use today): “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the [efficient] use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”15 Jevons’ insight was that increases in the efficiency with which we use a fuel reduce the cost of that fuel relative to other goods, and thereby – according to the laws of supply and demand – must increase demand for the fuel. Or, put more elegantly, “any time one reduces the cost of consuming a valued resource, people will respond by consuming more of it.”16 Reduce the cost of keeping your house cool by installing a geothermal heat pump and you will be tempted to turn on your air conditioning much more often than you did previously; reduce your cost of driving by buying a Prius or other fuel-efficient car and suddenly driving everywhere doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Now, the magnitude of environmental rebound effects – whether they totally or only partially offset the benefits of efficiency gains – is a hotly debated topic. Author and environmentalist Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, took issue with Owen’s New Yorker article. Lovins wrote, in rebuttal: Rebound effects are small for three reasons: no matter how efficient your house or washing machine becomes, you won’t heat your house to sauna 82

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temperatures, or rewash clean clothes; you can’t find an efficient appliance’s savings in your un-itemized electric bill; and most devices have modest energy costs, so even big savings look unimportant.17 The Owen–Lovins dispute, like much that is debated about energy policies, comes down to accounting: what you choose to count and where you decide to stop counting. The proponents of Jevons and rebound effects are prone to “count” more broadly than Lovins. For example, Lovins’ response names the temperature of one’s house and the number of times one washes clothes as self-limiting forms of consumption. In this, they resemble Adam Smith’s observation that a rich man’s stomach holds no more food than a poor man’s. Smith wrote that a rich man may dine on higher-quality fare, but he cannot increase the quantity he eats to match his proportionately greater wealth. Yet this is not the end of things. While a wealthy person may be bound “by the narrow capacity of the human stomach,” his or her “desire for the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage and household furniture seems to have no limit or certain boundary.”18 In other words, wealth that is accrued from any source, including savings from increased energy efficiency, need not be used only to buy more of what the efficiency gain was intended to reduce, but can be used to increase consumption generally. You can take what your geothermal heat pump saves on your electricity bill, itemized or not, and use it to pay for a European vacation. Lovins’ rebuttal to Owen speaks to specific direct rebound effects, but Owen and Smith also believe there are indirect or economy-wide rebound effects. The more things you buy, the more energy you consume, even if indirectly. So it seems safe to say that gains in energy efficiency for houses and buildings are likely to result in both direct and indirect rebound effects that will at least partially offset the efficiency gains. What is the likely rebound associated with “green” buildings? To date there have been numerous studies of the rebound effects for efficiency improvements in automobiles and appliances, but very few studies of buildings. The few that exist almost all evaluate the heating of single-family houses. Steve Sorrell, a Senior Fellow at the Sussex Energy Group, reviewed a number of these home-heating studies and, controlling for the different methodologies and definitions used, concluded that “the econometric evidence broadly supports the conclusions of the quasi-experimental studies, suggesting a mean value for the direct rebound effect for household heating of around 30 percent.”19 Sorrell also notes that a study of the direct rebound effects for more efficient washing machines found that the demand for clean clothes rose by 5.6 percent, which lends credence to Lovins’ mention of clothes washing as an activity for which rebound effects “are small.”20 A 30 percent increase for household heating, however, does not fit my definition of small. What of economy-wide, indirect rebound effects associated with energy efficiency gains generally? The book The Myth of Resource Efficiency (another title that immediately reveals its authors’ beliefs) contains this passage: The policy situation is remarkable. The likelihood that theoretical and real input savings [of energy] are identical is zero; some rebound is uncontested, 83

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and the lowest macroeconomic [system-wide] total-rebound estimates lie in the range of 25–40 per cent. It is therefore astonishing that, with a handful of exceptions, government agencies and policy assessment companies do not correct for it, but rather in a purely “engineering” approach set real savings equal to technologically possible savings. However, a rebound coefficient of 0.5, which is at the present state of knowledge justifiable, would significantly alter estimates of both efficiency’s effectiveness and its cost-effectiveness.21 If these authors’ estimate is correct, a true “net-zero” building would have to produce 150 percent of its total energy needs, not the 100 percent that is commonly assumed. Furthermore, to represent a “true” society-wide saving of energy, the surplus 50 percent would need to be repurposed or reinvested in a manner that would alleviate, rather than promote, additional economy-wide consumption. This makes the prospect of a “net-zero society” a much dicier proposition, because the increased consumption that results from efficiency gains of any sort is not some inconvenient byproduct, but instead is one of the principal driving forces behind the growth of our economy.22 Our societal problem is not that we consume too much energy, it is that we consume too much. Jevons’ Paradox and other rebound theories do not address carbon emissions and their impact on climate change. (Nor do they address the impact of the declining availability of cheap fuels after passing the point of “peak oil,” which should drive the cost of fuels up, thereby reducing consumption.) One could still argue, out of concern for greenhouse gas emissions, that designing new and retrofitting old buildings so that they utilize renewable sources of energy is a worthy goal. The lesson for architects to draw from the existence of rebound effects is not that we should abandon our attempts to design more energy- and resource-efficient buildings, or to switch from non-renewable sources of energy to renewables. What rebound tells us is that we need to complement our search for technical solutions with parallel strategies for social, cultural, and – of course – economic solutions to our energy needs; that we need to think in terms of multi-dimensional “big pictures” instead of single-dimension small ones. In short, we need to pay greater attention to the “connectedness” of things. Owen’s concern with rebound is simply a recent recognition of the complexity of living in an industrialized technological society.23 Rebound is “but one instance of mankind in the grip of its pernicious techniques.”24 This phrase comes from Ivan Illich’s 1976 classic exposé, The Medical Nemesis, a book describing the ways industrialized medicine endangers our health. Illich proposed the phrase “cultural iatrogenesis” (borrowing and extending the medical term for an adverse effect caused by the treatment itself) to describe the unavoidable and irreversible “by-products of diagnostic and therapeutic progress.”25 I think cultural iatrogenesis can also be applied to our current attempts to engineer our way out of our environmental predicament. Illich, in fact, predicted as much, referring to an article (written in 1971!) by James B. Quinn, which declared: “environmental improvement is becoming a dynamic and profitable series of markets for industry that pay for themselves and in the end will represent an important addition to income and GNP.”26 84

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At first this doesn’t sound so bad. After all, the growth of green industries leading to more green jobs is often cited as one of the positive byproducts of innovations in energy production or conservation. As John Thackara observed in an early version of Chapter 4, however, “it takes a lot of energy and money to harness energy.”27 The growth of new industries, even green ones, means increased energy consumption, leading to a one-step-forward, two-steps-back result. Furthermore, Illich, in his book Energy and Equity, makes a persuasive case that our addiction to ever-increasing amounts of energy erodes individual freedom and promotes social inequality. He writes that “beyond a certain point [that the US has long since passed] more energy means less equity.”28 We have been using instrumental reason to address the iatrogenic effects of instrumental reason – so we are caught within a “self-reinforcing iatrogenic loop” for which there is no easy way out.29 “The technical approach creates technical solutions. But these solutions in turn create even more problems which in turn demand ever more technical solutions.”30 The degree to which the technological system – the self-reinforcing loop – in which we live is autonomous and out of our control is, certainly, a matter of debate. Illich hoped that we would eventually make informed political decisions to consume less. (His preferred solution was a global speed limit for all forms of transportation of around 15 miles per hour.) 31 From the perspective of the present, I find myself persuaded by more pessimistic voices, such as that of philosopher of technology Langdon Winner: In summary . . . members of the technological society actually know less and less about the fundamental structures and processes sustaining them. The gap between the realities of the world and the pictures individuals have of that world grows ever greater. For this reason, the possibility of directing technological systems toward clearly perceived, consciously chosen, widely shared aims becomes an increasingly dubious matter.32 If we are unable to choose to consume less, is it possible that fortuitous circumstances may at times make the right choices for us? This is the position David Owen takes in both Conundrum and his preceding book, Green Metropolis. His thesis is simple, and not unprecedented: People who live and work in dense urban environments such as New York or Hong Kong occupy less space, seldom drive cars, acquire fewer possessions, and therefore both directly and indirectly use far less energy than most of the rest of us.33 The reason is not that residents of these cities are intellectually or morally superior, but that through accidents of history and geography New York and Hong Kong became extremely dense in terms of both buildings and population. Whether Owen is right that Manhattan is the ideal – or if others who champion mid-rise buildings and “the familiar compact town” are correct – is, I think, a secondary concern.34 What is important is that in some environments, characterized by people living in close proximity to one another, unintended and relatively uncontroversial limits are placed on consumption. Because the physical characteristics of these dense environments matter a great deal – there are a multitude of design issues to be addressed, from mitigating urban 85

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heat island effects, to granting access to views and sunlight, to sanitation, noise, and privacy concerns – improving the quality of cities and towns should be a major preoccupation for environmentally conscious architects.

Why do cities work and what should architects do about it? It is possible to see cities themselves as a particular kind of rebound effect. As tribal gathering spots grew into villages, and villages coalesced into towns, it must have been obvious to our ancestors that there were practical advantages to what we now call urban living. Cities are concentrations of capital and other kinds of power, and cities could not exist without the surplus production made possible by some degree of specialization in labor. In cities that were geographically confined, like Manhattan and Hong Kong, the excess capacity could not “escape” laterally, as sprawl, but had to be spent inwardly and upwardly, on cultural production, luxuries, and – most relevant to a discussion of architectural style – tall buildings. We generally think of economies of scale in association with production, but in this characterization the scale of urban living creates efficiencies of consumption. Except that the word “efficiencies” in that last sentence does not tell the full story. Having many people in close proximity facilitates relatively unimpeded and therefore efficient economic exchanges, so one would think that if cities are the engines of progress Edward Glaeser claims in his recent Triumph of the City, then David Owen’s Green Metropolis argument that dense urban environments reduce overall consumption cannot possibly be right. Owen, however, references a number of convincing per capita measures to support his belief.35 If Owen is correct, what is it about dense urban environments that limit our desires for “the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage and household furniture” that otherwise “have no limit or certain boundary?” The two most obvious answers are: lack of space and gravity. Limited space makes it more difficult for urban residents to continually acquire goods, and gravity imposes financial penalties for redirecting growth upward. Thus, it is a combination of efficiencies and limits that allows constrained urban environments to both generate growth and absorb its indirect rebound effects. My proposal, speculative though it remains, is that dense urban areas evolve into self-regulating systems for “the pursuit of happiness” that are more effective (as opposed to efficient) and more benign than other forms of human settlement.36 Limited space and gravity mixed with lots of people set off a chain of developments Peter Calthorpe calls urbanism’s “fortuitous web of co-benefits”: Urbanism’s compact forms lead to less land consumed and more farmland, parks, habitat, and open space preserved. . . . Urbanism leads to fewer miles driven, which then leads to less gas consumed and less dependence on foreign oil supplies, less air pollution, less carbon emissions. Fewer miles also leads to less congestion, lower emissions, lower road construction and maintenance costs and fewer auto accidents. This leads to lower health costs because of fewer accidents and cleaner air, which is reinforced by more walking, bicycling, and exercising, which in turn contributes to lower obesity rates. And 86

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more walking means more people on the streets, safer neighborhoods, and perhaps stronger communities.37 Calthorpe refers to these interconnected benefits as a series of “feedback loops.” The loops he describes spiral in the opposite direction from Illich’s iatrogenic ones. Our most sustainable cities create material and cultural obstacles to the unchecked instrumentalist thinking (money, as Simmel wrote, being the most perfect instrument of all) which Illich believed to lie at the root of cultural iatrogenesis.38 None of which is to suggest that cities are an ideal environment. Owen notes that one of the many downsides of urban density is that it also allows diseases to spread efficiently. Glaeser makes a persuasive case that even successful cities must tolerate a certain amount of poverty: “Cities aren’t full of poor people because cities make people poor, but because cities attract poor people with the prospect of improving their lot in life.” 39 To claim that cities are our most effective form of settlement does not imply that they are, or ever can be, perfect. Cities may be our best response to our energy and climate “problems,” but they are not a solution. The word “solution” implies a final answer, but cities are a constantly evolving form of settlement for which we must continually seek improvement. Architects, planners, and other designers need to better understand the fragile “fortuitous web” of urban liabilities and benefits so that we can contribute to this necessary, never-ending refinement. Architects are trained to think broadly and to design while keeping many levels of concern in mind at once. These skills can seem outdated in our current professional environment, with its demand for narrowly focused quantifiable measures of “performance.” Germane to the topic of this book, architects should remind our technically focused colleagues (and themselves) that “performance” always has two aspects: one based on action, the other on acting. The first is concerned with execution, with what is physically real and measurable; the other is concerned with representation, with the symbolic “role” buildings play in larger cultural systems. Style is not unrelated to performance, and it should not be its opposite. In welldesigned works of architecture, style and performance form a mutually reinforcing symbiotic relationship. Keeping this principle in mind, architects should be more critical of so-called “high-performance buildings.” The measures of “performance” used to justify the adjective “high” are usually too narrow. Society-wide effects such as indirect rebound and negative cultural impacts are generally ignored. The actual long-term effects of these buildings, or any buildings, on the environment are poorly understood and nearly impossible to model. As industrial ecologist James J. Kay states, “we really do not have a good understanding of how ecological systems work.”40 Architect-theorist Jeremy Till mentions Cedric Price’s “direct and devastating” observation “that the best solution to an architectural problem is not necessarily a building.” 41 Yet how often is a building’s performance measured against the alternative of no building at all? Architects should also resist the use of the word “optimization.” As Anna Dyson, architectural educator and researcher at Renselear Polytechnic’s CASE lab, has 87

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stated, “building design decisions cannot be optimized, because these decisions are always based on trade-offs.”42 Buildings are fully embedded in a cultural and social environment that is always changing; they are big and complex containers of lots of people whose behavior isn’t entirely predictable. Even on the most basic physical level the situation of a building is hard to describe accurately. Dyson points out that for some buildings every façade may engage a different microclimate. Optimization is a precise, intentionally “small-picture” approach to design that works for well-defined purely technical problems, but is ill-suited for the design of buildings or even the typical systems within buildings. The “wicked problems” of buildings lack the rigorously defined “problem space” necessary for optimization. The factors that will determine how a building “performs” are nearly unlimited in number, often contradictory if not controversial, subject to politics and fashion, only partially quantifiable, and therefore cannot lead to a verifiable “optimum” solution. “There is growing comprehension that sustainability issues cannot be discussed in isolation. They must always be examined within their broader context. Every system is a component of another system and is, itself, made up of systems.”43 A well-designed work of architecture ends up being a workable compromise between all the various desires, constituencies, opportunities, and constraints that are unique to that particular work at that place and time. The three examples with which I began this chapter fit these criteria. They are all big, public projects with somewhat “fuzzy” boundaries that make it difficult to conceptualize them as objects. They are physically, economically, and politically embedded in their contexts. They are not new, “blank slate” constructions. They reuse and build upon what already exists. They all contribute to making urban living more attractive and enjoyable. They also challenge the overly building-centric approach to environmental issues that has characterized the prevailing attitude of the architecture profession to date. They do not, however – because of the diversity of their purposes and contexts – have characteristics that would allow one to definitively classify them by their appearance. They do not constitute what we usually think of as a “style,” although they share an attribute that is partly evident in how they look. I call this attribute their “embedded-ness.” They are of the city, of the landscape, of the culture in which they sit. Field Operations, the apt name of the landscape architecture firm that designed the High Line, is also an appropriate description of all three exemplary projects. These projects conserve energy, even though there is little about them specifically designed to do so. Borrowing another term from Peter Calthorpe, they are components of “passive urbanism.”44 By making living in their cities more interesting, more enjoyable, and more exciting, they help to attract and retain urban residents, who in turn consume less than their suburban peers. Because they influence society and culture, they are less subject to iatrogenic effects than our usual green buildings, though buildings can also have some of these same qualities. The “appearance of connectedness” or “passive urbanity” I am trying to describe has a great deal in common with Vivian Loftness’ characterization of buildings that “surf” in their environments.45 The only difference between her 88

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examples and mine is that, instead of riding the wave of natural forces, the projects I have described “ride” on societal forces, surfing our natural inclination toward sociability, conviviality, and playfulness. If architects decide to take up the challenge of making urban living more attractive, we have much work to do. Certainly, I acknowledge, we must devote some of our attention to buildings. The generic mid-rise apartment building, in dire need of an infusion of imaginative design thinking, would be an excellent place to start. The sense of connectedness I am advocating is particularly difficult to obtain in buildings like these which completely separate inside from outside. To improve our urban apartments we will have to take seriously the psychic need described by Bachelard in his phenomenology of the house. Without “cellars and garrets” how do we design apartments to satisfy the first necessity of dwelling – to shelter our dreams?46 Fortunately, healthy urban environments assist us here, too. A vibrant city is an idea as much as it is a place.47 There is less need for one’s dream house in the city, because the city itself exists to fulfill the hopes and desires of its residents. The most attractive cities all have style. This is yet another way that cities, and urban architecture, perform.

Notes 1 D. Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability, New York: Riverhead Books, 2009, p. 40. 2 Friends of the High Line, Field Operations, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street, New York: Friends of the High Line, 2008. 3 These arguments have been made previously, most notably by Peter Calthorpe, Douglas Kelbaugh, and Sim Van der Ryn. See, for example, Kelbaugh’s edited volume, The Pedestrian Pocket Book, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989; and Peter Calthorpe and Sim Van der Ryn, Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs and Towns, San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club, 1986. 4 E. Klein, “Cities are engines of growth . . . the problem is that many of them are too expensive to live in,” Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, May 6, 2012. 5 For example, in 2012 a 4–7-story apartment building in New York would cost $232/sq.ft., but in Houston the cost would be $151/sq.ft. Source: R. S. Means construction cost data: http://www. reedconstructiondata.com/construction-forecast/news/2012/06/rsmeans-dollar-per-square-footconstruction-costs-for-four-types-of-accommo (accessed August 2012). 6 E. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, New York: Penguin Press, 2011, pp. 264–265. 7 Glaeser, Triumph of the City, p. 266. 8 Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803. Cited by D. Owen, Green Metropolis, p. 19. 9 H. Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1986; original publication 1929. 10 These urban dysfunctions relate directly to urban populations, and track very closely to what we consider some of the advantages of urban living: higher incomes and greater innovation. See: L. Bettencourt and G. West, “A unified theory of urban living,” Nature, 467, 2010. 11 http://www.solardecathlon.gov/pdfs/2011_rules.pdf 12 Exceptions include universities that are part of the “Ivy Plus Sustainability Working Group” or the “International Sustainable Campus Network.” 13 D. Owen, Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse, New York: Riverhead Books, 2011, p. 30. 14 D. Owen, “The efficiency dilemma,” New Yorker, December 20 and 27, pp. 78–85. 15 W. S. Jevons, The Coal Question, 2nd edn., London: Macmillan, 1865.

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16 J. M. Polimeni, K. Mayumi, M. Giampietro, and B. Alcott, eds., The Myth of Resource Efficiency: The Jevons Paradox, London: Earthscan, 2009, p. xi. 17 Owen, Conundrum, 115; Amory Lovins, letter to the New Yorker, published in “The Mail,” the New Yorker magazine, January 27, 2011, p. 3. Relative to indirect rebound effects, Lovins writes that “Respending a saved energy dollar does indirectly use energy, but, from 1986 to 2007, only six to nine cents’ worth on average.” 18 A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 11, “Of the Rent of Land” Part 2, paragraph 58, 1776: http://geolib.com/smith.adam/won1-11.html. This section from Smith is cited in Polimeni et al., The Myth of Resource Efficiency, p. 64. 19 S. Sorrell, “The evidence for direct rebound effects,” in H. Herring and S. Sorrell, eds., Energy Efficiency and Sustainable Consumption: The Rebound Effect, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 36. 20 Sorrell, Energy Efficiency, p. 37. 21 Polimeni et al., The Myth of Resource Efficiency, pp. 63–64. 22 Another prominent driving force toward the expansion of economic activity is population growth. Neither it nor increased consumption through indirect rebound effects are easily reconciled with an agenda to save energy through reduced consumption. 23 While it is tempting to identify capitalism as a major culprit in this “self-reinforcing loop,” in Energy and Equity Illich argues that it is the commitment to economic and technological expansion that is at fault. In regard to energy specifically, ‘[f]urther energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.” The control ends up in the hands of the elite within the society, regardless of the economic system. See Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, New York: Harper & Row, 1974, p. 8. 24 I. Illich, The Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, New York: Pantheon Books, 1976 (Bantam Books edition, 1976, p. 24). 25 Illich, Nemesis, p. 25. 26 Illich, Nemesis, p. 25, note 72. 27 J. Thackara, earlier draft of “Design in the light of dark energy” in this volume. 28 Illich, Energy and Equity, p. 6. 29 Illich, Nemesis, p. 25. 30 C. George Benello, “Technology and power: technique as a mode of understanding modernity,” in Clifford G. Christians and Jay M. Van Hook, eds., Jacques Ellul: Interpretive Essays, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981, pp. 91–92. 31 Illich, Energy and Equity, p. 6. 32 L. Winner, Autonomous Technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977, pp. 295–296. 33 New York City residents also have smaller families when compared to some of our least densely populated states. In 2008, the fertility rate for New York was 67.3 (http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/ downloads/pdf/vs/vs-population-and-mortality-report.pdf – accessed August 2012), while the fertility rate for the states of Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, and Utah were, respectively, 81.1, 79.1, 78.4, and 93.1 (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763849.html – accessed August 2012). 34 Owen’s other model is the residential university campus. The “compact town” phrase comes from Luis Fernández-Galiano’s chapter, “Architecture and Life” in this volume. 35 Owen, Green Metropolis, notes to chapter 1, especially notes 14 and 19. 36 Thanks to my co-editor Bill Braham for suggesting this phrasing and the connection to the pursuit of happiness. 37 P. Calthorpe, Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011, p. 10. 38 G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 3rd edn., London and New York: Routledge, 1978; see also R. Sennett, The Uses of Disorder, New York: W.W. Norton, 1970. 39 Glaeser, Triumph, p. 70. 40 J. J. Kay, “On complexity theory, exergy, and industrial ecology: some implications for construction ecology,” in C. J. Kilbert, J. Sendzimir, and G. Bradley Guy, eds., Construction Ecology: Nature as the Basis of Green Buildings, London: Spon Press, 2002, p. 74. 41 J. Till, Architecture Depends, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p. 167. 42 A. Dyson, director of the Center of Architecture, Science and Ecology (CASE), “Disciplines adrift: thoughts on contemporary research cultures,” public lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, November 4, 2010.

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Kay, “On complexity,” p. 79. Calthorpe, Urbanism, p. 18. V. Loftness, “Environmental surfing,” in this volume. G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston, MA: Beacon Paperback, 1969, particularly chapter 1. D. Willis, “The emerald city: a study of substance and place,” in The Emerald City and Other Essays on the Architectural Imagination, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, pp. 89–98.

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Chapter 6

Environmental surfing Delight and nature’s renewable energies Vivian Loftness

Environmental surfing Energy and environmental effectiveness does not demand a stylistic response in architecture, but a more fundamental change in design approach: to celebrate the dynamics of climate and place by choosing sailing over motor yachting, surfing over jet skiing. Just as sailing and surfing embrace the natural flows of sun, wind, and tide, as well as the engaged participation of the athlete, environmental architecture embraces the dynamics of sun, wind, light, and temperature, and the engaged participation of the occupant, to bring comfort and delight without dependency on non-renewable energy. The thrill of responding to the nuances of nature is unparalleled, emerging from the collaborative skills of architects, engineers, landscape architects, building occupants, and even the building industry. Environmental surfing merges built and natural landscapes uniquely for each climate and culture. By creating views, managing temperature changes, wind, sun, and shade, and regenerating water resources in geographically specific ways, environmental surfing ensures diversity of place. The term is deliberate and replaces earlier articles on “free rolling” buildings and “environmental coasting,” both introduced to imply ease and enjoyment.1 Surfing, as opposed to coasting, reflects the thrill of working with nature as it changes, embracing the variations of time and place. Environmental surfing captures both the skill and the excitement of designing and operating our buildings and communities with the full complement of nature’s resources: abundant, renewable, and varying with the time of day and season. As the following sections illustrate, environmental surfing engages design creativity toward a shared quality of life with sustainable access to affordable energy, healthy air, clean water, material resources, mobility, community, and the regenerative powers of nature itself.

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A short treatise on architectural style and energy The question of whether design for energy efficiency begets an architectural style is somewhat gratuitous. We are awash in architectural styles at the moment, often introduced with the phrase “you have never seen a building like this before . . .” – a true sign of indulgence at the expense of the environment. One only has to scan the covers of magazines to identify the hot styles in architecture, many of which are expensive and indifferent to energy or indoor environmental quality. Thanks to the media and our insatiable appetite for recognizable brands, a majority of these styles are transported around the globe irrespective of the climate and culture in which they land. A short description of several of these hot styles might clarify the argument. Let’s begin with the poured-glass façade, sealed and static, despite revitalizing environmental changes over time and seasons. In a hot climate, this building is solar baked and energy intensive. In the desert, this building has eliminated the benefits of thermal mass and its ability to shift cool nighttime temperatures into the following day. In mild and cool climates, this building has eliminated natural ventilation and the delight of connecting to the outdoors on perfect days. The static and predictable quality of these buildings is beginning to be boring, so architects are exploring stylistic variations – the disposition of mirrored, colored, and clear glass – variations rarely driven by the indoor environmental quality they engender. The instability of the electric grid, and the increasing duration of power outages,2 should reopen the question of whether sealed, all-glass buildings are sustainable in every climate. Then there are the huge cantilevers. These building forms play with structure to project floors or even stacks of floors out over thin air. The more dramatic the cantilever, the more outrageous the load, the more media coverage it is given. These building forms require costly investments in structure and material. They expose spaces to unnecessary heat loss and heat gain. They create deeply shaded floors, with windows that have a view dominated by the concrete undersides of the floor above. The structural gymnastics are at times cost prohibitive and have resulted in “outboard” columns and stilts that create thermal bridges in harsh climates. The structural and environmental challenges are even greater if the building form shifts from orthogonal to torqued blobs on stilts. All of these environmental challenges and costs are compounded by the loss of community fabric and pedestrian interest at the street level. Let’s not forget the newest attempts to make our static façades more dynamic through the introduction of hopscotch windows and randomized fins and overhangs. A building with erratic windows or small, punched openings placed irrespective of internal function has dismissed the importance of view, daylighting, or natural ventilation. Undulating overhangs are often cantilevered floor slabs creating thermal bridges with measurable heat loss and long-term degradation. Randomized fins that ignore the true dynamics of sun, daylight, and wind undermine the possibility of natural conditioning. These attempts to make static façades dynamic entirely miss the opportunity to make the façades actually dynamic in response to climate. 93

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Finally there are the scrims, a stylistic gesture that is dominating both practice and the university studios. These permanent veils destroy views and daylight on behalf of a stylistic gesture. There are very few climates in which the pervasive need for shade would merit this design solution, except as a playful cladding for urban parking garages.

Environmental surfing is key to carbon-neutral and net-zero The Architecture 2030 Challenge argues that our very survival depends on the creation of carbon-neutral or net-zero buildings.3 To meet these goals, the next generation of buildings must be designed to use so little energy that on-site renewables can fully meet the heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, and plug loads. These loads collectively represent over 40 percent of all US energy use.4 For the first generation of projects currently being built, these challenges are met with airtight buildings and superefficient equipment, fed modestly by solar electric installations. While this strategy helps to achieve a 30 percent reduction in energy use, it will never reach carbon neutrality.5 In order to be totally carbon neutral, we need nature’s renewables: daylight, natural ventilation, natural cooling, and passive solar heating. We need active systems that are idle for as long as possible – buildings that “surf” through hours, days, months, and seasons. The beauty of buildings that environmentally surf goes beyond the conservation of energy and water, or the reduction of carbon. These buildings support health, productivity, and a higher quality of life. Over 80 percent of the energy use in buildings is for heating, lighting, cooling, and ventilation.6 In contrast, sustainable buildings run for as many hours, days, and months as possible on natural conditioning: daylighting, natural ventilation, time lag cooling, and passive solar heating. Embracing nature region by region, these buildings sustain limited local resources by preserving, then surfing, cascading, and regenerating nature’s resources.7

Surfing sunlight for heat Heating is the largest energy load in US buildings.8 Highly insulated building enclosures, high-efficiency mechanical systems, and heat-recovery strategies yield significant benefits for buildings today, reducing heating loads by 30–50 percent (see Figure 6.1). 9 The giant leap in energy savings, however, is achieved by buildings designed with passive solar heating as the dominant heat source – surfing for 60–90 percent of the time without mechanical intervention. Passive solar heating design is an opportunity for developing the integration of collection, absorption, storage, distribution, and controls, with equally rich opportunities for industrial innovation (see Figure 6.2). In addition, passive solar heating can provide toasty winter spaces without an energy penalty, as well as full-spectrum light which supports health, eliminates pathogens, and reduces the risk of mold. Early-morning sunlight is critical to our sleep cycles and to healthier, more attentive students,10 and sunnier hospital rooms have been linked to faster recovery rates and reduced levels of medication – research that reinforces the importance of sunshine to our health and productivity. 11 94

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6.1 (a) The Fraunhofer Institute uses passive solar heating and dynamic shading for year round comfort. (b) While conservation can shave 30–40 percent off the heating load, passive solar takes us to the level where renewables can match the demand.

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Even though heating is the largest energy demand in US buildings, we block sunlight through poor orientation, low-transmission glass, and closed blinds. A building dynamically designed to capture solar heat exactly during the hours and seasons when heating is needed, while blocking solar heat when not needed, brings innovation together with comfort and delight. The outdoor temperature at which heat is needed can be shifted from 65°F (the typical degree day base) to a new balance point temperature as low as 45°F before any heat is needed.12 This is solar surfing at its best. 95

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Surfing for free cooling Building insulation, shading, and energy-efficient HVAC systems are obvious first steps for 30 percent energy savings in air conditioning loads. The giant leap, however, is achieved by buildings designed with natural cooling as the dominant cooling source – surfing the natural energies in outdoor air flows and diurnal temperature swings for 90 percent of the time. This leap in energy savings requires rediscovering the techniques of previous generations, including the use of heavy materials and earth shelter to delay the heat of the day until cooler times at night, then to hold the cool of the night to absorb the heat of the next day. These traditional design approaches for cooling with nature – day- and nighttime ventilation, evaporative cooling, time lag construction, and ground source cooling such as earth tubes – can be advanced significantly through twenty-first-century material and assembly innovations (Figures 6.3 and 6.4). Mixed-mode or hybrid conditioning, for example, is the marriage of natural and mechanical cooling and ventilation strategies, representing one of the most cutting-edge areas of development for zero-energy buildings.13

Surfing for fresh air As we seal our buildings more and more, mechanical ventilation becomes mandatory year round, reaching 20 percent of the total load in commercial buildings. Innovations in mechanical systems – occupant-responsive controls, variable-speed fans, task air (conditioned air delivered directly to, and controlled by, the building occupant), desiccant air handlers, and heat recovery – can substantially reduce ventilation energy use. The giant leap, however, can only be achieved when buildings are designed with natural ventilation as the dominant strategy for as many hours, days, and seasons as possible, so that renewable energies can truly meet the remaining mechanical ventilation loads. Human beings have thrived without forced air systems for centuries. Natural ventilation is not only a viable method to deliver outdoor air, in substantially higher quantities than forced air systems, it can also deliver cooling whenever the outdoor temperatures are within or below comfort levels. In fall, winter, and spring, a classroom filled with students can and should be conditioned with “free cooling” through natural ventilation. The challenges for natural ventilation are the basis of design excellence – managing drafts, humidity, noise, pollution – at times created by the very fans, chillers, and cooling towers necessary in sealed buildings. To maximize the use of natural ventilation, building enclosures and mechanical systems must be designed in tandem, seeking innovations unique to each climate and building type (Figures 6.5 and 6.6). We just had the most spectacular March in Pittsburgh (2012), with 75°F days and 55°F nights that only those buildings that environmentally surf could enjoy. All the sealed offices, classrooms, and restaurants in the city had to tolerate the constant drafts and noise from mechanical systems and live without access to the amazing spring weather. The unfortunate occupants of these buildings paid a price in terms of both energy wasted and quality of life. 96

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6.2 (a) Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia uses night ventilation to pre-cool highly articulated thermal mass to eliminate the need for air conditioning. (b) Shading alone can reduce air conditioning loads by 20 percent, and adding passive cooling can keep air conditioning demands to a minimum in most US climates.

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Surfing for light Energy-efficient lamps, ballasts, and fixtures are obvious first steps for 30 percent lighting energy savings, and daylight and occupancy-responsive controls can shave the next 20 percent off lighting energy use.14 The giant leap, however, is achieved by buildings designed with daylighting as the dominant light source – surfing the daylight without any electricity demand for lighting. Daylight as the dominant 97

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6.3 (a) The façade of this South African restaurant opens completely to connect diners with the spectacular views, sounds, and breezes of the coast. (b) In sealed buildings, forced air is necessary year round with energy and air-quality impacts.

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light source requires design excellence and management expertise, integrating space planning with windows and skylights, advanced glazing technologies, light redirection devices and shading layers that enrich and regionalize our architecture. Daylit classrooms, offices, hospitals, gyms, airports, grocery stores, and other spaces also contribute to greater health and performance outcomes. Light levels 98

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in daylit spaces can be higher without energy penalties; full-spectrum light offers rich color rendition and improves three-dimensional perception; and daylight variations throughout the day trigger melatonin production, circadian rhythms, and healthy sleep patterns.15 As an added benefit, views afforded through windows and other transparent surfaces meet fundamental needs for a connection to nature (Figures 6.7 and 6.8).16

6.4 (a) Pelli’s National Airport building is designed for daylighting of the major public space. (b) Improvements in lighting efficiency and controls is key, but design for daylight is the big leap for zero energy.

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Surfing for water The US consumes the most water per capita, without measurable quality of life gain over European countries that consume one-quarter to one-tenth of the quantity of water.17 Without design creativity, we use potable water for everything, and we use it just once. We flood our cities and contaminate our rivers with wastewater. As a result, we are rapidly depleting our abundance of fresh water and contributing to global shortages. To ensure continued access to fresh water, we must lead through design creativity – preserving, cascading, and regenerating our water supplies. Surfing for water can enhance quality of life by ensuring that all water infrastructures will become visual and recreational amenities. Non-porous surfaces could be taxed so that aquifers are regenerated, runoff is eliminated, and site water is captured for use or for living landscapes. Water can be used three times: first for potable needs; then gray water demands; then for black water systems.18 Rain- and stormwater can become an artistic medium and a resource, and roofs can become visual amenities, the fifth façade, producing water, food, or habitat. 19 Environmental surfers celebrate rain, capturing, funneling, tumbling, then storing, filtering and reusing site resources at the point of need. The growing challenges of flooding and the health implications of combined storm–sewer overflows can be resolved by a consortium of designers learning from nature how to capture, store, and cascade water sources to close the fresh water cycle (Figure 6.5).

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6.5 (a) Dockside Green closes the water cycle with spectacular neighborhood amenities (2012). (b) This Dresden installation has such fun with rainwater that tourists hope for a rainy day.

Environmental surfing

Surfing for mobility Even mobility can be surfed, through walkable, whole-life communities filled with a diversity of cultures, ages, professions, and skills. America is in a state of transportation poverty. If you do not own or cannot drive a car – a condition for over 20 percent of the US population who are too young, too old, or too poor – you cannot access many necessities or amenities.20 Other nations, focused on a shared quality of life for all, have designed a “portfolio” of transportation, merging walking and biking and light rail and heavy rail with cars as the basis of community design. Communities that surf will be mixed-use so that a majority of daily and weekly appointments can be reached by walking. They are linked to other communities and shared amenities by bikeways, ferries, light rail, and where needed, by high-speed rail, so you do not have to lose family time and community time in traffic, airports, and hotels. They have so effectively reduced the demands for cars and trucks that the communities are quiet, so we can hear, see, and feel the sensory richness around us. They are designed so we can enjoy active lifestyles, where walking and biking is fun, stairs make music, sports are collaborative, and work–life balance is real (Figure 6.6).

Surfing regional variability and daily dynamics If direct sunshine can displace 30 percent of today’s heating, how could any building in a heating-dominated climate not celebrate southern windows and thermal mass to collect and store free heat? If shade can displace 20–40 percent of today’s cooling, how could any building in a cooling-dominated climate not celebrate advantageous orientation and shading devices? If natural ventilation can displace 80 percent of today’s ventilation demands, especially in mild to cool climates, how could any building in those regions not celebrate multiple operable windows that capture and exhaust air for each room? If daylight can displace 35–75 percent of today’s lighting, how could any building be built too deep or poorly glazed for effective daylighting? Design for environmental surfing maximizes the number of hours, days, months, and seasons, where “passive renewables” – such as daylight, natural ventilation, passive solar heating, and time lag cooling – allow mechanical and electrical systems to be turned off for long periods of time. This is the only way we can achieve the 90 percent reductions in building loads that take full advantage of active renewable sources. Design for environmental surfing, however, challenges architects and engineers to collaborate on regional design solutions, merging traditional and innovative materials and systems to create or re-create buildings that are indigenous to each climate. The joy of summer nights in unsealed, naturally conditioned spaces in the Tucson Inn, the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, the Montauk Mountain House in New York State – each unique to its climate and truly low energy – are irreplaceable experiences. Regionally appropriate designs are critical for zero-energy buildings and for the cultural richness that makes traveling and living a unique celebration of place.

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6.6 The Vauban community in Freiburg is designed for mobility for the young, old, and professionals that have made this the highest biodiversity and concentration of children in any community in Germany.

Surfing the regenerative forces of nature “Biophilia,” a term coined by E. O. Wilson with deep elaboration by Stephen Kellert, is the innate human need for a connection to nature and living systems.21 Design for environmental surfing will ensure that our architecture is filled with “biophilic” richness for health, productivity, and all of the natural energies that offer an abundance of light, heat, air, and cooling. Our communities will also be filled with the biophilic richness of multi-generational activities, layered landscapes for water capture, filtration, storage, and use, and with diverse, recreational forms of mobility. Indeed, biophilic richness builds on “environmental surfing” with 102

6.7 (a) Andreu’s Charles de Gaulle terminal and (b) Rawn’s Cambridge Library provide a cocoon of sunlight and natural materials that makes long hours fly by.

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natural energies to add to the contributions of human energies as critical elements in our innate need for a connection to living systems (Figure 6.7). The architectural masters of environmental surfing will preserve, cascade, and regenerate nature’s abundant resources for sheer delight; create technologies that mimic nature and regenerate without waste; and ensure 100 years of shared access to revitalized natural settings, healthy lifestyles, mobility, community, sustainable energy, water, and material resources. Unlike the architecture that self-consciously strives for a novel, distinctive style, the architecture that environmentally surfs naturally reflects the uniqueness of each climate, culture, and community. Just as a surfer soars with the changing forces of weather and waves, architecture that surfs dynamically responds to the time of day and the seasons, and celebrates nature’s creative energies. Notes 1 V. Loftness, “Free rolling buildings,” GreenSource, November/December, 2008. 2 “India’s power network breaks down: Second blackout this week affects area where 680 million live, embarrassing nation by exposing ramshackle grid,” July 31, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/ article/SB10000872396390444405804577560413178678898.html (accessed November 6, 2012). 3 Architecture 2030, “The 2030 Challenge,” 2011, http://architecture2030.org/2030_challenge/ the_2030_challenge (accessed May, 2012). 4 http://buildingsdatabook.eren.doe.gov/CBECS.aspx (accessed November 6, 2012). All of the baseline energy use data in this chapter is based on the Energy Information Agency’s Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS 2003). The percentages are based on the site energy use of all US office buildings nationwide. Please note the qualifiers: total energy use vs. heating/cooling/lighting/ventilation energy use (a subset of total); total electricity use (excluding fossil fuels typically used for heating and hot water); building electricity use as opposed to total US electricity use. The data for heating without conservation, cooling without conservation, sealed buildings, and lighting with inefficient systems, shown in Figures 6.1b, 6.2b, 6.3b, and 6.4b, respectively, are from the Energy Information Agency’s Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey 1995 and 1999. 5 These percentage reduction calculations, repeated in each section and shown in the figures, are based on the work of Vivian Loftness and Ying Hua in 2007. Beginning with CBECS 2003 average energy load breakdowns for offices, a cross section of field studies enabled the calculation of conservation energy savings and then “best of show” passive conditioning savings. Conservation alone achieved an average of 30 percent savings in each end-use category, while conservation plus natural (passive) conditioning could achieve 70–90 percent energy use reductions, well within the reach of cost-effective on-site renewables. 6 http://buildingsdatabook.eren.doe.gov/CBECS.aspx (accessed November 6, 2012). 7 Four terms have been introduced to add depth to the overall thesis on environmental surfing: preserve is used to summarize the benefits of conservation, using as few resources as needed; surf is used to summarize the benefits of passive conditioning with non-depletable natural resources such as light, sun, wind, diurnal swing; cascade is used to summarize strategies to use depletable natural resources several times by recapturing the waste stream (energy, water, materials) for secondary and then tertiary uses with a goal of zero waste; regenerate is used to summarize the potential of actually increasing a resource such as fresh water through innovative technologies and design solutions. 8 http://buildingsdatabook.eren.doe.gov/CBECS.aspx (accessed November 6, 2012). 9 Figure based on research by Loftness and Hua in 2009. 10 M. G. Figueiro and M. S. Rea, “Lack of short wavelength light during the school day delays dim light melatonin onset (DLMO) in middle school students,” Light Research Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, February, 2010.

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11 J. M. Walch, B. S. Rabin, R. Day, J. Williams, K. Choi, and J. Kang, “The effect of sunlight on postoperative analgesic medication use: a prospective study of patients undergoing spinal surgery,” Psychosomatic Medicine, 67, 2005, pp. 156–163. 12 Balance point temperature is the outdoor condition at which heating will be needed given the quality of the construction. Typically set at 65°F, balance point temperature is the basis of heating degree days. Given internal heat gains from people and equipment, superinsulated buildings can lower the balance point temperature by 5–15°F, and the addition of passive solar can lower it even further, eliminating the need for mechanical heating for most of the winter. For a detailed explanation, see: M. Utzinger and J. Wasley, “Building balance point,” published in Vital Signs Curriculum Materials Project, 1996. 13 Mixed-mode or hybrid conditioning is the merging of mechanical and natural cooling and ventilation through design and engineering collaboration. ASHRAE and the International Energy Agency have established standards for mixed-mode conditioning, described in G. Brager, Mixed-Mode Cooling, ASHRAE Journal, 48, 2006. 14 A. Williams, B. Atkinson, K. Garbesi, F. Rubinstein and E. Page, “A meta-analysis of energy savings from lighting controls in commercial buildings,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Erik Page & Associates, Inc., September, 2011. 15 Figueiro and Rea, “Lack of short wavelength light.” 16 Heschong, Mahone Group Inc., “Windows and offices: a study of office worker performance and the indoor environments,” California Energy Commission Technical Report, 2003. 17 Aquastat United Nations database on world energy consumption by climate, graphed at watercentral.wordpress.com 18 Dockside Green: Neighborhood Amenities, 2012: http://www.docksidegreen.com/Residential/ Amenities.aspx (accessed May, 2012). 19 H. Dreiseitl, Recent Waterscapes: Planning, Building and Designing with Water, Basel: Birkhauser Architecture, 2009. 20 P. Calthorpe, Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010. 21 E. O. Wilson, Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species, 3rd edn., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. S. Kellert, Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2008.

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Chapter 7

Adaptive architecturing Simos Yannas

Look talk Clearly, few of last century’s residential and commercial buildings that we inhabit in Europe and North America, or the more recent buildings in the large cities of Asia and the Gulf, could have looked as they do without substantial inputs of energy to build and make them habitable. Energy has done more than influence architectural style; it has created style. Can this be turned around so that the way a building looks can tell us how energy efficient it could be? Surely, more energy-efficient buildings ought to look different, especially if designed to respond to site and occupancy. For one, the external skin could differ in response to their particular exposure to sun, wind, or other parameters affecting energy demand (Figure 7.1). On urban sites, adjacent structures which obstruct daylight and solar access may prompt further differentiation, this time along the lengths as well as heights of building elevations, resulting in strongly asymmetrical patterns of window sizes and placements. Other features associated with passive building design or renewable energy technology may be visible on façades or roofs (Figure 7.2). Among the former, operable or adjustable building elements and components are of particular interest, as they allow a building’s environmental properties to be varied (Figure 7.3). The capability for selective variation of a building’s heat transfer and air exchange rates is a necessary condition for what this chapter calls adaptive architecturing, which means that a building’s occupied spaces may be maintained in comfort without recourse to mechanical systems. Given knowledge of which features to look for and how they vary with climate, urban morphology, building type, and operational conditions, a building’s environmental intentions and potentials could become as readily visible as any of the other visual signs commonly recognized as informing an architectural discourse by designers, critics, historians, teachers, and students of architecture (Figure 7.4). If this became true, it would provide impetus for critical discussion on the relationship between environmental performance and architectural expression, a relationship that is still the least well understood, yet potentially the most promising, area of architectural theory and practice.

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7.1 Performance or style?

7.2 Solar stacks on the southern façade of Building 16 at BRE (Building Research Establishment) outside London, UK (Architect: Feilden Clegg Architects). 107

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7.3 Shutters, blinds, and movable shading devices provide occupants with adaptive opportunities.

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7.4 Architect Enric Ruiz Geli explains the environmental strategies behind the unconventional look of his practice’s recent Media-TIC building in Barcelona, Spain, a headturner of a building completed in 2010 in the city’s 22@ district.

Performance at a glance: how do I know if it is what they say it is? It is not uncommon for an unconventional look to be explained as an expression of a building’s environmental design agenda. It can be equally claimed that good environmental performance need not entail an unconventional look. While the presence of certain visual signs may be read as reflecting an environmental intention, in itself this is not sufficient to suggest a lower energy consumption or improved environmental quality. For example, an asymmetrical disposition of windows that favors a sunnier orientation may lead to a larger admission of passive solar gains, but this is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of a good environmental performance for all climates or building types. The environmental performance of buildings and outdoor spaces should be attested by quantitative data, as well as assessed experientially by the occupants of these spaces. The terms of reference for such evaluations are complex, as are the physical processes and interactions that affect energy consumption and the environmental conditions experienced by occupants. Whether intentionally or not, every element and component of a building has an effect on its environmental performance. Each element interacts with the outdoor climate, which is modified by site conditions, and with indoor conditions, which are influenced by occupant activities and the operation of mechanical equipment. 109

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Given knowledge of local climatic conditions, building use, and the size and orientation of external glazed elements, even a casual look and brief internal visit can reveal a great deal of a building’s likely environmental performance. What kind of performance should we then expect from buildings today and how do we define “good” environmental performance? Thirty years ago in the United Kingdom, a group of modest semi-detached houses (Figure 7.5) were reported as having measured annual space heating energy demand of 5 kWh per square meter heated floor area.1 This made conventional space heating equipment redundant. It was achieved solely by passive means for which the only external visual sign was the small size of the buildings’ windows. Thirty years later it is now widely feasible – as well as socially and environmentally desirable – to replace non-renewable energy sources, and the cumbersome and expensive engineering built around them, with self-sustaining processes that are inherent in the built form, elemental properties, and operational characteristics of buildings. We commonly refer to those processes and our ability to direct them with the term sustainable environmental design – a design approach that makes use of nature’s energy sources and sinks by means of architecture. Combined with electricity generation from renewable energy sources, this approach lays down the foundations for independence from non-renewable energy sources. Independence must start with a critical re-evaluation of environmental design requirements along the lines of the following questions. What conditions are required in a building? Where, when, and for how long are these conditions required? How is each such requirement translated into an energy demand? What forms of energy supply are available to meet the demand? Performance is not a matter that is resolved by zero carbon emissions alone; it starts and ends as an issue of environmental quality that must involve a building’s occupants.

The triangle of knowledge Few architects return to buildings they designed to assess how they work when occupied. With many of the buildings that are lauded as environmentally exemplary during design failing to deliver the predicted energy savings and environmental improvements, how can the continued development and dissemination of sustainable environmental design knowledge be ensured? Are designers’ expectations too high? Have site conditions become more extreme than was assumed at the

7.5 Twelve semi-detached houses of deliberately conventional look at Two Mile Ash, Milton Keynes, UK, completed in 1985 based on a design developed by the University of Westminster and Feilden Clegg Architects. 110

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design stage, perhaps owing to unaccounted microclimatic effects of urban morphology? Are occupants less compliant than modeled for energy predictions? Are the energy-saving strategies applied less effective than expected? The knowledge required to answer such questions comes from three distinct, but complementary, constituents. Theoretical principles derived from science form the foundations of what is commonly known as building science, with applied physics, climatology, and physiology providing the main concepts and mathematical algorithms. Although building science has been taught in schools of architecture for quite some time, the knowledge and understanding it encompasses are still not part of students’ and architects’ cognitive framework and design intuition. Built precedents, traditional as well as contemporary, provide invaluable lessons on how buildings are used on a day-to-day basis and how they may respond to varying internal and external environmental stimuli, thus helping architects understand how to apply the theoretical principles in different contexts. Observations in occupied buildings also pinpoint discrepancies between prediction and reality, thus helping to improve predictive capabilities and design practice. Unfortunately, such studies are neither pursued systematically nor publicized widely. Performance simulations: computational tools have improved dramatically over the last ten years in input–output capabilities and especially in speed. These improvements allow simulations of the thermal, lighting, and airflow processes to be performed interactively during design. However, gaps in the integration of the analytic functions relating to these processes make current software vulnerable to errors in modeling designs, as well as in the interpretation of results, thus demanding a high level of knowledge and experience from users to make meaningful use of these tools. At present, students and practicing architects don’t understand enough of any of these three domains of knowledge to apply them with certainty. At the same time, the gaps we still have in both knowledge and tools are acute in some of the most critical areas. These include uncertainties over the effects of urban morphology and how to account for these on building thermal and lighting loads, or on outdoor thermal and visual comfort. Simplifying assumptions and defaults embedded in the software will often frustrate and confuse users. Given the tendency of architects and students to engage with complexity from an early stage, it is truly disappointing when the computational tools available to them are either unable to handle such complexity, or are themselves too complex to be used interactively during design. Nevertheless, there have been several important attempts to develop design concepts and tools that unified this triangle of knowledge.

A brief history Of the many publications produced over the last 50 years, those by Victor and Aladar Olgyay are among the earliest and possibly the most comprehensive 111

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handbooks for architects and students. Authored by the brothers and published in 1957, the earlier book, Solar Control and Shading Devices, presented an original design method in detail, covering principles, applications, and tools. 2 Published in 1963, Victor Olgyay’s Design with Climate is unsurpassed in its pioneering spirit, ambition, and originality.3 The book’s subtitle, “Bioclimatic approach to architectural regionalism” presaged the global appeal of this research agenda that was subsequently promoted worldwide by the PLEA expert network through its international conferences, held annually since 1981.4 Although for today’s readers the Olgyay books may seem a little daunting and somewhat deterministic, both remain surprisingly current. The bioclimatic chart and the shading masks, which they introduced as graphical tools, continue to be used by students all over the world. Among the publications that followed, Baruch Givoni’s Man, Climate and Architecture, published in 1969, his subsequent Passive and Low Energy Cooling of Buildings, published in 1994, and his Climate Considerations in Building and Urban Design, published in 1998, are classics, especially among students and architects from warm climates.5 Drawing upon longstanding research, Givoni’s experimental data and design guidelines have been endlessly quoted and referenced by students of architecture. Equally practical in scope and guidance, as well as similarly addressed to warm climates, is the Manual of Tropical Housing and Building Part 1 Climatic Design.6 Published in 1974, it was originally drafted by Otto Koenigsberger in the early 1950s for a course on tropical architecture started with Maxwell Fry at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.7 The energy crisis of 1973 provided impetus for solar energy research and building applications that made use of passive solar heating. An earlier application of these principles, on a school building near Wallasey (Figure 7.6) in the north of England, achieved notoriety in the early 1960s and impressed (and possibly, baffled) Banham, succeeding in eliminating a conventional heating system by relying entirely on solar and internal heat gains. 8 It was, however, the US experience of the 1970s that was instrumental in generating wider interest as well as significant results. Published in 1979, Edward Mazria’s The Passive Solar Energy Book provided an attractive as well as practical overview of this experience for architectural students and professionals.9 Building science researchers owe a great deal to J. Douglas Balcomb and his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the pioneering experimental and analytical work they conducted on passive solar heating in the 1970s. Undertaken as part of the US Department of Energy’s program on Solar Applications for Buildings, this culminated in the three volumes of the Passive Solar Design Handbook.10 The knowledge and insights disseminated by these works have contributed greatly to our understanding of the physics as well as the design potential of passive solar processes. In Britain, the solar energy research program – managed by the Energy Technology Support Unit in the 1980s – involved extensive monitoring of many occupied buildings around the country. This was followed by detailed parametric analysis using dynamic thermal simulation as part of performance assessments and 112

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7.6 St. George’s school, Wallasey, UK designed by Emslie Morgan, Borough Architect’s Department in 1961.

advanced design studies. These studies provided some of the built precedents and case studies that were subsequently included in Solar Energy and Housing Design, a two-volume design handbook published in 1994.11 From the early 1980s a great deal of research and dissemination has been taking place as part of programs launched and managed by the European Commission. Of those, the long-awaited European Passive Solar Handbook, published in 1992, was an important output for designers and students.12 While the flow of all technical information continues in an accelerated manner today, little research about building performance of the scope and intensity of that of the late 1970s and 1980s has taken place since. Moreover, little, if any, of the research done then touches on architectural aspects of energy performance and environmental design. It is, then, hardly surprising that energy-efficient design did not permeate practice as fast or as widely as might have been expected. Nor has it yet revealed its creative and innovative potential. In addition, there are common preconceptions and misconceptions, held by architects and students alike, which essentially derive from seeing the environmental agenda as separate from the making of architecture, and thus as additive and potentially disruptive, rather than integral to the process of architectural design. There have been questions about how far good environmental performance (or energy efficiency) can be taken, about the parameters that may promote or inhibit its achievement, and about how much of it can be the product of architectural design. No consensus has emerged regarding how far architectural design can go in reducing energy use and overall carbon emissions, or about what other qualities architecture brings to the environment inside and around buildings and how to highlight them. Finally, there are misconceptions about the true costs of environmentally performative buildings. Do they cost more to build, or may they actually save in capital as well as in running 113

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costs? It is now a good time for these questions, and the misconceptions from which they originate, to be discussed in some detail.

Adaptive architecture: performance with style13 By interfering with preexisting energy flows, buildings alter the energy balance of their surroundings, fostering immediate microclimatic changes as well as impinging on other buildings and pedestrian activities in the vicinity. Equally important is a building’s continuous disposal of waste heat that is released to the urban environment by conduction, air exchange, and the forced action of HVAC equipment. With these exchanges, each building acts like a giant heating system in the city. Whether in free-running mode, or while being mechanically heated, ventilated, or cooled, buildings will relentlessly warm the air around them, inducing complex longer-term effects that fragment the urban environment into a random assemblage of accidental microclimates. These, in turn, subject the surrounding buildings to different environmental conditions than those for which they were originally designed. A symbiotic relationship between buildings and the urban fabric they form and occupy is an essential condition for an ecological urbanism. To achieve this symbiotic relationship we need buildings that can be attuned to the variable biological clocks and activities of occupants inside, and to similarly variable natural rhythms and activities outside. For such attunement, indoor spaces and their constituent elements need to be provided with the capacity to vary their transmission of heat and light, and their rate of air exchange with the outside. Occupancy patterns and the expectations and adaptive behavior of occupants determine the range of environmental conditions and functional requirements that translate into energy demands (for heating, cooling, lighting, appliances) in buildings. Climatic conditions outside a building may lessen or increase the intensity of such demands and may also introduce further design constraints and opportunities. Building form, spatial organization, and the internal and external properties of the building envelope are the means by which architectural design can meet or moderate occupant energy demands. Collectively these represent a vast combinatorial of historical precedents and potential future designs. While some of these variants have been studied empirically and/or analytically, the dynamic aspects of building performance and the resulting interactions between occupants, buildings, and engineering appliances are still poorly understood and largely unexplored architecturally. However, both fieldwork and simulation studies for different building types and climates suggest that harmonizing key design parameters so as to provide adaptive opportunities for occupants will help lower the need for conventional space heating and cooling to insignificant levels, thus drastically reducing the size and running costs of the mechanical plant. There can be no denying that making better architecture involves more and better knowledge of how buildings are used and how they interact with their environment. The environmental agenda of building design must become a central issue of any architectural discourse. It is a heuristic rather than deterministic issue, provided that as architects we are prepared to see architecture as controllably variable and not as a static sculpture. The range of variability and mechanisms of 114

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control are important areas for architectural research and creative development. Zero carbon emission buildings should indeed “look different,” inside and out. Adaptive architecturing should combine performance with style.

Notes 1 P. Ruyssevelt, J. Littler, and P. Clegg, “Experience of a year monitoring four superinsulated houses,” Proceedings of the of UK-ISES Conference, 1987. 2 A. Olgyay and V. Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. 3 V. Olgyay, Design with Climate, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963. 4 PLEA (Passive and Low Energy Architecture) is an international network of experts engaged in a worldwide discourse on sustainable architecture and urban design through annual conferences and related events since its inception in 1981: http://plea-arch.org. 5 B. Givoni, Man, Climate and Architecture, London: Applied Science Publishers Ltd., 1969. B. Givoni, Passive and Low Energy Cooling of Buildings, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994. B. Givoni, Climate Considerations in Building and Urban Design, New York: Wiley & Sons, 1998. 6 O. H. Koenigsberger, T. G. Ingersoll, A. Mayhew, and S. V. Szokolay, Manual of Tropical Housing and Building, Part One: Climatic design, London and New York: Longman, 1974. 7 The Department of Tropical Studies (aka AA Tropical School) ran at the AA School till 1971. In 1974 the AA launched its Environment & Energy Studies which continues uninterrupted, currently offering MSc and MArch courses in Sustainable Environmental Design. 8 R. Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, London: The Architectural Press/Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969. 9 E. Mazria, The Passive Solar Energy Book, Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1979. 10 J. D. Balcomb et al., Passive Solar Design Handbook, Vols. 1–3, Washington, DC: US Department of Energy/American Solar Energy Society, 1980–1983. 11 S. Yannas, Solar Energy and Housing Design, London: Architectural Association Publications, 1994. 12 J. R. Goulding, J. O. Lewis, T. C. Steemers, eds., Energy in Architecture: The European Passive Solar Handbook, London: Batsford, 1992. 13 The text of this section includes material from S. Yannas, “Adaptive strategies for an ecological architecture,” Architectural Design, June 2011, pp. 62–69.

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Chapter 8

Designing for low energy Seeking representations of high-performance homes in post-war America Franca Trubiano

Energy and the single family home Seemingly, nothing is as innocuous as the design of the single family home. Young families throughout North America dream of securing a parcel of land large enough to build their own private oasis wherein children can thrive. This model of home and garden is desired almost universally, transcending socio-economic background, race, and ethnicity. In the years following World War II, an entire market economy predicated on ownership of one’s residence developed to facilitate this dream. Its mechanisms were so effective that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, 40 million new homes were built in North America alone.1 Surely, so universal an aspiration has little cause to be the subject of a fundamental re-examination of its tenets. And yet, this is precisely what this chapter undertakes to accomplish. Whether, for reasons related to its wasteful consumption of energy, its denial of high-performance metrics, or more particularly, its reluctance to engage questions of “representation” and figuration, this chapter posits a rehabilitation of the very concept of “home.” The “idea” of home, effortlessly marketed by realtors and residential developers, and eagerly consumed by homeowners in most of the industrialized world, remains that of the detached single family residence whose genetic code was developed during years of unlimited growth and conspicuous consumption that was the US in the 1950s and 1960s. This model, however, has outlived its appropriateness and effectiveness; a fact widely accepted by planners, urban designers, community leaders, and health advocates. Even the most cursory review of recent 116

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economic history attests unequivocally to its conceptual failure, having played a significant role in the massive financial losses occasioned by the 2008 US mortgage crisis.2 Equally problematic are the costly and wasteful consequences of deploying such a model on the environment and the world’s energy resources. Sobering are the challenges faced by homeowners highly dependent on the consumption of energy to sustain these properties, as well as the lifestyles they engender. An increasingly dysfunctional “representation” of home is marketed in the figure of supersized residences with dimensions far in excess of the living requirements of a typical American family. In developed countries, and most particularly in the US, the size of residences has swelled each decade since the end of World War II. According to the American Census Bureau, in 2009 new homes were 40 percent larger than in 1980, while over the same period the size of the average household decreased by 2 percent.3 No more consumptive a model exists for the depletion of arable land, the wasteful distribution of building services and materials, and the sprawl of vehicular infrastructure. Moreover, the construction and operation of these homes is, substantially, made possible by energy generated from non-renewable resources. By 1997, 73 percent of all homes in the US were detached single-family residences that consumed 130 percent more energy for space heating than multi-family dwellings, 50 percent more electricity for air conditioning, and, on average, 92 percent more total energy than multi-family dwellings.4 The continued promotion of these excessively wasteful material and energy practices is fundamentally unsustainable. Homes represent the smallest square footage of any building type, but cumulatively surpass commercial, industrial, and institutional buildings in total square footage built. As argued in this chapter, and as championed by informed policy makers such as Smart Growth America (SGA), nothing short of a reconceptualization of the very “idea” of home is needed. To this end, a growing number of national, state, and local organizations are committed to the end of suburban sprawl and the promotion of increased access to walkable communities, public transportation, and a greater variety of available housing types. When specifically addressing the future of more sustainable singlefamily homes, two interconnected questions of ethical import are worthy of review. To begin with, can this most pervasive of building types continue to escape the accountability of matter and energy? Or should the design, construction, and operation of single-family homes respond to an agreed to set of minimum performance criteria? In the commercial real-estate market, for example, recognizable benefits accrue when buildings are monitored for their energy consumption and material waste. Motivated by profit, lowering energy use reduces operating costs and offers obvious financial incentives. The same, however, is not the case for the residential building industry, whose developers are rarely burdened by the high operating costs of poorly engineered and/or poorly constructed homes. Resulting from this split incentive, home builders have yet to embrace the full value of sustainable construction, rarely seeking energy certifications granted by expert agencies such as the US Department of Energy’s Energy Star program, the Home 117

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Energy Rating System (HERS) administered by RESNET, or Passive House Certifications managed by institutes in Europe, Great Britain, and the US.5 These and other voluntary organizations have developed rigorous accreditation standards for measuring energy and material consumption. Acknowledging the value of their respective benchmarks is essential for the home-building industry. The second query, and the question of particular interest to this chapter, is whether conceptually reframing the “idea” of home occasions an even greater challenge for its “representation?” Introducing objective benchmarks for reducing resource consumption certainly alters the operational organization of a building and its systems, but does it also alter the aesthetic dimension of its design? Said otherwise, does adherence to energy-saving and energy-producing tenets suggest an alternate framework within which to conceive the appearance of “home”? In the years preceding the US mortgage crisis, the depiction of domesticity and the “figure” of home most typically favored by prospective owners was one aligned with traditional values and historical references. Even when this language was without functional veracity or regional appropriateness, thousands of new homes were built in single-zoned enclaves marketed with names like Desert Willow, Carrick Village, Cottonwood, and Windgate Ranch. Communities so-labeled promise leisure and comfort, abundant nature, and the village-like lifestyle desired by so many but available to so few. Coventry, Capistrano, and Terrazza are plan configurations accommodating as many as seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms and, regardless of site, the Chelsea’s façade is interchangeably The Farmhouse, The Carolina, The Georgian, The Versailles, The Savannah, The New England, or The Williamsburg. 6 Even in the face of personal lives fraught with increasing social and economic tension, these are the depictions of home sought almost exclusively by an ever-shrinking and disenfranchised middle class.7 Thousands of these residences were built in Arizona, New Mexico, Georgia, Nevada, and Florida; thousands stand abandoned by owners victimized by the foreclosure crisis.8 Given, therefore, the nearly ubiquitous disavowal of contemporaneity and regional specificity in the design of single-family homes, can the residential building industry ever become a viable site for the representation of a sustainable form of life that is the embodiment of high performance?

High-performance homes The field of “high performance” does, in fact, provide an alternative framework within which to address the representation of single-family homes. Typically used to describe objects, environments, industrial processes, and even human organizations, in matters architectural, “high performance” is used to qualify material products, building systems, entire buildings, and even construction delivery methods. A high-performance building is one that wisely manages its energy expenditure to reduce its thermal and power demands to near zero, by privileging design and construction strategies that eliminate the need for building systems. The design of a building’s site, orientation, footprint, volume, materials, and sectional profile, as well as its construction details all contribute to this goal. Where architectural strategies are insufficient, various forms of renewable energy, such 118

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as solar thermal, photovoltaic, or wind are introduced to achieve the goal of netzero. For many, however, no more incongruous a phrase exists when describing the home. The hypothesis that living environments are subject to the qualifier of “high performance” is categorically rejected. Surely, reducing the family residence to a series of numerical measures and energy-saving technologies poorly captures the fullness of dwelling. As noted above, the single-family home remains the most reticent of all building types to the “representation” of technology. Rarely are energy-saving devices marketable features, even as they contribute to lower operational and life-cycle costs. While commercial, industrial, and institutional buildings exhibit with pride their solar panels, wind turbines, and energy conservation measures, energy-producing or -reducing technologies are seldom valueadded components requested by prospective homeowners. The language of “high performance” is acceptable for environments wherein we conduct business and save lives, not so for settings in which we raise our families; its tenets remain insufficient for organizing the richness that is the aesthetic dimension of home. A far more nuanced characterization of the phrase is required, therefore, when addressing this most complex of architectural programs. Desired is a definition of “high performance” in which qualitative measures are considered alongside quantitative ones. To this end, an example from the immediate post-war period, in which the reconciliation of these opposites was successfully envisioned, is discussed.

Lessons from post-war America, an integrated science of housing Architects who oversaw the industrialization of vast sectors of the American economy following World War II called for a drastic redefinition of single-family housing and a focused reinvention of its fundamental building technologies. One such architect was C. Theodore Larson (1903–1988) who, as a Harvard graduate, former project planner for the United States Housing Authority, and technical consultant for the Kilgore Subcommittee on War Mobilization, proposed in 1947 the first working definition of housing “performance.”9 In his article “Toward a science of housing,” published in the no longer extant Scientific Monthly, Larson maintained that the US had fallen behind technologically, particularly in the materials and methods with which homes were built.10 Post-war housing had failed to benefit from the industrialization of vast sectors of the American economy. Citing the 1940 census, Larson noted many homes in America still lacked, “running water, private baths, flush toilets, electricity and refrigeration.”11 Builders were ill-prepared to tackle the demand by thousands of returning soldiers and their families. And while “methods and materials used centuries ago” were still in use, they were “too costly for the average citizen’s pocketbook.”12 Larson’s response to the problem was comprehensive, informed, and socially enlightened. Handcrafted wood building methods would fail to supply the sheer quantity of homes needed. New cost-effective construction methods and standards 119

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of excellence were required, and to this end, Larson promoted the adoption of an integrated process of building; a comprehensive practice in which all aspects of a building’s definition (site, program, materials, available labor, building technology, and occupant preferences) productively contribute to its design. [T]he production of a house must be viewed as a single integrated process that extends all the way back to the original sources of supply – the forest, the mine, the quarry and the farm. If this is done, then large abbreviations of time can be done at every step, where there is handling or processing of materials. All such time saving should be translatable into dollar savings for the consumer.13 Larson was an architectural visionary. He articulated the tenets of what today is referred to as “integrated design”; a highly favored practice employed by architects, engineers, and builders in the construction of high-performance buildings. Integrated design and its various project delivery methods define industry-wide protocols for encouraging collaborative engagements in the construction of betterperforming buildings.14 Larson’s particular vision of a truly integrated building process began with the invention of new building products. With intimate knowledge of the means and methods by which assemblies were made, significant savings could be accrued. Having rejected existing carpenter-based building methods, he supported research in new materials and in new forms of manufacturing. Larson identified vast inefficiencies plaguing the “backyard building industry,” prevailing in the US after the war. He sought its complete overhaul, promoting methods of fabrication that advanced a scientific understanding of residential construction as well as the reorganization of its labor practices (Figures 8.1 and 8.2): These new producers look upon themselves as housing manufacturers. Already even before most have completed their tooling and gotten into full stride, they have set up their own trade association . . . they talk about “industrialized houses” and the implications of using structural materials. 15 He endorsed the transformation of housing by manufacturing processes, recognizing companies such as Butler Manufacturing from Kansas City, Reliance Homes from Philadelphia, and the Harmon Corporation from Wilmington.16 Their innovative approaches to the use of steel and aluminum had resulted in new industrialized processes for producing highly engineered components within the controlled environment of a factory. Larson saw great promise in the use of porcelain enamels, stressed skin panels, and those made of glue resin and corrugated paper; all of which were early examples of high-performance composites. He celebrated the production of ceramic-surfaced steel panels manufactured by the Lustron Corporation and destined for 15,000 new homes. Notwithstanding the company’s subsequent notoriety in 1948–1950 for having received $40 million in government grants just prior to declaring bankruptcy,17 Lustron homes featured 120

8.1 Lustron house living room.

8.2 Lustron house under construction.

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advanced material technologies including shop-engineered steel studs and roof trusses, enameled steel panels, and forced air heating. A total of 2,500 single-story two-bedroom/one-bath units were built, roughly 32 sq.ft., with nearly 1,000 sq.ft. of livable area (Figure 8.3).18 Common to all projects was the search for the “single, multipurpose material,” a product engineered for maximum versatility in the construction of both walls and roofs. This goal Larson shared with the National Housing Agency (NHA), who claimed: If a building material could be developed which would permit the economical molding by mass production methods of mono-lithic self supporting wall panels . . . a very important step would have been taken toward solving the problem of excessive housing costs.19 One such material was the “aluminum faced, plastic, honeycomb paper core panel being developed by Lincoln Industries,” an early composite plastic fiberglass sandwich, first used in the protection of radar equipment for Navy airplanes.20 Larson also highlighted the use of cotton-reinforced plastics and the substitution of traditional concrete aggregates with pumice, cottonwood fibers, straw, and vermiculite for enhanced performance.21 The goal of a single multi-purpose material was believed to be easily within reach, given the wealth of new synthetics, capable of being varied in form and substance to meet 122

8.3 Lustron house exterior view.

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different conditions. What the ideal synthetic will be – whether it should be made from things that are grown or things that are mined or quarried – is mainly a question of research or economics.22 More than 60 years later, the notion of engineering a super miracle material seems optimistic, if not naive. Fragmentation of performance criteria rather than consolidation of standardized processes has occurred since the end of the war. At present, ever more differentiated materials are used for an increasing number of specialized functions. The hundreds of different silicon and resin-based products used in waterproofing alone betray a trajectory far different than Larson envisioned. Moreover, his promotion of “the ideal synthetic” that could be either grown or mined poses a serious ethical issue for contemporary design, given the near total market domination of non-renewable petroleum-based polymers. In the twenty-first century, plastics and composites continue to befuddle the designer’s imagination. Abundant, versatile, and often quite beautiful, they are, however, high in embodied energy and rarely recyclable; this being one of the many consequences of postwar engineering not apparent to the author in 1947. In sectors other than housing, however, Larson’s vision of highly engineered composite materials, designed for optimal performance succeeded in supplanting traditional materials such as wood, concrete, and steel. Larson’s motives for advancing the home-building industry were varied, albeit precise. Attentive to improving the structural and material properties of new products, he was equally intent on endorsing the notion of “performance.” Highly inspired in seeking industry-wide implementation of performance-based building standards, he recognized the benefits of their increased flexibility, calling for their application in industrialized housing.23 Prescriptive codes used before World War II, based on generalized rules of thumb for the behavior of traditional materials, were no longer appropriate for a building industry committed to the use of highly engineered materials. Absent these performance-based standards capable of evaluating the true merit of new composites, manufactured homes and their building assemblies were benchmarked against inarticulate codes. 24 To remedy the situation, Larson imagined an entirely different set of criteria: In setting up desirable standards of performance, the task essentially is to predetermine the range of functions a house should serve and then to prescribe the necessary behavior as a control over the development of new materials and structural systems.25 More broadly, he associated building “standards” with the full range of activities sheltered by homes. While essential functions included structural integrity and the protection of occupants from the natural elements, “standards of performance” transcended purely objective criteria. Larson reminded his readers that with the implementation of new building technologies arose the need for a transformation in the very aesthetics of home. In his paragraph, “The shape of things,” he observed:26 123

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Just as the first automobiles were horseless carriages . . . and the first airplanes looked more like kites than “flying machines,” it is not surprising that the factory-built houses coming on the market are quite conventional in appearance. [But] . . . houses will soon evolve into forms more consistent with the needs of contemporary living and reflecting the greater freedom in design that comes with industrialization.27 Factory-based processes would determine not only the way things were made, but equally the way they appeared. Industrialization occasioned greater levels of formal invention, and this was precisely the catalyst needed in rehabilitating the image of home. Repeating an often-cited narrative characteristic of European modernism from the late 1920s, new forms of design arose alongside the recognition of new functions. Cars, ships, and planes were progressively redesigned according to their new functionalities; so too should the single-family home more fully represent the vastly expanded range of purposes it now served. Larson cited the work of Buckminster Fuller, whose Dymaxion House did precisely this, as well as the Lakes’ Steel Corporation Quonset Hut, and Paul Nelson’s “suspended house”; each of which embodied singular instances of the yet untapped potential of performancebased design.

Larson’s critic So committed was Larson to the idea that homes built in the second half of the twentieth century required a “shape” appropriate to their industrial origins, he chose to respond to an exceedingly negative critique of his article published in the February edition of Scientific Monthly.28 Authored by naval architect Lindsay Lord, “Modern housing” was brief but biting, chastising Larson for having asserted that “walls need no longer be inert masses of masonry”: That Mr. Larson’s walls can be trained like seals is no longer newsworthy, but that his type of thinking shrugs off the value of holding up the roof and keeping out the weather and then completely ignores the social and esthetic values of architectural beauty and repose is typical of the hysteria of those who would herd us into enameled trailer camps. I am not a religious man but within the comfortable shelter of my own stone and hewn-beamed house I find a soul satisfaction which could not exist in a Model 13-X, unit Number 6327, of the F.O.B. Detroit Corporation’s aluminum masterpiece.29 Larson’s idea of a comprehensive and integrated form of building, responsive to a complex set of performance criteria, had been satirized. Lord’s displeasure at the prospect of being forced to live in an enameled trailer camp was categorical, as was his preference for traditionally hand-built homes of stone and heavy timber construction. Age-old techniques could be used alongside the unobtrusive addition of “accessories” such as heating, plumbing, and lighting. In adopting such methods the home could “remain a family comfort and a community asset.” So enamored was he with conserving the traditions of architectural figuration he 124

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recommended Larson visit “the gracious rooms of Williamsburg, or Mount Vernon,” for there he would see the “smallest of many old-time cottages whose inner comfort and outer charm easily outbids much of both contemporary and futuristic socalled housing.”30 Larson’s response was brief and all the more pointed.31 He assured his critic of having, on many occasions, visited both Williamsburg (the recreated eighteenthcentury early American settlement in Virginia) and Mount Vernon (the home of America’s first president). He admitted a “very deep admiration for these old houses,” but with every visit he wondered why I always wind up with the deflating thought that after a century and a half we are still trying to imitate these architectural masterpieces of the past for their surface characteristics. . . . We completely miss the point that if these early designers were still alive they would be trying to do now what they were doing then – seeking to do the most with the materials at hand.32 The search for an architectural language commensurate with post-war reality was essential to the work of many an architect; Larson was no exception. The profession struggled with figuration in the face of vast social, technological, and material changes. Jean Prouvé, Konrad Wachsman, Marcel Breuer, and Richard Neutra sought answers to this question. So, too, did John Entenza, whose celebrated “case study houses” promoted design as a “simple and straightforward expression of the living demand of modern-minded people.” 33 Even today, architects strive to identify markets still committed to the representation of contemporary lifestyles and high-performance design in single-family homes. Yet the “Williamsburg” model remains available for purchase in any region of the country its developers are open for business. In the end, Lord’s rejection of a “science of housing” is noteworthy for what it reveals about professional and political biases. Lord had also served his country in World War II and went on to a career in designing high-performance watercraft. In 1946, a year before Larson’s article, he authored The Naval Architecture of Planing Hulls, demonstrating expert knowledge in the mathematics of water displacement and sailing vessels. In 1971 his work was cited in a US government report on the feasibility of using ferro-cement for the construction of boats in developing countries. His design for mass-produced fishing vessels were described as “composite wood-plastic fishing boats for East African fisheries which were packaged in a ‘knock-down’ state here, shipped by steamers, and assembled at the destination where they were used by unskilled laborers.”34 So detailed, the boat was designed with simple components, easily assembled by unskilled people, incorporating “knock-down” packaging other wise known as “flat pack” shipping, still used today for transporting prefabricated panelized industrial products, including homes. Of most interest, however, is that Lord’s vessels were built using the very same family of post-war engineered building products of particular interest to Larson – material composites. For Lord, this new product, combining the properties of both wood and plastic, augmented a boat’s performance while lowering 125

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its cost. Why composites were suitable for vessels destined for cultures in Southeast Asia, but not so for constructing American middle-class homes remains unclear, unless one considers the following factors. For Lord, the pursuit of prefabrication and material innovation in the construction of new homes was misguided if this technological prowess was applied to the building’s shell. Traditionally insulated masonry walls 16 inches thick and exterior walls made of wood-frame construction remained cost effective means for supporting the home and protecting its inhabitants. Contrary to “sanitary bakedon enamel,” conventional materials bestowed a “universally accepted” sense of “character and beauty.” 35 More pointedly, and in further negation of Larson’s thesis, Lord stated: The housing industry is not technologically backward. On the contrary, it has made prefabrication and assembly-line production so common that more people than ever aspire to housing luxuries undreamed of a few years ago. Today’s carpenter is derided for his lack of skill, but consider that he no longer has the necessity for developing journeyman status. His doors and windows, carefully packaged with their frames, arrive complete from the assembly line. His cabinets, millwork, flooring, stairs, mantels, and bookshelves are all out of the catalogue.36 Evident even in this description are many of the same shortcomings with contemporary forms of prefabricated housing that Larson was singularly focused on avoiding; the most important being the reductive use of machines to imitate material details previously produced by a craftsman. Without citing the words of nineteenth-century art theorist John Ruskin, who deplored the loss of truth concomitant with mass-produced architectural details, employing machines to such ends is still reprehensible to many architects who seek the ethical reconciliation of design, technology, and representation. For Lord, however, in the materials and products by which the single-family home was given to representation, only tradition and history remained the bearers of order. Lord’s stance may simply have been an instance of chauvinism by a professional who accorded the metrics of high performance and industrialization solely to the subjects of engineering while insisting that homes be built using construction techniques no more sophisticated than those brought over on the Mayflower. Larson’s critic maintained the disciplinary boundary between high-performance vessels traveling in water and those embedded in the ground, notwithstanding that both are subject to natural forces and human occupation. Isolating speed, buoyancy, and water resistance as design criteria was acceptable for the engineering of watercraft; highlighting high performance as a yardstick for the home was not. Contrary to his critic, however, Larson had dissolved a number of disciplinary boundaries between engineering and architecture to achieve the goals of integration he promoted with so much enthusiasm. He sought a comprehensive and ethical definition of housing performance whose industrialized methods addressed the 126

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“needs of contemporary living”: “[T]he need for more precise information on exactly what are the desirable patterns of family activity. It should be the objective of a comprehensive program of housing to provide such information.”37 For Larson, “patterns of family activity” were identified through a series of qualitative performance variables, which industrialized housing would ensure. Manufactured housing would contribute to the health of occupants, an understanding of the effect of color and form on mood and behavior, the recognition of the subconscious needs of building users, and address particular preferences which families had for organizing their living environment. For Larson, identifying the best “standards of performance” included incorporating qualitative measures within the measure of design. Nelson’s “suspended house,” for example, made possible the adjustable transparency of its walls as well as the spatial flexibility of its living volume to “conform to the requirements of a particular activity.”38 With its capacity to add volumes as required, “the entire structure would provide a threedimensional, easily alterable flow of family activity.” 39 In this regard, Larson featured the work of architects who studied the role of “function” in defining new configurations of geometric space, as well as those who researched modularity and flexibility in the manufacture of components that could be “hooked up together on the site with ‘connector units’ to form individual dwellings of variable size.”40 According to Larson, these and other qualitative factors “should be the objective of a comprehensive program of housing”; foremost amongst which, was that of “community”:41 The more the new dwellings depart from traditional forms, the more imperative it becomes that they be put in planned groupings rather than as isolated units. No matter how pleasing an individual Dymaxion or Quonset or X-Space house may be by itself, it would be jarringly conspicuous if placed in a setting of conventionally designed homes.42 Aware of the need to mitigate vast figural differences between industrialized houses and those more typically found in American suburban subdivisions, Larson highlighted the need to build the social infrastructure required for new communities. He applauded General Homes of Columbus Ohio, who planned the building of “shopping centers, nurseries, parks, [and] playgrounds” alongside the construction of 1,700 new housing units; making special mention of the project’s innovative financing whose “cooperative” structure enabled its union members to eventually occupy the houses they built.43 For Larson, the construction of housing implied the construction of community and his “science of housing” required “research on the broadest possible social scale.” 44 The education of children, the health of community members, the wasteful consumption of water, and the development of better-planned neighborhoods were all issues worthy of scientific investigation, for only in this way could “a coordinated program of technical research in housing on a scale broad enough to meet the nation’s needs” truly be realized.

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Conclusion More than six decades later, the true promise of industrialized home building has yet to be realized. While prefabricated homes make up a significant sector of the housing industry, rarely are innovative material assemblies invented and deployed at large enough scales to substantially challenge the fundamental technologies used in the construction of single-family homes.45 Rarer still are opportunities for such technologies to occasion a change in their appearance. Yet in sectors other than housing, advanced research in building envelopes has proliferated during the past two decades, resulting in significant material advances in the energy-positive performance of building shells and their skins. Varying forms of thermochromic and electrochromic glass, structurally insulated panels, translucent insulation materials, polycarbonates, metal meshes, rain screens, and double skin façades are but a few of the technologies transforming the practice. What is required, however, is the integration of this research in the context of housing. For only in this way can the metrics of performance challenge existing “representations” of home. In what was an early and visionary stance, Larson articulated a far-reaching strategy for rehabilitating the housing industry decades ahead of his contemporaries by integrating both qualitative and quantitative metrics within his science of housing. He expanded the ethical function of high performance to include questions of lifestyle and occupant needs, particular to contemporary life in postwar America. He did so by repeatedly advancing scientific research in the field of design, leveraged by methods of analysis and those of design, integrating issues of technology with those of society.46 Larson’s work is deserving of renewed attention. As architect and educator, he sought the establishment of an integrated building process, founded on a science of housing committed to community, technology, material innovation, and the evolution of design. His aspirations are all the more critical for developing sustainable and ethical practices for the design and construction of twenty-firstcentury low-energy housing. By studying his expanded and comprehensive definition of “performance,” an alternative framework for the “image” of home can be envisioned anew. Notes 1 US Census Bureau, 2000, “Census of housing,” http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/ historic/units.html (accessed July 29, 2011). 2 See G. Glasgow, P. G. Lewis, and M. Neiman, “Local development policies and the foreclosure crisis in California: can local policies hold back national tides,” Urban Affairs Review, 48, 2012: 64 originally published online September 16, 2011. 3 J. Barth, “McMansion economics,” Los Angeles Times, November 21, 2010, Part A, p. 37. 4 Energy Information Administration, “A look at residential energy consumption in 1997,” p. 6, http://www.eia.gov (accessed May 28, 2012). 5 Find Energy Star at: http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=new_homes.hm_index; HERS at RESNET: http://www.resnet.us/energy-ratings; and the Passive House Institute US at http://www. passivehouse.us/passiveHouse/PHIUSHome.html 6 Toll Brothers, “Design your own home,” http://www.designyourownhome.com/design_your_own_ home.shtml?state=NC (accessed June 18, 2012). 128

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7 T. Smiley and C. West, The Rich, and the Rest of Us, A Poverty Manifesto, New York: Smiley Books, 2012. 8 For sobering statistics on the number of homes vacant in the US and the toll this is having on local and state economies, see Brian Lewis and Dan Levy, “Vacant homes in U.S. climb to most since 1970s with ghost towns,” Bloomberg News, February 29, 2008. In spring 2012 the homeownership rate in the US is at 65.4 percent, the lowest since 1996, having peaked in the summer of 2004 at a rate of 69.2 percent. See US Census Bureau News, US Department of Commerce, US Census, Vacant Data (2), Monday, April 30, 2012, p. 5. 9 Theodore C. Larson had a productive career before and after World War II. He worked for the US Housing Authority in 1939–1940 and, following the war, became a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan. He worked for the Dodge Corporation (1937–1939), was a technical editor of Architectural Forum (1941–1942), and the technical director of General Homes (1947). His “science of housing” was based on decades of experience across various sectors of American industry. 10 C. T. Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” Scientific Monthly, 65 (4), 1947, 295–305. 11 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 295. 12 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 295. 13 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 297. 14 For a review of integrated design practices, see 7group and B. G. Reed, The Integrative Design Guide to Green Building: Redefining the Practice of Sustainability, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2009; P. Appleby, Integrated Sustainable Design of Buildings, Washington, DC: Earthscan, 2011; J. Yudelson, Green Building Through Integrated Design, New York: McGraw Hill, 2009; R. D. Rush, The Building Systems Integration Handbook, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 1986; M. Keeler and B. Burke, Fundamentals of Integrated Design for Sustainable Building, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2009; K. Moe, Integrated Design in Contemporary Architecture, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008; V. Lerum, High Performance Building, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2008; A. Woodner, High Performance Building Guidelines, New York: DIANE Publishing, 1999; L. Bachman, Integrated Buildings: The Systems Basis of Architecture, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2003; G. Elvin, Integrated Practice in Architecture, Master Design-Build, Fast Track, and Building Information Modeling, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2007; and R. Deutsch, BIM and Integrated Design, Strategies for Architectural Practice, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2011. 15 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 297. For a comprehensive visual library of prefabricated homes on the market at this time, see the Call it Home Project at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ gsapp/projs/call-it-home (accessed May 28, 2012). 16 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 297. Butler Manufacturing has become an industry leader in the United States of prefabricated buildings of all types; see http://www.butlermfg.com (accessed May 28, 2012). 17 This event was widely discussed in the trade press, See C. B. Sweets, “Cy Sweet says,” American Builder (1948–1969), 71 (12), 1949, 64; “EDITORS’ round table,” American Builder (1948– 1969), 72 (9), 1950, 57; R. E. Saberson, “Houses for nothing!” American Builder (1948–1969), 71 (4), 1949, 152; R. E. Saberson, “An impressive record speaks for itself,” American Builder (1948–1969), 73 (2), 1951, 144; and “On and off the record: news, views and comments,” American Builder (1948–1969), 71 (10), 1949, 51. 18 B. Bergdoll and P. Christensen, Home Delivery, Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008, pp. 102–107. 19 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 298. 20 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 298. 21 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 298. 22 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 299. 23 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 300. 24 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 300. “The lack of desirable performance standards should not be construed to mean that the new factory built houses are substandard. They are in fact distinctly superior to the average conventional house in quality and livability. The difficulty is one of requiring compliance with standards that have become obsolete and consequently wasteful.” 25 Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 300. 26 It was only in 1962 that George Kudler published his work The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962.

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

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Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 300. L. Lord, “Modern housing,” Scientific Monthly, 66 (2), 1948, 176–177. Lord, “Modern housing,” 176. Lord, “Modern housing,” 176. Lord, “Modern housing,” 176. Lord even suggested Larson’s approach was “closely allied to that of the crackpot.” C. T. Larson, “Not merely four square walls,” Scientific Monthly, 67 (6), 1948, 454. E. Smith, P. Goessel, P. Loughrey, S. Loughrey, and J. Shulman, Case Study Houses: The Complete CSH Program (1945–1966), New York: Taschen, 2002, 15; and as originally published in “The Case Study House Program”, announcement in Arts & Architecture, January 1945, p. 20. N. D. Vietmeyer, Background-Information on Ferro-Cement as a Boatbuilding Material for Developing Countries, report for TA/OST and NESA/SA (AID), March 12, 1971, p. 19. Lord, “Modern housing,” 177. Lord, “Modern housing,” 177. Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 302. Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 302. Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 301. Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 302. Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 302. Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 302. Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 303. Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 303. R. Smith, Prefab Architecture: A Guide to Modular Design and Construction, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, 2011. Larson, “Toward a science of housing,” 305.

Part 3

Architectural aspects

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Chapter 9

Technics and poetics of the architectural environment Dean Hawkes

Terms of reference There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.1 The above quotation comes from Charles Rennie Mackintosh, arguably one of the most stylish architects ever. In making my contribution to the debate, I will set the question of the relation of energy and architectural style in a wider historical context. For many years I have taught, researched, and practiced what I choose to describe as “environmental design in architecture.” My early research in the 1960s and 1970s was based in building science. Later my work focused upon the relationship between the technical discourse of environmental design and the concerns of history and theory. These studies were collected in The Environmental Tradition.2 Connections were made between contemporary research and practice and the theories and practices of the past, with references to the works of Vitruvius, Palladio, and Alberti placed alongside discussions of Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Piano and Rogers, and Robert Venturi. In The Environmental Imagination I made a critical distinction between technics and poetics in environmental design, revealed through the works of architects ranging from Soane to Zumthor. 3 In my most recent book, Architecture and Climate, the study is limited geographically to Britain, and the timescale is extended back to the sixteenth century, beginning with the buildings of Robert Smythson and concluding with those of his near namesakes, Alison and Peter Smithson.4 My interest in the relationship between technics and poetics derives from Le Corbusier’s lecture, “Les techniques sont l’assiette meme du lyrisme” (Techniques are the very basis of poetry) delivered in Buenos Aires in 1929. The lecture focused on a drawing (Figure 9.1): “Ladies and Gentlemen, I begin by drawing a line that 133

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can separate . . . the domain of material things . . . from that specially reserved to spiritual ones. Below the line, what exists, above, what one feels.” On completing the drawing, Le Corbusier declared, I shall no longer speak to you of poetry, of lyricism. I shall draw precise reasonable things . . . I shall talk “technique” and you will react “poetry.” And I promise you a dazzling poem: the poem of the architecture of modern times.5

9.1 Le Corbusier, techniques are the very basis of poetry.

I began The Environmental Imagination by quoting Louis Kahn, I only wish that the first really worthwhile discovery of science would be that it recognized that the unmeasurable is what they’re really fighting to 134

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understand, and that the measurable is only the servant of the unmeasurable; that everything that man makes must be fundamentally unmeasurable [my italics].6 I take Kahn’s measurable and unmeasurable to be directly analogous to Le Corbusier’s technique and poetry. I propose that the essential interdependency of technics and poetics informs the conception and realization of substantial works of architecture. In the “modern” works studied in The Environmental Imagination and, equally, in the “pre-modern” buildings discussed in Architecture and Climate, the relationship is shown to be both complex and subtle. Returning to our opening question, “Does energy consumption influence architectural style?” I believe that sustainable design, low-energy design, or any of the numerous other synonyms of these terms, should be regarded as a specific instance of the wider domain of environmental design in architecture. There are clearly particular constraints that follow from observance of the objective, measurable factors of building physics and technology in relation to energy processes in buildings that have a significant bearing on the form and materiality of a building. This is the realm of technics. But these factors are, of necessity, deeply conditioned by cultural and aesthetic judgments, the unmeasurable and the poetic, and “style” – a tricky word – should in its deepest and most significant sense be the product of the interpenetration of these two realms.

Style and environment in the English Renaissance In order to explain my position I will draw upon my research from the past decade. My first examples are from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. First is Robert Smythson’s Hardwick Hall, completed in 1597; second is Christopher Wren’s library at Trinity College, Cambridge, completed in 1695. Stylistically these buildings are separated by the arrival in England, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, of Italian classicism in the hands of Inigo Jones.7 They also sit astride the profound line of demarcation that was drawn by the emergence of quantitative meteorology. Robert Smythson (1535–1614) was a near contemporary of Andrea Palladio (1508–1580). Hardwick Hall, arguably the finest Elizabethan house, stands on a hilltop high above a steep valley in the English midlands. At the date of the building’s completion, England was in the midst of the “Little Ice Age,” when the generally temperate climate was subject to bitterly cold winters, of which Smythson and his client would have been only too aware. The plan is based on a simple rectangle, elaborated by six tall, square turrets that rise above the main roof. The house is remarkable for the large expanses of window that quickly attracted the appellation, “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall” (Figure 9.2). Analysis of the house shows that it embodies a remarkably sophisticated response to the English climate. The long axis of the plan is oriented almost exactly north–south, and running almost the entire length is a massive masonry wall that contains most of the house’s 28 fireplaces, whose chimneys rise high above the roof in expression of the warmth within. The effect of this “wall of fire” is to offset to some extent 135

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the heat losses from the large windows. On sunny days, even in these cold winter months, the windows become sources of warmth, proto-passive solar. Smythson’s appreciation of this is shown by the meticulous planning of the principal rooms in which the apartments of the owner, the countess of Shrewsbury, who was 70 years old when she first occupied the house, are placed at the southern end of the first floor. Here, they receive the best of the sunlight and warmth and are buffered against the climate by the floors above and below. Each of the relatively small apartments has a large fireplace, and an inventory of contents made in 1601 itemizes the fire screens, coverlets, rugs, curtains, fire irons, and so forth that would have ensured local comfort. This analysis proposes that the house embodies precisely understood environmental principles that contributed greatly to the comfort of its Elizabethan occupants. But this was comprehended within a complex unity of the symbolic and the practical from which the “style” of the house emerged. A century later, much had changed. Classicism was now the established language of architecture and Christopher Wren had, in his maturity, become masterly in its use. Comparing Smythson and Wren we see a further and crucial distinction. Smythson grew from master mason to architect and was, in that regard, a practical man. Wren received a classical education and, at the age of 21, became a fellow of All Souls at Oxford and four years later was elected professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London. In 1660 he was a founder member of the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific body. Wren was a scientist before he was an architect. He worked in the “mathematical sciences” – astronomy, cosmology, longitude, but he also turned his hand to practical matters, including meteorology. Among his papers is a proposal for 136

9.2 Robert Smythson, Hardwick Hall.

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the construction of a History of the Seasons as the basis for understanding the effect of climate on human health. 8 In relation to this he made a number of “weather clocks,” portable meteorological stations which he demonstrated at meetings of the Royal Society in 1662 and 1663, in which year he also presented to the Society a model of his design for the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. Much has been written about the relation of Wren’s science with his architecture, but surprisingly little has been said about its effect on the environmental aspects of his designs.9 My studies of his buildings suggest that all aspects of their environment – luminous, thermal, and acoustic – were informed by the architect’s scientific understanding. At the Trinity College library the principal environmental question was the lighting of this enormous single space (Figure 9.3). The building, described as “complete, magnanimous serenity” by Summerson, would appear originally to have been unheated.10 Scholars, all members of the college, would have taken books to their firesides in their nearby rooms in the winter months. Acoustically, the marble floor was explicitly specified by Wren to quieten the sound of footsteps moving through the room. The room, at first floor above the damp atmosphere of the nearby river Cam, is 200 feet (60 meters) long by 45 feet (13.5 meters). The long axis is, coincidentally, north–south as at Hardwick. This was almost certainly determined by the existing configuration of the college buildings; the library completes a previously three-sided court, but Wren exploits this to great effect. In cross section the room is divided horizontally between the relatively dark tone of the hardwood book presses and the bright upper volume of windows and white-painted plaster. The presses line the walls and extend into the space to form intimate aedicules with slightly raised timber floors, providing tiny microclimates within the room. In the early morning the sun directly enters from the east and from the west in the afternoon, but is excluded as it moves through the southerly quarter of the sky at the hours astride midday. In the summer months this excludes the greatest heat of the day. In summer morning and evening sunlight touches the lower parts of the room, but in winter it is contained in just the upper part. At all seasons its presence, moving from east to west, animates the interior and provides a constant reminder of the otherwise invisible exterior. From the exterior the building, with its extensive area of glass – perhaps another unconscious echo of Hardwick – offers an anticipation of its bright interior. It is in every respect a “lightbox,” a subtle and effective translation of its architect’s scientific understanding of the geometry of the sun and of the English climate into eloquent architectural composition.

The architectural environment in the twentieth century I now “fast forward” to the twentieth century, reluctantly passing numerous examples of buildings by architects such as, in the eighteenth century, Lord Burlington and William Kent, and in the nineteenth century, Soane, Labrouste, Barry, and the architects of the Arts and Crafts movement. One observation that should be made concerning the nineteenth century is that, as the fruits of the Industrial Revolution were applied in the introduction of extensive mechanical 137

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servicing networks into buildings, these were almost effortlessly accommodated into buildings of many functions.11

Le Corbusier One of the iconic diagrams of the modern movement is Le Corbusier’s 5 points d’une architecture nouvelle. The most explicitly environmental component of this is the graphic comparison between the distribution of daylight from traditional windows arrangements and modernism’s fenêtre en longueur, but the diagram’s significance is its wider implication of a transformation of the entire tectonic essence of architecture from the mass, density, and inclusivity of earlier forms of construction to the lightness, openness, and separateness offered by new techniques. On the environmental front Le Corbusier’s most provocative proposal, made in the Buenos Aires lecture with which I began, was, “Every country builds its houses in response to its climate. At this moment of general diffusion, of international scientific techniques, I propose only one house for all countries, the house of exact breathing.”12 It is an intriguing fact that, in the light of this powerful declaration, Le Corbusier never adopted mechanical services in his designs for houses, in comparison with his larger buildings, such as the Cité de Rèfuge (1932) with its respiration exacte. Elsewhere in the Buenos Aires lectures he discussed and illustrated the orientation of the Villa Savoye (1929–1931): The main view is to the north, therefore opposite to the sun. . . . Receiving views and light from around the periphery of the box, the different rooms 138

9.3 Christopher Wren, Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.

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centre on a hanging garden that is there like a distributor of adequate light and sunshine. It is on the hanging garden that the sliding plate glass walls of the salon and other rooms of the house open freely: thus the sun is everywhere, in the very heart of the house.13 In most publications of Le Corbusier’s work the plan of Villa Savoye at Poissy is shown with south at the top (Figure 9.4). When this is reversed to make north uppermost, the environmental logic becomes immediately apparent, with “the sun . . . everywhere,” liberated by the new compositional possibilities of the 5 points.14 All of this proves to be beautifully adapted to the specific character of the continental climate of Paris.

9.4 Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Plan.

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Alvar Aalto Alvar Aalto’s modernism has been interpreted by Colin St. J. Wilson as belonging to an “other tradition.”15 Something of the distinction between the two traditions may be shown by comparing the Villa Mairea (1937–1939) with the Villa Savoye. Aalto’s plan is more loosely composed. It has been suggested that it is a variant on the L-shaped plan of the Nordic vernacular house, but its allegiance to modernist principles is shown in the overt separation of structure, enclosure, and internal planning in the square form of the principal pavilion. 16 (Figure 9.5). Environmentally the house exhibits Aalto’s deep understanding of the climate of his native land. At 61°35′ north of the equator, to be compared to 48°55′ at Poissy, the low trajectory of the sun and the almost endless summer days have a deep influence on the house’s topography, dimensions, and detail. The pavilion is oriented with the cardinal points almost exactly on its diagonal. The sun, therefore, may enter at all hours of the day, including late into the long summer evenings, when it also reaches the dining room and the adjacent covered loggia, with its external fireplace. At this latitude the sun’s highest point at noon at the summer solstice is just 52° above the horizon and at the equinoxes it is 28°. Consequently

9.5 Alvar Aalto, Villa Mairea, Plan. 140

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it penetrates deep into the 14-meter depth of the square pavilion, illuminating its very heart. The house is equipped with an array of devices for solar control, adjustable louvered timber screens, retractable canvas awnings and fixed pergolalike louvers. All utterly functional, but beautifully composed on the body of the house in what Richard Weston describes as a Braque-like collage.17 The environmental elements are thus seamlessly embraced by Aalto’s overall conception.

Louis Kahn With Louis Kahn’s Richards Medical Research Building (1957–1965) we reach an important moment in the relationship between environmental design, in its broadest definition, and the language of architecture. In The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment (1969), Reyner Banham proposed the term “exposed power” to define a category of modern building in which the mechanical service installations were given explicit expression.18 He cited Marco Zunusso’s OlivettiArgentina Factory (1964) and Franco Albini’s Rinascente Store in Rome (1961) as examples of this, but it was the Richards Laboratories that captured the greatest critical attention (Figure 9.6). Kahn had made his vital distinction between “served” and “servant” spaces, of which Peter Blundell-Jones suggested: “This invests each of these buildings with a specific and coherent topography that some commentators have identified as ‘his main contribution to the history of architecture’.”19 The service towers, containing mechanical services and the “service” of human circulation in staircases rising high above the laboratory towers resulted in widespread admiration for the building. Colin St. J. Wilson asked “Will ‘servant’ spaces become the next form of decoration?”20 Kahn himself described the first phase of the building in more dispassionate terms: A central building to which the three major towers cluster takes the places of the areas for services which are on the other side of the normal corridor plan.

9.6 Louis Kahn, Richards Medical Research Laboratories, Philadelphia. 141

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This central building has nostrils for the intake of fresh air away from the exhaust sub-towers of vitiated air . . . a plan should be recognisable as belonging to an era. This handling of our complicated servant spaces belongs to the twentieth century, just as a Pompeian plan belongs to its era.21 These towers may be interpreted as expressing the energy of this building, almost in the manner of Robert Smythson’s chimneys rising high above the roof of Hardwick Hall. If they are “the next form of decoration” performance becomes style. But we should remember that Kahn also said: I do not like pipes, I do not like ducts. I hate them really thoroughly, but because I hate them so thoroughly, I feel that they have to be given their place. . . . I want to correct any notion that you may have that I am in love with that kind of thing.22 As Banham and others have shown, mechanical systems of environmental control have had a place in buildings since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Buildings of numerous functions have, in Banham’s terminology, been “power operated.” But the critical attention that the Richards Laboratories attracted may, perhaps, be taken to mark a watershed at which the historic association between architecture and climate – in the sense that it is seen in the buildings of Smythson and Wren and even in the houses of Le Corbusier and Aalto – and which Banham characterized as the “structural” approach, was replaced by the predominance of the mechanical environment. In the light of this observation it is, I propose, significant that in all the sequence buildings that Kahn completed in the last years of his life, he chose to suppress rather than express their mechanical systems. Nowhere else are they “decoration,” even in the equally highly serviced Salk Institute, where the servant spaces are inserted above and below the laboratories and the “face” of the building is expressed by the delicate, small-scale study towers that front the central open space. At the Exeter Library, Kimbell Art Museum, and Yale Center for British Art, the mechanical systems are discreetly given their place in the topography of each building, quietly, effectively, and, most importantly, poetically bringing service to space and purpose.23

Carlo Scarpa Carlo Scarpa created a unique interpretation of the language of modernism in his sequence of buildings constructed in the Veneto region of Italy in the post-war years. This is the territory of Palladio and it is clear to me that Scarpa’s works, in their deepest fundamentals, share the conditions of history, culture, building traditions, and, most relevant here, climate that shaped Palladio’s buildings. The most potent example is the Museo Canoviano that Scarpa designed in 1955 to house the original plaster casts of the neo-classical sculptor Antonio Canova. In the grounds of Canova’s house in the foothills of the Dolomite mountains, Scarpa constructed a small extension to an appropriately neo-classical basilican gallery by Francesco Lazzari (1832–1836). 142

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Scarpa’s piece focuses upon a cubic space, lit at its four corners by trihedral glazed openings, which are simultaneously window and rooflight (Figure 9.7). To the west these are tall and concave and to the east, where they are partly obstructed by the mass of the adjacent basilica, they are square and convex. Scarpa said of the design “I wish I could frame the blue of the sky.”24 The effect of this invention, with its apparent debt to Frank Lloyd Wright’s “destruction of the box” and to Rietveld’s Schroeder House, produces a remarkable transformation of the illumination of the space in comparison with that of the zenithal rooflights of Lazzari’s barrel-vault and the distribution of light offered by Palladio’s meticulously proportioned windows in the nearby villas, both under the same sky. The simultaneous lighting of adjacent walls engenders a dynamic light that is entirely appropriate to the display of the sculptures: Each statue has a very precise place, with respect to the overall space and to the light that pours in – at times with glaring violence, at others softly and faintly – modelling the plasters on display, modifying them over the course of the day, with the changing seasons and the variations in weather.25 The building was constructed without a heating system. It simply uses the elements of construction – walls, roof, windows openings, material – to provide a shelter for its priceless contents, exactly the method of Palladio, except that he did provide some warmth from open hearths. The sculptures, unlike most fine-art objects, are unaffected by their thermal environment and survive their variable climate. For the human onlooker the encounter with the sculptures is heightened by the

9.7 Carlo Scarpa, Museo Canoviano, Possagno. 143

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palpable awareness of the season of the year as it is transmitted into the building by both the ever changing daylight and by the tempered thermal environment: in summer, cooler than outside, in winter, warmer. In its environmental primitivism Scarpa’s building could hardly be further from Kahn’s sophisticated structuring of the two categories of space into “served” and “servant.” But both architects share a deep engagement with the fundamentals of the situations of culture, environment, and technology that they find in their respective designs, and they in equal measure transform the necessities of construction into profound poetic statements. It is from these circumstances that they fashion their buildings and it is this that gives them their enduring relevance. This is a matter of principle rather than style.

The Smithsons Alison and Peter Smithson were among the most important figures in the theory and practice of architecture in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. A consistent, but often unregarded, aspect of their work is its environmentalism. Examples of this strand may be found throughout their output.26 Among all their works one building best serves to support the present argument. This is the Upper Lawn Pavilion (1961) (Figure 9.8). The “diagram” is simple. A two-story timber-framed structure sits to the south of an old wall. At ground level are a kitchen and bathroom, and above a space divided by the masonry chimneypiece of the old cottage. The Smithsons own description sums it up:

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9.8 Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn Pavilion, view from southwest.

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Here, it is enough to say it is a pavilion, in a compound, surfaced half by paving “as found” and half by lawn; a pavilion in which to enjoy the seasons; a primitive solar-energy pavilion whose thin skin forms a new space against the thick masonry walls of the earlier farmstead cottages.27 The house had minimal services. The main heat source was a coke-burning stove in the kitchen, which was supplemented by two portable electric convection heaters at the first floor. Cooking was on a camping gas stove. There were two “Anglepoise” lamps for reading and writing, but dining, in the kitchen, was always by candlelight. The Smithsons kept extensive written and photographic records of their inhabitation of the house between 1961 and 1982. These provide a rich narrative of their experience of the English seasons as these were filtered by the simple enclosure. All was not always “comfortable,” in our modern understanding of the term, but the house did provide a vivid and deeply satisfying setting for family life away from the city. The Smithsons were devoted to the architecture of Robert Smythson, and Upper Lawn may be interpreted as a return to the environment of the first Elizabethans, experienced through the architectural precepts of the twentieth century. The building is absolutely not about style. Its form is the product of the simple construction method, and the disposition of solid and void follows from the aim to capture light from east, south and west, following the sun’s path, and to allow a controlled view across the open country to the north. It is the lyrical expression of this simplicity that determines the building’s now iconic status in the literature of twentieth-century architecture.

Peter Zumthor The buildings of Peter Zumthor feature extensively in The Environmental Imagination. In the Introduction to the book I explored the etymology of the word environment in order to establish a deeper ground for my analyses. Through the English appropriation of the French ambience, and the related ambiente of Italian, I found ambience defined in English as the character and atmosphere of a place. In his book, Atmospheres, Zumthor quotes J. M. W. Turner, speaking to Ruskin: “Atmosphere is my style.”28 In seeking to define atmosphere in relation to his buildings, Zumthor proposed eight “answers,” three of which are explicitly environmental. The Sound of a Space. Listen! Interiors are like large instruments, collecting sound, amplifying it, transmitting it elsewhere. This has to do with the shape peculiar to each room and with the surfaces of the materials they contain, and the way these materials have been applied. The Temperature of a Space. I believe every building has a certain temperature. . . . Temperature . . . is physical, but psychological too. It’s in what I see, what I feel, what I touch, even with my feet. The Light on Things. The first of my favourite ideas is this: to plan the building as a pure mass of shadow then, afterwards, to put in light as if you 145

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were hollowing out the darkness. . . . The other idea I like is this, to go about lighting materials and surfaces systematically and to look at the way in which they reflect the light.29 It is from such inquiry into the fundamentals of his projects that Zumthor achieves such consistent depth. But it should be noted that his buildings, while absolutely consistent in thought and method are, in appearance, as dissimilar as could be. It is from such engagement with principle rather than style that architecture of substance is made, as all of the works presented here amply demonstrate. To illustrate the point, let’s compare Zumthor’s Kunsthaus Bregenz (1997) and Therme Vals (1996). In situation, form, material, and function these buildings could hardly be more different (Figures 9.9 and 9.10). The Bregenz building appears, at first sight, to be a further example of the twentieth century’s most prominent architectural stereotype, the air-conditioned glass box. Therme Vals appears as an outcrop of the mountainside, this reading reinforced by its use of the Gneiss stone of the region. On closer examination, however, both buildings demonstrate environmental methods that, in intention, if not specific detail, have much in common.

9.9 Peter Zumthor, Kunsthaus Bregnez. 146

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9.10 Peter Zumthor, Therme Vals.

At Bregenz, in Zumthor’s own words: The multi-layered façade is an autonomous wall construction that harmonizes with the interior and acts as a weather skin, daylight modulator, sun shade and thermal insulator. Relieved of these functions, the space-defining anatomy of the building is able to develop freely in the interior.30 This “space-defining” anatomy consists of sparsely disposed in situ concrete structural walls, horizontal slabs and perimeter screens that provide environmentally stable mass and enclose coils of water pipe that circulate groundwater drawn from an artesian well deep below the building, to provide summer cooling and winter warming to the building without recourse to the elaborate mechanical systems of conventional practice; in Banham’s terminology, “structural” not “mechanical.” Therme Vals, with its complex environments, embracing diverse conditions of heat, light, and sound, is the perfect demonstration of the synthesis of technics and poetics. Behind the scenes the building has extensive mechanical installations, but the environmental priorities lie elsewhere. The primary experience of the spa is of bodily immersion in the waters, with their diverse temperatures, but over and above this the building offers a complex sequence of sensory stimuli. The bather encounters, in almost endless combinations, the atmosphere, its temperature, humidity, luminosity, perfume, and the sound that it carries. Here is the ultimate 147

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example of an environmental architecture whose concern is with ends not means. With J. M. W. Turner, atmosphere is the style.

Conclusion The obligation of architecture in achieving greater energy efficiency is clear, and this brings new constraints and opportunities to design. In presenting this historical review of the environmental dimension of architecture my aim has been to set the question of “energy and style” in a wider critical context. The point of my argument is twofold. First, that the priorities of energy should be seen as new parameters of the historic environmental function of architecture in which substance consistently triumphs over style. The second is that the environmental function is ultimately a matter of technics and poetics, Louis Kahn’s measurable and unmeasurable. In the twenty-first century we have a repertoire of theory and technology that permits an infinity of environmental possibilities. Almost half a century ago Banham distinguished between two broad possibilities in creating the “welltempered environment,” the “structural” and the “mechanical.” This classification continues broadly to define the basis of contemporary practice – maybe even of theory. The majority of what we define as “sustainable” design sits in the “structural” camp, with priority given to the exploitation of ambient energy and to the environmental properties of the building envelope.

Coda Following this parade of master buildings I am apologetic in adding a project from my own practice. I hope this adds just a little to the argument. This small house in the suburbs of Cambridge (Figure 9.11) is, in passive solar terminology, a directgain design.31 This is expressed in its form, with a high, largely glazed elevation

9.11 Dean Hawkes, House at Cambridge, Street Front from west.

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facing south and its mono-pitch roof sloping to the north, where the façade is windowless. The construction is a simple up-rated variant of traditional loadbearing masonry. In the 20 years since it was built, the house has proved the efficacy of passive principles in the English climate, with modest energy consumption providing a comfortable environment. But what about “style”? The house is clearly, if unassertively, of its time and a number of “influences” have been suggested – Utzon and Barragan among them.32 My claim is that, while I know and admire the work of these architects and many others, their value to me comes not from their respective “styles,” but from the deeper lessons I glean, of tectonic expertise and, particularly, of place making. The intention in design should be to discover the fundamentals of the problem, of program and setting, and to express these with both technical expertise and poetic insight.

Notes 1 In 1901 Charles Rennie Mackintosh appropriated this quotation from the English architect, J. D. Sedding as his motto and inscribed it in a typographical panel. 2 D. Hawkes, The Environmental Tradition: Studies in the Architecture of Environment, London: E & FN Spon, 1996. 3 D. Hawkes, The Environmental Imagination: Technics and Poetics of the Architectural Environment, London: Routledge, 2008. 4 D. Hawkes, Architecture and Climate: An Environmental History of British Architecture 1600–2000, London: Routledge, 2012. 5 The lecture is published in Le Corbusier, Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, Paris: Crès et Cie, 1930; English trans, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 35. 6 L. I. Kahn, “Silence and light,” lecture given at ETH, Zurich, 1969; H. Ronner and S. Jhaveri, Louis I. Kahn: Complete Works, Basel: Birkhäuser, 1987, p. 6. 7 For an overview of Jones’ life and work, see: J. Summerson, Inigo Jones, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966, new edition 2000. 8 The proposal was published in Christopher Wren Junior, Parentalia, London: T. Osborn and R. Dodsley, 1750; reprinted, London: Gregg Press, 1965. 9 The relationship of Wren’s work as scientist and as architect is discussed by J. Summerson, “The mind of Wren,” in Heavenly Mansions and other Essays in Architecture, London: Cresset Press, 1949; and J. A. Bennett, The Mathematical Science of Christopher Wren, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 10 J. Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830, ninth revised edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. 11 I have explored this question at some length in The Environmental Tradition, The Environmental Imagination, and Architecture and Climate. 12 Le Corbusier, Precisions, p. 64. 13 Le Corbusier, Precisions, p. 136. 14 A more extensive environmental analysis of Le Corbusier’s houses is in Hawkes, The Environmental Imagination. 15 C. St. J. Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project, Lanham, MD: Academy Editions, 1995; revised edition, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007. 16 J. Pallasma, ed., Alvar Aalto: Villa Mairea, Helsinki: Alvar Aalto Foundation/Mairea Foundation, 1998. 17 R. Weston, Villa Mairea: Architecture in Detail, London: Phaidon Press, 1992. 18 R. Banham, The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, London: Architectural Press, 1969. 19 P. Blundell-Jones, Modern Architecture Through Case Studies, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2002, p. 238. 149

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20 C. St. J. Wilson, “Open and Closed,” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, VII, 1961, pp. 97–102. 21 L. I. Kahn, cited in Ronner and Jhaveri, Louis Kahn: Complete Works, p. 106 . 22 L. I. Kahn, quoted in J. Donat, World Architecture 1, London: Studio Books, 1964, p. 35. 23 I explore this in some detail in The Environmental Imagination. 24 Carlo Scarpa, from a lecture given January 13, 1976, published in, “Carlo Scarpa Frammenti,” Rassengna, June 7, 1981. 25 S. Los, Carlo Scarpa, Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1993, p. 64. 26 A. Smithson and P. Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture, New York: Monacelli Press, 2002; and A. Smithson and P. Smithson, The Charged Void: Urbanism, New York: Monacelli Press, 2004. 27 Smithson and Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture, p. 238. 28 P. Zumthor, Atmospheres, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006. Turner made the statement to John Ruskin in 1844. 29 Ibid, p. 4. 30 P. Zumthor, Introduction to Kunsthaus Bregenz, Archiv Kunst Architektur: Werkdokumente, Osterfilden-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hitje, 1999, p. 10. 31 See M. Field, “Building study: house at Cambridge,” The Architects’ Journal, October 30, 1996. 32 These “influences” were suggested by the critic Denis Sharp in his address at the RIBA Eastern Region Architecture Awards presentation in 1992. The other buildings that received awards in the region that year included Norman Foster’s extension to the Sainsbury Centre at Norwich and his Stansted Airport Terminal.

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Chapter 10

The formations of energy in architecture An architectural agenda for energy Kiel Moe

Few words, in my view, would transform the very purpose and activity of design in this century more than the observation that matter is but captured energy. Matter is an expression, a temporary expression, of both vibrating molecules in various states as well as the energy that binds, concentrates, and transforms matter. Perhaps more consequentially, matter is also an expression of all the forms and transformations of energy that are captured and channeled through matter. As such, architecture’s material practices are actually a subset of a range of energy practices. Architecture is a formation of energy and should be designed as such. Bricks, buildings, infrastructure, and cities are the hardened edge of a cascade of energy captures and transformations. In other words, the formations of matter in buildings are an expression of the energy captured and channeled with the building. As but two examples from the canon of architecture, the design of the Korean Ondol (a traditional house typology) or Roman bathing complexes can only fully be understood through the formations of energy that are central organizing agents in their designs. These buildings literally capture and channel heat in such a way that guides basic architectural decisions such as sequence, material specification, and thermal experience. Without an understanding of the energy captured and channeled by these buildings, their design will remain abstract and incomplete. In both cases, the architecture – conceived as a capture-and-channel device – underlies a range of cultural, social, and economic habits, such as the custom of exposing one’s bare feet to the floor and the generational distribution of family members relative to the fire in the Korean example. Their formation of energy is a jig for the matter and spaces of those buildings. They express part of an architectural agenda for energy. These ancient buildings are emblematic of ways energy can motivate architecture in a method that is not limited to a discourse on efficiency and optimization. 151

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These latter terms have by now overdetermined the relationship of architecture and energy, but in incomplete and problematic ways. Conservation, efficiency, and optimization, as deployed in contemporary practice, are most often questions and techniques specific to other disciplines. In these modes, energy is at best regarded by architects as a set of necessary quantifications, bureaucratic mandates, and checklists rather than as a fundamental agent in novel formations of architecture. While such mandates and techniques might be as inevitable to practice today as gravity, building codes, or the Americans with Disability Act, energy can motivate and shape architecture in other, more discipline-specific ways. Latent possibilities emerge when the formations of energy that presuppose architecture are more centrally positioned as a specific disciplinary concern. The conceptual and literal formation of a building – the appearance of its material and spatial organization – cannot be fully understood without a clear understanding of the organizations of energy transformations inherent in that building. These formations are not limited to the building as a highly ordered composition of matter, but also are an expression of the energy inherent in distant temporal and spatial processes that precede the construction of buildings. These compositions are abstract, yet real, and can be understood and designed to directly affect how architecture appears. These energetic contingencies of a building are as consequential as they are inevitable, if not frequently under-considered in architecture. Architecture can no longer sustain its focus on the visual formation of objects alone any more than its can sustain its incomplete and inadequate focus on the conservation, efficiency, and optimization of energy. For decades, if not centuries, the question of architectural formation has rested on elaborately developed, but incomplete object compositions. The discipline of architecture has evolved such that the formation of buildings is taught and practiced in ways that largely preclude engagement with buildings as actual formations of matter and energy. Architecture’s formations have been reduced to visual preoccupations and energy to mere quantities to optimize. Any architectural agenda for energy must recognize, as the pioneering biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson once noted, that “morphology – the study of change shapes – is not only a study of material things and of the forms of material things, but has a dynamical aspect, under which we deal with the interpretation, in terms of force, of the operations of Energy.”1 Examining much more completely the “operations of energy” in the morphology of buildings helps explain the specific appearances of architecture and can today help guide novel formations of architecture.

The appearances of architecture Appearance is a more consequential term than style for explaining the relationship between architecture and energy. Appearance describes both the process of emergence (to appear) and the final visual result of building (appearance). The full etiology of a building’s appearance is inevitably manifold and provides a more substantive starting point for understanding why a building looks the way it does as 152

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well as how it performs the way it does. Appearance is only of consequence in architecture, though, if it is comprehended as a polyvalent term. Beyond the obvious and routine discourse on the visible appearance of a building, formations of energy in architecture incite a broader understanding of appearance that could alter the discipline’s understanding of morphology. To understand the operations of energy in architecture, a building’s inherent contingencies must be studied as a correlated, polyvalent set of intensive and extensive appearances. First, appearance accounts for a building as a convergent center of materials and energy otherwise dispersed in the environment. How, literally, did this building appear? Whence these materials and energies? Why was this building built at all? What formation of material, energy, and agency made this building manifest? This extensive formation of the energy and matter inherent in every building is an important but neglected aspect of contemporary design. The implications of this extensive formation of energy have consequences beyond concerns of the embodied energy of a building alone. This extensive composition of a building affords the appearance of system feedback that could make architecture much more powerful in this century. Thus appearance accounts for the actual occurrence, and relative potential, of its material geographies, supply chains, material logistics, waste, opportunity, etc. Architects can strategically design aspects of these extensive compositions, managing relative amounts of exergy, entropy, and system feedback. These are nontrivial qualities of energy, which have often been dismissed as externalities, but are the channels through which energy becomes matter. The seemingly innocuous ratio of energy qualities should be at the core of an architectural agenda for energy. This resultant ratio of relative useful energy is tied to the emergence of deleterious, benign, or regenerative feedbacks that the formations and transformations of energy inevitably produce. A more intensive type of appearance includes the experience of a building by the human body. Beyond the familiar visual/spatial appearance of a building, this includes a more nuanced understanding of the thermal experience of buildings and the operations of energy that yield comfort. Little-understood phenomena, such as the diffusivity and effusivity of various materials relative to the human body, specify a quite different approach to energy and architecture than the quantifications and statistical comfort models used by engineering. This more nuanced physiological perspective should also be central to an architectural agenda for energy. Appearance must also concern the methodologies and techniques used to design the building. An architect’s mental habits and tools, the very culture of design, strongly condition the appearance of a building. The incomplete parameters of current energy-modeling software programs privilege, and at times predetermine, the appearance of certain formations of energy, certain technologies, and certain systems in buildings. The appearance of a building, whether considered by a designer or not, is linked to vast formations of energy. These formations should be determined by an architectural agenda and not by the particular limitations of simulation software. 153

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The appearance of architecture in global material geographies or to the sensations of the human body is of great consequence to an architectural agenda for energy. To grasp the implications of such appearances, buildings – and their operations of energy – must be understood as physically connected through the cascade and recurrence of energy that courses through buildings, cities, and the world. To place a building in the nested cascade of its energy hierarchy opens the formation of architecture to new questions and new opportunities. The discipline of architecture has been very timid about the extensive role of energy and the energy hierarchies of buildings. This greatly limits both its formal ambition and its ecological efficacy in this century. Adjacent fields, such as developmental biology, for instance, have been more ambitious about documenting the role of energy in the appearance and morphology of an object. For instance, D’Arcy Thompson wrote that “the form of an object is a ‘diagram of forces,’ in this sense we can deduce the forces that are acting or have acted upon it.”2 Thompson helps us see the current appearance of an object, such as a building, in terms of its shaping forces and the pattern of its historical development and differentiation. Thompson’s concern for an object’s “diagram of forces” coupled with its “operations of energy” points to a more ambitious agenda for energy, and morphology, in architecture. Since matter is but captured energy, it is essential to understand that the appearance of any material object is figured by the formations of energy that pattern that object during its development. Buildings are material indices, expressions of captured and channeled energy. As such, they can and should be designed as capture-and-channel devices of linked gradients: from operational energies to embodied energies, from maximum-power designs to low-exergy designs, from the sun through various fuels and materials. How energy is captured and channeled in these energy hierarchies should temper an architect’s engagement with energy. Thus, a discipline-specific relationship between architecture and energy will develop from overt capture-and-channel compositional strategies.

Capture-and-channel design To clarify what constitutes a capture-and-channel composition, a couple of examples from outside of architecture will help illustrate some key points. As one example, the energetic organization and operations of a tree distributes its matter in such a way that it captures the diffuse solar gradient and channels it through chemical processes that yield carbon dioxide, water, oxygen, and complex organic molecules (Figure 10.1). Formally, its dendritic foliation of leaves maximizes exposed surface area for these solar collectors and carbon dioxide accumulators. These processes produce the lingo-cellulosic composition of the tree trunk, which in turn is strong and supple enough to push its branches and leaves further up into solar gradient exposure, out of the shade of the forest floor. The only way to understand the energy “price” that a tree pays for its trunk is that it pushes more foliage toward more solar energy capture, and if robust enough, prevents felling in a wind event; essential feedback operations for a tree. The cellular solid composition of the trunk and branches also provides hydronic channels for the circulation of liquid captured in root or leaf functions. 154

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The tree is a capture-and-channel composition that reinforces its own energy transformations and power (e.g., the trunk pushes more leaves toward diffuse solar energy). Most importantly, though, the tree reinforces not only its own operations of energy through its composition, but through the composition of connections with its adjacent milieu and its energy hierarchy. A tree needs the carbon dioxide we exhale as much as we need the oxygen a tree releases. In other words, its capture-and-channel dynamics are not bound to its internal structure and compositions, but more importantly are self-amplifying when its adjacent milieu thrives as well. This notion of mutual amplification should be a primary attribute of an architectural agenda for energy and should exert pressure on the intensive and extensive compositions of architecture in new ways today. In short, the flux and transformation of energy in a tree is a framework for its own success: a self-organizing assemblage of matter and energy that at each turn amplifies its quantities and qualities of life. With similar dynamics in mind, the biophysicist Alfred J. Lotka stated that “in the struggle for existence, the advantage must go to those organisms whose energy-capturing devices are most efficient in directing available energy into channels favorable to the preservation of the species.”3 Lotka uses the term efficiency in this statement, but it must be noted that in the self-organizing systems Lotka has in mind, any discrete operation of efficiency is in service of the larger energy hierarchy. In some cases, efficiency might be the right goal. In many cases, a very powerful system may consist of many less efficient components. As system ecology thinker James J. Kay states, any time one part of a system is optimized in isolation, another part will be moved farther from its optimum in order to accommodate the change. Generally, when a system is optimal, its components are themselves run in a suboptimal way. One cannot assume that imposing efficiency on every component in a system will lead to the most efficient system overall.4 Lotka’s message is less about efficiency of a capture-and-channel organization, but rather it prioritizes the overall power of the system. The focus on efficiency and optimization of building systems and components must thus be a subsidiary interest to larger energy hierarchies and the overall power of the system. The mutually amplifying self-reinforcement that Lotka describes is fundamentally a matter of natural selection.5 Universal energy laws state that systems will prevail that maximize power. Building on Lotka’s observations, systems ecologist Howard T. Odum studied the power of systems through a particular method of energy system diagrams. He mapped the extended cascade – the formation – of energy inherent in any object: the energy captured and channeled by an object. He named this captured energy emergy, with an “m.” In essence, he diagrammed the hierarchical set of energetic forces that have acted upon any object. Odum’s energy system diagrams help make legible the many formations and transformations of energy, visible and invisible, present in the appearance of an object. These transformations of energy might not all be immediately present in the current formation of energy, but they are nonetheless inextricable from it. 155

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(a) Components of a system

10.1 Odum hierarchy.

(b) Separation of items of similar scale:

(c) Tree example:

Leaves & small roots

Branches

Trunk

(d) Human village

Components

Shelters

Tribal center

(e) Energy systems diagram

Energy Sources

Emergy

e Used en

rg y

(f) Energy flow

(g) Transformity

“Low quality”

“High quality”

The appearance of trees It is useful to examine these energy hierarchy diagrams as they are manifest in the world. The immense taxonomy of trees indexes a range of adaptations to a range of milieux. Each of these adaptations typically serves to amplify the power of that tree in that milieu. As self-organizing capture-and-channel assemblages, there are obvious reasons why the appearance of a pinyon tree differs from that of a mangrove tree. Likewise, it is instructive to understand why certain plant species appear in a landscape after a forest fire and which species appear decades later as emergy has accumulated in the forest. Trees can, of course, be imported from diverse climates and arranged for picturesque qualities and other visual concerns. However, it is compelling and 156

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necessary in this context to think about the appearance of a tree by examining its development milieu: its responses and adaptations to that milieu and how it captures and channels energy as a series of productive feedbacks. The appearance of an object – a tree, a building – is directly tethered to its developmental milieu. As Odum’s energy hierarchy diagrams document, the “operations of energy” of that developmental milieu and object are bonded through a series of energy transformations. To help peer into the dynamics and operations of energy that shape the appearances of an object, one must look beyond mere quantities of energy to the relative qualities of energy. The various qualities, such as available or dissipated energy, are critical to understanding the efficacy and power of a system. The preoccupation with energy quantities alone occludes very important information in this regard. The relative amount of available and dissipated energy reveals much about the capacity of a composition to either reinforce itself or suffer from unnecessary entropy gains. For anything – a tree, a building – to persist, it needs to reinforce its power through design. “Since any energy transformation has less energy in the output, to prevail,” Odum notes, “the lesser energy produced and stored must be able to feedback and reinforce the input production, which is only possible if it multiplies or otherwise amplifies that process.”6 This puts any object in great tension with the energetics of a developmental milieu, as well as its physical milieu. Today this tension is a key topic of design for the appearances and formations of architecture as we transition from stored energy to local, environmental energy. Architects should design mutually reinforcing feedback relationships to more overtly amplify the limited energy available in its immediate milieu. A tree is a capture-and-channel device that reinforces energy intake to the mutual benefit of it and its milieu. But buildings are not trees, do not mimic trees in their behavior, and most emphatically do not appear like trees. Buildings have a specificity that is compelling in its own right. The arboreal example merely illustrates the operations of energy that are inherent in the morphology and appearance in general. A more anthropogenic example – a bicycle – will connect these ideas to design and building more directly.

Bipedalism and bicycles Bipedalism and an upright posture made human locomotion very powerful. However, as Ivan Illich has noted, “man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process.”7 The bicycle superbly captures human energy and channels it to the propulsion wheel. The chain drive conducts nearly all – 87 per cent to 99 per cent – of human power inputs to the drive wheel.8 Like so many self-organized energy systems, we employ bicycles because their design makes us more powerful. Any claim about efficiency, like this one, however, must always be put into a larger context; its energy hierarchy. In this example the chain drive is an efficient design, but its operation is contingent on a larger set of energy captures and transformations inherent in the preparation of the caloric fuel that feeds the body that drives the crank arm of the bike. A similar context would be absolutely necessary for a car or a building. 157

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Bicycles are also selected for more extensive purposes that enhance the overall power of their system, placing efficiency in a more suitable context. For instance, many of us recognize the many mutually reinforcing effects of metabolically moving a 175 lb object (a human body) with a 20 lb bicycle (e.g., thousands of miles per gallon of olive oil). The more common alternative of moving a 175 lb body by means of a 4,000 lb vehicle with hydrocarbon or electrical sources is also powerful, but the systemic effects are even more extensive. But again, the relative of emergy intensity of each mode of mobility and their respective fuel sources must be kept in mind. Yet other aspects – health, fitness, pollution, etc. – are inherent in such a comparison in the form of feedback reinforcements that far exceed the relative efficiency of a bicycle and a car – or a building – alone. The different composition or appearance of two styles of bikes – for example an upright road bike and a recumbent – can be best explained by their respective operations of energy (Figure 10.2). By altering the body’s posture, the recumbent increases power by reducing air drag on the cyclist. Due to this aerodynamic advantage, recumbents hold bicycle speed records and have been banned from cycling competitions with uprights since 1934. The diagram of forces in the more upright position of the bipedal human body on a typical road bicycle, however, is better suited for climbing hills, a milieu where the supine posture of the body in the recumbent is a less efficient capture-and-channel organization. The composition and appearance of bicycles – “styles” of bikes – reflects advantageous formations of energy inherent in their respective capture-and-channel designs and milieux. This helps emphasize that the evolutionary specificity of capture/channel designs fit for specific contexts is vital. For instance, bicycle designers have developed bikes with either double tires on each axle or wider tires on each axle for snow and sand conditions, milieux where other bicycle designs fail. Conversely, many new “styles” of bikes are developed only to enhance their appearance for the marketplace in which sales drive selection. This shifts development from a context of energetic power to cultural and economic power and reminds us that otherwise self-organizing processes are tempered by multiple motivations and ambitions in anthropogenic contexts; this is certainly the case in the context of building design. Over time, though, the morphology of the bicycle evolves as designs are selected to maximize power for their particular milieux. The design of bicycles reinforces by amplifying the rate of work accomplished. The price of a bicycle is justified in terms of work done. Bicycles help articulate the differences between the human design of objects and more strictly ecological examples, such as the tree. However, the historical development of bicycles, and buildings, reflects a type of evolutionary selection that shares some of the selforganizational behaviors of strictly ecological evolutions: more powerful designs tend to prevail. As such, the bicycle example helps demonstrate that energy is captured and channeled both as matter and as information about its role in the larger system. The evolution of that information is essential to understand the style of energy formations in architecture.

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10.2 Patent bikes.

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Shape The appearance of bicycles and trees begin to indicate how visible and non-visible features of an object are but expressions of the operations of energy in an object. In a capture-and-channel morphology of architecture, the shape of a building – the appearance of its outlines – should be of central importance and of great disciplinary interest, albeit in a radically more operative manner. This demands greater attention to the performative capacity of shape in architecture alongside other disciplinary concerns and compositional preoccupations in architecture. Shape matters. In landscape ecology, for instance, the shape of a patch in a landscape is a well-studied and documented factor of landscape functionality (Figure 10.3). For landscape ecologists there are a range of important primary 159

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Convolution (number of lobes)

parameters of patch shapes: human and non-human dynamics, degree of convolution, and degrees of compactness, to name just a few. These parameters reveal a great deal about the performance of a landscape: from its historical development to its probability for species diversity to the ecological exchange of energy with its adjacent milieu. In landscape ecology, patch shape is a diagram of the forces that shape it. It is also a diagram indicative of the active forces that index current and future factors that guide the successional morphology of the patch shape. The

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ecological power of shape is not easy to discern, but it could become an important design concern in this century. Similar observations exist for many of the animals in these landscape patches. Consider the shape of hares in extreme climates: jack rabbits and arctic hares. The jack rabbit of the American Southwest has an elongated profile with maximal convolution. This shape maximizes thermodynamic exchange with its milieu, excellent for cooling that fast-moving desert leporid. The arctic hare, on the other hand, tends toward an almost spherical shape that minimizes its thermodynamic exchanges; a conservative approach to its frozen milieu. Its ears must be critical for its predator–prey dynamics to justify their thermodynamic “cost.”

Buildings A building is neither a tree, a bicycle, nor a rabbit. But an architect can think about the specificity and appearance of a building’s morphology – its operations of energy and emergy – with the same ecological concepts and methodologies. This was once a more direct matter of necessity and common sense for builders. The massive inputs of hydrocarbon-based energy sources adopted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries significantly skewed a trajectory of often obvious patterns of self-organization for the capturing and channeling of energy through buildings. Self-organizing systems are blind, but today there are multiple invisible – and not so invisible – hands. Technological determinants, economic sanctions, building and energy codes, the ambitions of large corporations, insurance and finance backing, or the vagaries of culture may swerve the choices of individuals, groups, and whole societies. For this reason, attention to the operations of energy, feedback loops, and pulsing cycles all require more deliberate and overt attention from designers. While buildings remain parts of self-organizing processes that maximize power in this context, the explosion and implosion of hydrocarbon fuel sources that yielded so much growth in the modern era shifts some assumption about energy systems. There have been abundant hydrocarbon sources available in the last century. This century, however, will be characterized by increasing demand for diminishing hydrocarbon resources. Those petro-resources that remain, in turn, will become more and more costly. This has some specific implications for building design in this century. For instance, the ambitions of people, pedagogies, and policies engaged in sustainable outcomes are often associated with the goal of homeostasis. The shifting climate, resource, population, and economic conditions inherent in the pulsing cycle of the last and present century make homeostasis a confounding, if not errant, design and policy ambition.9 Decisions and ambitions that fundamentally target homeorhesis – complex adaptable structures that more knowingly track such changes – form a much more cogent goal. For instance, over the previous century, inexpensive fuels have favored flimsy, low-resource-intensive buildings that dissipate much available energy. The coming transition instead calls for, in part, the design of more durable and adaptable buildings today while resources are more readily available and can be used to 161

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store energy and information in an architectural way. Such buildings would be designed to prevail in a range of conditions that free available energy in the future. As such, the intensive and extensive appearance of such a building would be guided by the multiple energetics dynamics that confront this new century: from recurrent issues of human comfort to these larger emerging planetary dynamics.

Conclusion What kind of building should appear in this century? How should those buildings appear? To maximize power in a context of diminishing resources puts new types of demands on the design and appearance of buildings. It is not sufficient, and at times even misguided, to conserve energy or be more efficient with energy sources. Another, more architecturally specific, yet thermodynamically accurate, agenda for energy is necessary today. The power of the overall, collective system and its various feedback reinforcements should be a primary concern of architecture’s appearance today, and thus of an architectural agenda for energy. Although efficiency may be an important part of a maximum power design, it cannot motivate an architectural formation of energy nor answer larger, more pertinent and pressing questions. Our discipline needs to design much more powerful objects and, more importantly, much more powerful systems. We need buildings and systems that are designed to deliver maximum available energy for today and for tomorrow. We need to do so in a way that amplifies not architecture itself but qualities of life in the larger collective. Design decisions today that make available energy disappear tomorrow make the future a colony of the present. Other futures are possible, but only with an expanded agenda for energy and appearance. The appearance of architecture remains a central question for the discipline. Grasping the energy hierarchies of a building as a capture-and-channel proposition instigates larger questions about the formation and appearance of architecture in this century. In ways not generally familiar to architects today, an architectural agenda for energy must be premised on a more complete ambition for these hierarchies and transformations. This poses new opportunities and new obligations for design that elevates architecture’s purpose in this century. Architecture’s current, incomplete understanding of energy and its subjugation of energy to building simulations and certification mandates alone does not address the more pertinent topic of the self-organizing, complex adaptive feedback needed to make architecture more resilient and powerful. Thus a powerful architectural agenda for energy will be actualized when designers more overtly consider the operations of emergy in the morphology of architecture.

Notes 1 D. W. Thompson, On Growth and Form, New York: Dover Publications, 1992, p. 14. 2 Ibid., p. 11. 3 A. J. Lotka, “Contribution to the energetics of evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8, 1922, p. 147. 4 J. J. Kay, “Complexity theory, exergy, and industrial ecology,” in C. J. Kilbert, J. Sendzimir, and G.

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5 6 7 8 9

B. Guy, eds., Construction Ecology: Nature as the Basis of Green Buildings, London: Spon Press, 2002, p. 93. Ibid, p. 151. H. T. Odum, Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making, New York: Wiley and Sons, 1996, p. 26. I. Illich, Energy and Equity, New York: Harper & Row, 1974, p. 60. D. G. Wilson, with contributions by J. Papadopoulos, Bicycling Science, 3rd edn., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, p. 342. See Thomas Abel’s contribution in this volume for more on the topic of pulsing and resource peaks.

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Chapter 11

Visualizing renewable resources Daniel A. Barber

I In the summer of 2009 the research branch of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, known as AMO, submitted a report to the European Climate Foundation called “Eneropa.” As part of the Foundation’s Roadmap 2050: A Practical Guide to a Prosperous, Carbon-Free Europe, AMO had been commissioned to provide the “graphic narrative” that would help communicate the extensive technical, economic, and policy analysis performed by the Climate Foundation’s consulting firms (Figure 11.1). AMO’s contribution redraws the map of “Eneropa” according to method of energy generation: “Geothermalia” in northwestern Europe; “Solaria” across the Mediterranean south; the “Tidal States” of the UK; “Biomassburg” in the Baltics; North, West, East and Central “Hydropia” hug the mountain regions. Not only do the names and divisions on this new map toy with geopolitical histories – most potently in the CCSR (Carbon Capture and Storage Republics) written across the former CCCP/USSR – each region is also fancifully represented with the mechanisms of a new energy technology. A blanket of solar panels, for example, is strewn across the rooftops of Barcelona. As AMO partner Rainer de Graaf noted in presenting the project, by suggesting “the complete integration and synchronization of the EU’s energy infrastructure,” “Eneropa” shows how “Europe can take maximum advantage of its geographic diversity towards a complementary system of energy provision ensuring energy security for future generations.”1 Given that it is the work of a leading architectural practitioner, and despite Koolhaas’ and AMO’s well-known predilection for irony, the “Eneropa” project warrants our attention for the suggestions it makes about how architects have responded to pressures on our energy system. Indeed, we can extract two points from the “Eneropa” project relevant to the history of the discussion of energy in architecture, and as a means to identify what is at stake in the present. The first point is that, over the last century or so, the design fields have become an important discursive location for debating, understanding, and thinking about environmental complications, and about energy in particular. This is, at least in 164

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11.1 AMO “Map of Eneropa,” 2009, courtesy of European Climate Foundation.

part, because these professions are involved in the formal and material conditions of the built environment – the global flows of materials, energy, and ideas have been of concern to architects for very pragmatic reasons – and in part because of a strong disciplinary tradition to focus on projection of a design concept into a future scenario. Architects have frequently been enlisted, as in “Eneropa,” to present a vision of future conditions based on research from an array of fields – economics, policy analysis, energy forecasting – and as a means to think creatively about environmental change. The second point to extract from this project has to do with the disposition of the images and ideas used by designers to represent means of environmental change. The “Eneropa” project is, again, quite explicit in this regard. In presenting it, de Graaf proposed that, despite the redrawn political boundaries, the most shocking part of [this plan] is how incredibly unshocking it is. Everything that moves is the same and still moves. Only the things that make the things move have all completely changed. It’s a situation where everything changes and at the same time nothing changes.2 Even conceding some ironic self-positioning, De Graaf’s words exemplify a broader trend in architectural strategies toward energy efficiency: through carefully applied 165

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technological innovations, this disposition holds, energy systems will be reconstructed in such a way that we almost won’t notice the difference. Daily life will stay the same – “nothing changes.” Or, more pointedly, the proposal is that in order for the social fabric to remain intact, dramatic changes are needed in technoscientific relations to the natural world. One could look at any number of recent “green” buildings to see a similar emphasis on technological innovation as the primary means by which our environmental problems can be mitigated. What other positions are available, relative to the relationship between architecture, energy, and environmental change? De Graaf’s approach to the complexity of environmental pressures can also be placed in some historical perspective. Indeed, as a counterpoint one could explore, as many interested in the history of environmental issues have done, the experimental practices of the 1970s. Here, as well, one can read architectural proposals and projects as a discursive location for explorations of environmental knowledge: in houses made of earth and detritus; in the premise of systems autonomy and self-reliance; and in the interest in participatory design and community development, the design fields served as an important site for debating the prospects and principles of environmental change.3 Distinct from the AMO proposal, many designers of the 1970s saw in technological innovations new impetus for social transformations: for new ways of living, and for developing new individual and collective parameters for engaging with the resource base.4 The countercultural premise was that anticipated energy scarcity could be managed through new forms of social organization. 5 If Eneropa is based in technological dynamism, the collective work of the 1970s placed its faith in sociocultural dynamism.

II Our interest here, then, is to describe how historical patterns of visualizing energy can be read as evidence of a broader cultural disposition toward means of environmental change. In particular, given the premise that the design fields are an important site for discussing energy futures, we can begin to construct a history of the creative visualization of renewable resources, and can read such visual material as attempts to reveal complications in the nexus of social formations, resource availability, and technological possibility. Further, we can begin to reconceive the history of architecture as, in part, a history of representing environmental knowledge, and of tracing changing dispositions toward the possibility of environmental change. The energy maps of R. Buckminster Fuller from the 1940s, for example, can be seen as one significant precursor to AMO’s “Eneropa.” Fuller’s maps open up the historical legacy of visualizing and thinking about the social possibilities inherent in a given energy condition. Fuller was the “science and technology” consultant to Fortune over 1936–1942, and produced a number of maps illustrating global energy uses and supplies. The “world energy” map of 1940 operated as an early proposal for reading the ecological footprint of social and industrial activities (Figure 11.2): Fuller placed population distribution (in white dots) relative to what he terms “inanimate energy slaves” (in gray dots) to indicate that the energy 166

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11.2 R. Buckminster Fuller, “World energy,” in Fortune, February 1940.

use per capita correlated to uneven cultural, political, and geographic conditions.6 The map also suggested that the amount of energy being used far exceeded available resources, and further that the US, and the east coast in particular, was the most egregious offender in this regard. Even more compelling than the maps themselves, Fuller’s images are symptomatic of a broad-based and complex concern over how to provide adequate energy in the post-war condition. While the period right after World War II is generally seen as one of endless energy abundance, it was in fact a period of intense debate. Fuller’s concern over the geopolitical dynamics of energy was part of a much wider inquiry over how to reconstruct the global economy so as to mitigate the uneven distribution of energy resources, to take advantage of emergent technological possibilities, and to absorb the complexities of post-war geopolitical tensions. 167

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Production rate: P = dQ / dt

Immediately after the war, the global energy system was in disarray.7 Policy makers, economists, corporate researchers, and others in the US were concerned about declining output from domestic oil and coal reserves that had been depleted by the war effort. The extent of Middle East oil fields was not yet widely known – nor, for both political and technological reasons, was their content yet available to US markets.8 Along with Fuller, these analysts saw this moment as a window of opportunity: an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between energy, technology, and social systems. 9 Prominent research projects and government reports were concerned with how to prepare for different futures, with varying levels of energy availability. The initial focus of such studies was to gather relevant data and develop means to visualize trends in energy supply. Thus a new field emerged in the immediate post-war period: energy forecasting, focused on extrapolating from present and historical data to predict the energy needs and supplies of the future.10 The best known of these forecasters today is M. King Hubbert, a research scientist at Shell Oil. Hubbert’s theory of “peak oil” (also known as “Hubbert’s peak”) was first presented in the 1948 paper “Energy and the fossil fuels.” Extrapolating from the slow decline of production in the Gulf States then going on around him, Hubbert proposed that the moment at which the cost of energy extraction exceeded the market value of the energy extracted could be predicted with some precision. Through determining these “mathematical relations involved in the complete cycle of production of any exhaustible resource,” he was also able to generalize about resource patterns, and to make predictions about future energy availability.11 Hubbert’s bell curves indicated that the decline in “economic availability” of a resource would generally be gradual, and in a more-or-less mirrored relationship to the rise, thereby allowing time to prepare for energy transitions (Figure 11.3). While Hubbert’s characteristic curve ended with an arrow pointing down, and was rooted in the expectation of eventual energy depletion, his rhetoric was a bit

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more optimistic. In the post-war reconsideration of the relationship between energy, technology, and social possibilities, the issue was less one of the imminent collapse of the current energy regime and more about how to estimate, on a long timescale, the number of years available for research into other sources of energy. Which is to say, the apparent decline of fossil fuel availability was seen, by Hubbert and others, as an opportunity for new sources of energy to be developed, and for new ways of living to emerge. Indeed, in 1948 Hubbert referred to the current moment as a “pip” in the historical development of “human affairs”; he saw reliance on fossil fuels as a historical aberration and the complications of the immediate post-war period as an opportunity to explore more reliable means of energy generation (Figure 11.4). Thus, while the lines on Hubbert’s charts may have appeared a bit apocalyptic, heading steeply downwards, at stake was the specific angle of that trajectory, and of the various social and technological means by which the period of prosperity could be extended.12 While Hubbert’s research is known to many today, the most prominent energy forecaster in the period was Eugene Ayres. Ayres, a technical assistant to the executive vice president of the Gulf Research and Development Company, and a well-known researcher on oil exploration methods, was also one of the most prominent advocates of alternative energies, and, even more than Hubbert, was focused on the eventual decline of fossil fuels as an opportunity to find new energy

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systems. Ayres developed his position in the heart of the oil industry. Asked to address the post-war energy condition by the American Petroleum Institute at their annual meeting in 1948, Ayres presented a paper called “Major sources of energy,” which was soon widely distributed.13 “Major sources of energy” had three themes: first, a comprehensive analysis of the global energy resource condition; second, an assessment of the economics of energy resource extraction that differentiated between non-renewable and renewable sources; and third, a proposal that a shift to renewable resources was a moral obligation even before it was to become an economic necessity. On the first point, Ayres presented data on the known state of global energy resources and their anticipated depletion, with careful attention to shifts in orders of magnitude as global population increases forced energy demand upward.14 He analyzed fossil fuel and other mineral sources, including uranium, on the basis of their extractive efficiencies and relationships to end use, and stated misgivings as to the capacity of these fuels to meet future needs. Ayres’ second, and most influential, innovation was to contrast this pessimistic assessment of fossil fuels with the endless possibilities pertaining to explorations in wind, solar, and water energy. He argued for a distinction between “capital” sources, based in resources buried deep in the ground such as coal and oil, and “income” sources, such as solar and wind which, once technology was able to better take advantage of them, would provide endless energy far into the future. Income sources, Ayres proposed, offered a return on investment that was categorically distinct from capital sources: technological innovations would not just lead to an increase in time-to-depletion – a slight extension of the declining curve – but would allow for a reliable source of power for the indefinite future – an arrow pointing endlessly upwards (Figure 11.5).15 The “host of technologists working constantly on problems of power production, transmission, and utilization,” he wrote, “should focus their efforts on income sources.”16 Many took heed of Ayres’ injunction: government and corporate actors came to assess their research programs with attention to the capital–income distinction, and numerous research projects were launched exploring wind power, solar energy, geothermal power, and other income-based projects.17 This distinction was also a major preoccupation of the three-week long conference sponsored by the United Nations, called the UN Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources, held in the fall of 1949.18 Though economic benefits were the paramount measure of his distinction, Ayres was explicit about the implications of capital and income sources for the future of civilization. As his third theme, Ayres saw development of renewable sources as the technological and philosophical baseline for the application of human intelligence to energy development. He asserted that technological engagement with income sources would indicate a triumph of human ingenuity far beyond the laborious and destructive extraction of stored carbon. Echoing Hubbert, Ayres wrote: “This tiny period of earth’s life, when we are consuming stored riches, is over. But man’s resourcefulness continues and becomes more potent with each passing decade. Because of this, the future is bright.”19 Along with Hubbert, he valued renewable resources not only for their potential to mitigate imminent energy crises, but also 170

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for the long-term implications for the quality of civilization that such methods were seen to produce.20 In the end, the historical significance of the analyses of Hubbert, Ayres, and their colleagues was not so much about the specifics of their projections – made, as we now know, with inadequate data as to the extent of fossil fuel reserves – but rather, for their invocation of the concern over capital resources as an opportunity to strengthen the economic and social institutions surrounding energy provision. The mid-century discourse on energy scarcity hummed with this notion that the technological demands to explore income sources was a test for human civilization, and it was marked by a profound sense of hope that a combination of technological ingenuity and social adaptation would not only lead to new routes out of the seemingly dire circumstances of energy depletion, but also to previously unforeseen benefits for social institutions and cultural production.21

III As in the “Eneropa” example with which we began, the design fields were seen by many in the 1940s as an exciting realm in which to play out some of these possibilities of reconceiving energy futures. What would a society look like in which energy from the sun, wind, and sea was endlessly available? “The eventual depletion of fossil fuel,” Ayres wrote, in an article exploring recent innovations in solar house heating, “will not be disastrous. On the contrary, for our children’s children the dreams of our architects and engineers will come true – communities of people who live in comfort without combustion.” 22 Part of the interest in architecture was pragmatic – the use of solar energy for house heating, both passive and active, was one of the most readily available applications of income sources in technological terms. It was also exceedingly relevant to the emergent growth of the suburbs – not only by producing the sort of leitmotif of a self-reliant citizen that fed suburban migration, but also because the open plot configuration characteristic of suburban development allowed for control over solar orientation, and the potential to maximize the absorption of radiation.23 During and right after World War II, hundreds of solar houses were built, most using passive radiation to reduce heating costs. These designs were generally based on a narrow plan and an all-glass façade to allow for solar penetration into the house in the winter, and with a carefully designed overhang that kept heat out in the summer. Radiant heat striking cement floors, and brick for the rear wall and interior partitions, operated as thermal storage, absorbing heat in the day for release at night. This “solar house principle” was celebrated in industry journals such as Architectural Forum and Progressive Architecture, popularized in the Ladies Home Journal and other shelter magazines, and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946.24 A series of solar houses based on active technology was later developed by a research group at MIT between 1947 and 1959, and a competition to design a solar house was held in 1959 that attracted entries from numerous architectural luminaries of the period. Though struggling to find a balance between technological innovation and cost, and often straining to articulate a clear architectural vision amid the demands 172

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of solar technology, these houses came to represent the possibility of a new and wide-open energy future – a future in which the growth of economies did not rely on the depletion of resources, but was rather rooted in the complex arrangement of designs for energy efficiency, new social values, and new arrangements of population across the national landscape. Indicating the intensity of these perceived possibilities, a 1949 article in Popular Science claimed that while advances in solar technology “cannot compete in drama with the towering cloud of death that rose over Hiroshima . . . the sun furnace may be the more important portent of the two.” 25 The cover image for the article shows a family happily enjoying the day while the sun heats the house – clean, free, and efficient – seeming to suggest, again, that changing territorial, material, and formal organization of the suburban house could mitigate the energy problem without dramatically changing life patterns (Figure 11.6). The house itself, based on one of the MIT

11.6 Ray Pioch, “Sun furnace in your attic,” illustrating one of the MIT solar houses. From Popular Science, March 1949. 173

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experiments, was far from ordinary. On one hand, it seemed to indicate, as in “Eneropa,” that life under a different energy regime would go on as before; on the other hand, if the “dreams of our architects” were to be fulfilled, it was assumed that a broad transformation toward designs for energy efficiency would need to infuse cultural and political discourse.

IV These solar houses, however, were not especially effective – the “sun furnace” illustrated in Popular Science only worked for about four years, and even so was reliant on continuous maintenance. This first significant wave of solar experimentation, as Ayres, again, noted in early 1952, was “overwhelmed by the flood of oil now coming out of the ground” in the Middle East and Venezuela.26 Diplomatic, military, and the efforts of a nascent CIA had succeeded in securing access to oil for the US and its allies, and the angles of the declining trajectory of fossil fuel availability, while still pointing down, seemed to extend endlessly into the future. What is even more significant for the present discussion is the image economy that began to circulate as experiments in alternative energy further developed. If the possible success of the solar house was overwhelmed by this flood of oil, the dream of a “bright future” and the insistence that the exploration of income energy would be a moral imperative before becoming an economic necessity, persisted. An article published in Fortune in September 1953, with a lengthy quote from Ayres as an epigraph, made this clear. Called “Power from the sun,” and written by Eric Hodgins, an editor at the magazine, the article surveyed recent solar energy experimentation. Looking not only at developments in house heating, but also innovations in using solar energy to render salt water potable, in the production of cultured algae as a cheap food source, in the use of solar heat pumps for irrigation, and early experiments in direct conversion to electricity, Hodgins’ article hoped to further spark interest in income technologies. Hodgins also began to change the image economy of energy futures. In a fullpage graphic entitled “Solar energy: global view,” the illustrators at Fortune developed an ambivalent image of the potential of solar radiation (Figure 11.7). Indicating the importance of the sun’s rays for the continuation of planetary life generally, its direct use for the daily needs of the population was seen by Hodgins as compromised by a “strange socio-industrial lethargy.” “The future world that does capture solar energy,” Hodgins wrote, “is not likely to be a straight-line projection of our present highly urbanized US factory-system economy.”27 Among other potential ramifications, Hodgins was interested in how solar technologies could be used as a means to manage US influence in the developing world; or more precisely, he saw the developing world as a site for experimentation in energy strategies that would later return to save industrialized economies from themselves. Hodgins knew these energy experiments, and their implications for economic development policy, well. Over 1951–1952 he had been a member of Truman’s “President’s Resource Policy Commission,” the goal of which had been to analyze “the combined material requirements and supplies of the entire free nonCommunist world,” as well as the government policies and corporate practices 174

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11.7 Max Gschwind, “Solar energy: global view” illustrating the article “Power from the sun” by Erik Hodgins, in Fortune, September 1953.

Total Annual Solar Radiation 1,000,000

All Figures in Trillions of

Reflection From Earth Received at Sea Level 400,000

Kilowatt-Hours

Deflected by Atmosphere 600,000

Evaporation 30,000

Annually Stored Energy In Water 4.0

Fossil Fuels

In Marine Vegetation 1,620

In Land Vegetation 180

Decay 137

Scale below this line magnified greatly Water Power Wind Power Food / Feed Trace 0.2 5.0

Fuel Wood 1.8

Liquid Fuels 4.5 18

1.4

1.8

Solid Fuels 11.7

Conversion Losses 4.7

Conversion Losses 2.9

Application Losses 8.6

Animal Energy 0.3 1.0 Mecanical Energy

Electric Power 0.3

2.1 Useful Heat

Transmission Loss 0.1

Available Solar Energy Land Vegetation Waterfalls and Peat Wind Heat Pumps Tropical Waters

Fossil Fuel Reserves

Degraded to Heat and Re-radiated

3.7

0.3

Oil Shale Tar Peat

Natural Gas Petroleum

Extraction 1.8

Solar Collectors for Heat and Power

Processing

Coal 0.8 Coal

Transportation 0.8 The pie chart represents the total amount of the sun’s annual bounty to the earth that could be converted to fill man’s needs for energy today. We fall far short: the present trouble with “free” solar energy is that it costs too much.

Domestic

The inner and outer limits of the world’s recoverable reserves of energy from fossil fuels are represented by the concentric circles above. Rising fossil-fuel costs are the lever through which we shall someday move closer to the service of man.

effecting them.28 The report of the commission, called Resources for Freedom, was edited by Hodgins and published in a lengthy five volumes plus a concise summary in February 1952. Representative of the broad interest in solar energy before the consolidation of oil, the report’s section on solar energy proposed that “the direct utilization of solar energy” was “the most important contribution technology can make to the solution of the materials problem”; a solution seen by Hodgins and others as necessarily global, and inflected by a new assessment of the relationship between political alliances and the economic growth of the industrializing world.29 175

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The house remained an important element of these reconceived energy futures, even as the promise of those futures was being re-read across the uneven global landscape. In an offset panel on the fourth page of Hodgins’ “Power from the sun” article there was a drawing of a simple bar house – similar to many of the solar houses mentioned above, with south-facing windows and an extended roof overhang – under the title “A not so utopian future” (Figure 11.8). While the basic principles of solar heating were implicit, the point of the illustration was to demonstrate how the house also “utilizes solar radiation to grow its own food, in the form of algae on its roof, on the assumption that the day is coming when population will make wheat fields and cattle ranges luxuries of the dear dead past”; other benefits were also illustrated. 30 The house was a stand-alone support system for a family of four, in a fashion that prefigured much of the survivalist ecology of the 1970s – from Sim van der Ryn’s Integral Urban House to John and Nancy Jack Todd’s Bioshelters, to Brenda and Robert Vales’ Autonomous House – which treated the building as a closed system, in which waste became the input for another system of production.31 The arrow of civilization’s future was here pointed in many directions. Indeed, Hodgins’ “Not so utopian future” placed a number of the visualization strategies we have been reviewing in an interesting light. Not only are the physical dynamics of solar energy rooted in a cyclical pattern, as he indicated, so are the technological processes of a self-contained living environment: waste becomes nourishment, “developing” countries of the South offer solutions to the “overdeveloped” countries in the North. Our attempts, then and now, to further exploit fossil fuels have only served to delay an inevitable turn to a more dynamic energy system – extending the curve of decline, before we have to, collectively, find other ways of living. While the general exploration of the closed system – as the basis for a global, national, and domestic energy economy – was well developed by the architects of the 1970s, its connection to this larger cycle of historical growth or decline has largely been lost (Figure 11.9). As in “Eneropa,” systems-based image economies

11.8 Antonio Petruccelli “A not so utopian future,” illustrating the article “Power from the sun” by Erik Hodgins, in Fortune, September 1953. 176

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11.9 Sim van der Ryn, “Energy flow in a closed habitat,” from van der Ryn et al. in The Integral Urban House, 1977.

Water

Water catchment rainfall

Methane generator Compost privy Cooking Aquaculture

Washing Drinking Wind

Windmill generator storage

Excreting Greenhouse garden

Lighting & electricity

Eating

Soil

Small stock

Space heating

Energy transformers

Solar collector & storage

Ecosystem

Sun

of energy use and supply have come to eschew the opportunities embedded in energy transitions, opting instead for technological solutions that claim little relevance to social change. By many accounts, we are now at the nadir of economically feasible fossil fuel extraction. Though predictions as to our possible future vary widely, “Hubbert’s Peak,” it is generally acknowledged, has been reached, and we are now on the downward slope. Not only will fossil fuels get more expensive, they also have the environmental costs associated with the changing climate. However, as Hodgins ended his article, with an echo of Ayres’ and Hubbert’s determined optimism: “there is more than one way of saving ourselves from the future.” Much of the work of energy researchers today is to render the arrow of decline more dynamic – not only through finding new energy sources or using existing supplies more efficiently, but also through facilitating new social movements that can encourage new ways of living in a changed energy future. What was needed in the 1950s, as Hodgins put it, was “a first hand to reach to close a valve,” other hands would follow.32 Rather than an insistent utopianism of technological possibility, the hope in the immediate post war period was for other not-so-utopian strategies, concerned with both the technological and social dynamics of new forms of energy: 177

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dynamics that can also provide creative opportunities for architects to visualize the present and future of our energy condition.

Notes 1 Reiner de Graaf, “AMO’s conceptualization and visualization of Roadmap 2050: A Practical Guide to a Prosperous, Low-Carbon Europe, lecture, Brussels, 13 April 2010, available at http:// oma.com/lectures/roadmap-2050-a-practical-guide-to-a-prosperous-low-carbon-europe accessed 31 January 2013. See also http://www.roadmap2050.eu/attachments/files/Volume3_FullBook.pdf 2 Ibid. 3 A survey of these strategies has been collected in a recent exhibition and catalogue organized by the Canadian Center for Architecture: see G. Borasi and M. Zardini, eds., Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture’s Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis, Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture and Montova, Italy: Corraini Edizioni, 2007. Many other recent publications have begun to account for the importance of the experimentation of the 1970s in conditioning current interest in architecture and energy. 4 On the mid-century scientific discourse concerning harmony, chaos, and other states of ecological change, see M. G. Barbour, “Ecological fragmentation in the fifties,” in W. Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: Norton, 1996, pp. 233–256. For the premise of natural limits, see D. Meadows et. al., Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New York: Universe Books, 1971. For a discussion of the roots of these issues in the discussions of the 1950s, see T. Robertson, “Total war and total environment: Fairfield Osborn, William Vogt and the birth of global ecology,” Environmental History, 17, 2012, 336–364. 5 For an example of such integrations of technological and social possibility, see G. Boyle and P. Harper, Radical Technology: Food, Shelter, Tools, Materials, Energy, Communication, Autonomy, Community, New York: Pantheon, 1976. On broader terms, Amory Lovin’s Soft Energy Paths argues against nuclear power in part on the premise that it limits possibilities of social change in the future. See A. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace, New York: Harper, 1977. 6 “World energy: a map by R. Buckminster Fuller [executed by Philip Ragan],” Fortune 21 (2), 1940, 7. Fuller’s interest in visualizing the dynamic between energy and population more effectively was one of the instigations to the famous dymaxion map, a more aggressive attempt to “bring home” to Fortune’s readers the impact their behaviors can have on the broader resource condition 7 Recently, historians have begun to reassess the post-war period with energy concerns in mind. The most effective text rewriting the energy history of the post-war period is T. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, New York: Verso, 2011, see especially chapter 5, “Fuel economy,” pp. 109–144. Post-war energy politics are also a primary concern of many of the essays in J. R. McNeill and C. R. Unger, eds., Environmental Histories of the Cold War, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. See also the foundational work of David Painter, especially D. Painter, Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of US Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–1954, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. 8 Of the seven billion barrels of oil used by the allies over 1942–1945, six billion came from the US, mostly from the Gulf Coast. See H. Ickes, “War and our vanishing resources,” American Magazine, December 1945, 18–23; C. D. Goodwin, “The Truman administration: towards a national energy policy,” in C. D. Goodwin, ed., Energy Policy in Perspective: Today’s Problems, Yesterday’s Solutions, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1981, pp. 1–63; A. E. Eckes, Jr., The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979, p. 120. 9 A. Barry, “Technological zones,” The European Journal of Social Theory, 9 (2), 2006, 239–253. 10 One of the first post-war forecasts was produced by a Harvard PhD student in economics working at the Department of the Interior. See H. Barnett, Energy Uses and Supplies, 1939, 1947, 1965, Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior, 1948. Barnett would later co-write an influential text resisting the basic premise of resource scarcity: H. Barnett and C. Morse, Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press and Resources for the Future, 1963.

178

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11 M. K. Hubbert Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, Houston, TX: Shell Development Company, 1956, p. 10; see also A. Lovins et al., Winning the Oil Endgame, Snowmass, CO: Rocky Mountain Institute, 2004. 12 Much of this work from the 1940s and 1950s was summarized in M. K. Hubbert, “Exponential growth as a transient phenomenon in human history,” Societal Issues, Scientific Viewpoints, Margaret A. Strom, ed., New York: American Institute of Physics, 1987, pp. 75–87. By this time Hubbert had received some renown, as his prediction that domestic oil reserves would reach their “peak” around 1970 appeared to have been largely accurate. 13 Ayres’ text was photocopied and sent to all members of the Institute, including many in government. It was the basis for E. Ayers and C. A. Scarlott, Energy Sources: The Wealth of the World, New York: McGraw Hill, 1952. 14 E. Ayres, Major Sources of Energy, Washington, DC: American Petroleum Institute, 1948. 15 E. Ayres, “International fuel economy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 281, 1952, 73–78. 16 Ayres, Major Sources, p. 112. 17 A number of relevant research projects are briefly mentioned in R. H. K. Vietor, Energy Policy in America since 1945: A Study of Business Government Relations, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Vietor’s focus is on attempts to extract liquid fuel from coal and shale, but he describes well the broader interest in alternatives. It is worth noting that until the 1960s nuclear energy was also considered an ‘alternative source’ and was subject, as has been well documented, to intense efforts to develop its commercial viability. See B. Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006. 18 Proceedings: United Nations Conference for the Conservation and Utilization of Resources (five volumes), Lake Success, NY: UN Department of Economic Affairs, 1949. For a discussion of Ayres’ influence, see C. N. Gibboney, “The United Nations Scientific Conference for the Conservation and Utilization of Resources,” Science 110 (2869), 1949, 675–678. 19 Ayers and Scarlott, Energy Sources, p. 279. 20 Ayres, Major Sources, p. 109. 21 Such peripheral benefits were also a major basis for interest in solar energy in the 1970s, as summarized in a well-known essay by Langdon Winner from 1980. He proposed that the energy benefits of solar power were secondary to the social benefits of decentralization, and the “salutary institutions [that decentralization] is likely to permit in other areas of public life.” See L. Winner, “Do artifacts have politics?” Daedalus 1 (9), 1980, 121–136. 22 E. Ayres, “Windows,” Scientific American, February 1951, 65. 23 On the confluence of architecture, energy, and the suburbs, see C. Macy and S. Bonnemaison, Architecture and Nature: Creating the American Landscape, New York: Routledge, 2003. 24 D. Barber, “The solar house principle: architectural experimentation and infrastructural engagement in the US, c. 1946,” Delft Architectural Studies on Housing, 7, 2012, 18–32. 25 H. E. Howe, “Sun furnace in your attic,” Popular Science, March 1949, 112. 26 Ayres, “International fuel economy,” 74. 27 E. Hodgins, “Power from the sun,” Fortune, 43 (9), 1953, p. 133. Ayres was referred to as “brilliant and learned” and taken to be the last word on the subject of solar energy’s potential. Hodgins was also the author of Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House (1946), a satire of a New York couple attempting to work with an architect on their weekend house, which was turned into a popular movie in 1948. 28 President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom: Summary of Volume I of a Report to the President, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952, pp. 2–4. 29 Resources for Freedom, p. 54. 30 This “not so utopian future” was based on an article from the June 1953 issue of the British journal Research; Hodgins quoted extensively from the article, in which the author, a German scientist named Hans Gaffron, described his vision: “The algae cultivated on the flat roof of a somewhat extended ranch house could provide all of the protein and some of the carbohydrate for the family living below . . . this house should have a roof slightly inclined to the south. A steady stream about two inches thick of a deep green algal suspension would be pumped over the roof. The carbon dioxide needed to charge the suspension might be derived from the burning of the family’s garbage.” Hodgins, “Power from the sun,” 134–135.

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31 See S. van der Ryn, Integral Urban House, San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1979; J. Todd and N. Todd, Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis for Design, San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1984, which summarizes the Todds’ work with the New Alchemy group; B. Vale and R. Vale, Autonomous House: Design and Planning for Self-Sufficiency, London: Thames and Hudson, 1975 and the collection of interviews in What Do We Use For Lifeboats When the Ship Goes Down? New York: Harper and Row, 1976. 32 Hodgins, “Power from the sun,” 194.

180

Image credits

1.1 ©Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, Design Architect 1.2 Rendering by the Miller Hull Partnership 1.4 Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manhattan.amk.jpg. Credit: Matthias Trischler 1.5 US Navy photo by MC3 Eduardo Zaragoza 2.1 R. S. Stein, C. Stein et al. 2.2 (Redrawn) Fernández-Galiano, 1982. 2.4 (Redrawn) H. T. Odum 2.5 (Redrawn) H. T. Odum 2.7 Public use, photographer, Lars Becker 3.3 (Redrawn) “Environment, Power, and society for the twenty-first century,” by Howard T. Odum. Copyright © 2007 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. 4.1 Photo by Eric Rosewall 4.2 Photo by Eric Rosewall 4.3 © Emanuel Louisgrand 4.4 © Emanuel Louisgrand 5.1 Photograph by Ray Gastil, 2011 5.2 Jim Bozek, La Dallman Architects 5.3 © Dana Getman/SHoP Architects 6.1a Photo by Vivian Loftness 6.2a Photo by Vivian Loftness 6.3a Photo by Vivian Loftness 6.4a Photo by Vivian Loftness 6.5a Photo by Vivian Loftness 6.5b Photo by Vivian Loftness 6.6a Photo by Vivian Loftness 6.6b Photo by Vivian Loftness 6.7a Photo by Vivian Loftness 181

Image credits

6.7b 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.7 9.8 9.11 11.1 11.3

Photo by Vivian Loftness Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society © Fondation Le Corbusier Courtesy of author Courtesy of author Courtesy of author © The Smithson Family Collection Courtesy of author European Climate Foundation, Roadmap 2050 (Redrawn) Reprinted by permission of Shell International Exploration and Production Inc. and its affiliates 11.4 (Redrawn) Reprinted by permission of Shell International Exploration and Production Inc. and its affiliates 11.5 (Redrawn) Reprinted by permission of McGraw-Hill Companies 11.9 (Redrawn) Gibbs Smith, publishers. Copyright Clearance Center

182

Index

References in italics indicate figures. Aalto, Alvar 140–1, 140 accounting, energy see energy analysis Adams, R. N. 21–2 adaptive architecture see environmental architecture adaptive cycle model 51 agriculture, urban 68 air conditioning 96 AMO (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) 164–6, 165 analysis see emergy analysis; energy analysis ancient buildings 151 animals, shapes of 161 Anthropocene 25–6 appearance 152–4 architectural style 2–3, 9–13, 15–17; and energy 93–4; evolutionary diagram of 11–12, 12; and performance 106, 107, 109–15, 109 Architecture 2030 Challenge 94 Arctic ice, melting 26 automobiles 79, 80 Ayres, Eugene 169–72, 171, 174 Banham, Reyner 1, 112, 141, 142, 148 Barcelona, Spain 97, 109 behavior changes, need for 79–80 bicycles 157–8, 159 biking 101 bioclimatic approach 112; see also environmental architecture bioconstructivism 16 biophilic richness 102–4, 103 boats, flat pack 125 Bordeaux, France 68–9 Building Research Establishment, London 107

building science 111, 112 built precedents 111, 113 Bullitt Center, Seattle 10, 13 calculators, mechanical 36 Calthorpe, Peter 86–7, 88 Cambridge, UK: Hawkes House 148–9, 148; Trinity College library 137, 138 Cambridge Library, Massachusetts 103 cantilevers 93 capital, thermodynamic 27 capture-and-channel design 154–6, 156 carbon-neutral buildings see net-zero buildings cars 79, 80 Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris 103 Chicago 69 cities: benefits of high density 43–4, 44, 85–7; ecological view 42–3; growth 42; reintegrate with regions 59–60; self-sufficiency 44; sprawl 42, 43–4, 79–81, 117; urban living 81, 86–9; urban nature 68–9 classicism 135, 136 climate change 26, 84 closed systems, houses as 176, 176, 177 community gardens 71, 72 community healthcare 67 compactness 43 competition 51, 56 composite materials 120, 122, 123, 125–6 computational tools 111, 153 connectedness 84, 88–9 conservation of existing assets 27, 72 construction codes 13 constructivism 16 consumption, limits on 86 convergence, spatial 56, 57, 58, 59 cooling 93, 94, 96, 97; see also shading 183

Index

cultural evolution 11, 18–20 cultural iatrogenesis 84–5 culture and energy 21–2, 40–2 dark energy 66 daylighting 94, 97–9, 99, 137, 140–1 density, urban 43–4, 44, 85–7 Depave, Portland, Oregon 70, 70, 71 desertification 26 Dockside Green, Victoria, British Columbia 100 dynamic shading 95, 95, 108, 141 Dyson, Anna 87–8 Earth Summit 65 East River Esplanade, New York City 77, 79 Eco-Boulevards, Chicago 69 ecological corridors 69 ecological economics see emergy analysis ecological succession 41, 50, 51–2 ecological urbanism 114 ecology, systems 19–20, 50–2 economic forecasting 30–2, 31 economics see emergy analysis; energy analysis economy: dependence on energy 64; growth-at-all costs 65, 66; informal 67–8 ecosystem climax 51 electricity 60 embodied energy 4, 27, 123, 151, 154; see also emergy analysis emergy analysis 4, 57, 155, 156, 157; Taiwan example 53–8, 54, 55, 58, 59 energy analysis 27–40, 28, 29; economic forecasting 30–2, 31; energy theory of value 33–7, 35; methodological problems 37–8; technological evaluation 32–3 energy certifications 81, 117–18 energy codes 13, 21 energy efficiency 2, 9, 19–22, 82–4, 86, 151–2 energy forecasting 168–72, 168, 169 energy memory see emergy analysis Energy Star program 117 energy system diagrams see emergy analysis energy theory of value 33–7, 35 Eneropa 164–6, 165 entropy 40–2, 43, 44 environmental architecture 92, 101, 110; daylighting 94, 97–9, 99, 137, 140–1; natural cooling 93, 94, 96, 97; natural ventilation 93, 94, 96, 97, 98; passive solar heating 94–5, 95, 112–13, 113, 136, 148–9, 148; performance and style 106, 107, 109–15, 109; see also green architecture; net-zero buildings European Climate Foundation 164 184

evolution 11, 17–18; cultural 11, 18–20 evolutionary diagram of style 11–12, 12 excess, in energy use 18, 21–2, 41–2 exposed power 141 façades: hot styles 93; solar houses 172, 173 5 percent energy future 67–8 food supply 67–8 forecasting: economic 30–2, 31; energy 168–72, 168, 169 forest succession 50, 51–2 Fortune 166–7, 167, 174–7, 175, 176 fossil fuels 26, 161, 168–70, 169, 175; growth due to 17, 18, 20, 51; oil 51, 64–5, 66, 168, 174; peak 51–2, 65, 66, 168, 171, 177 Foster, Norman 44 Fraunhofer Institute, Germany 95 Freiburg, Germany 102 Fuller, R. Buckminster 166–7, 167 garden cities 43–4 gardens 70–1, 72 General Homes, Columbus, Ohio 127 Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas 37, 40 Giedion, Siegfried 15, 17 Gilliland, Martha 33–4 Givoni, Baruch 112 glass façades 93, 172, 173 green architecture: designing in context 77–82, 78, 79, 88–9; rebound effects 83–4, 86; see also environmental architecture; net-zero buildings green design competition 81 greenhouse gas emissions 84 green infrastructure 69–71 green jobs 85 ground source cooling 96 Growing Water project, Chicago 69 growth-at-all-costs attitude 65, 66 Hannon, Bruce 33–4 Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, UK 135–6, 136 hares 161 Hawkes House, Cambridge, UK 148–9, 148 health and daylight 94, 98–9 healthcare 67 heating: ancient buildings 151; of cities 114; passive solar 94–5, 95, 112–13, 113, 136, 148–9, 148 hierarchy principle 50 High Line, New York City 77, 78 high-performance buildings 2, 87, 118–19 Hodgins, Eric 174–7, 175, 176 Home Energy Rating System (HERS) 117–18 household hierarchies 49, 52–8, 54, 55, 58, 59

Index

houses: as closed systems 176, 176, 177; passively heated 110, 110; solar 172–4, 173, 176, 176; see also single family homes Hualien, Taiwan 53–8, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60 Hubbert, M. King 168–9, 169 Huettner, David A. 34 hydrocarbon fuels see fossil fuels iatrogenesis, cultural 84–5 Illich, Ivan 84–5 impervious surfaces 70, 70, 71, 100 industrialized housing 119–28, 121, 122 informal economy 67–8 infrastructure: funding 80–1; restoring existing 27, 72; reuse of abandoned 77–9, 78, 79 Input–Output (I–O) analysis 28, 38 integrated building process 119–28, 121, 122 Jefferson, Thomas 81, 82 Jencks, Charles 11–13, 12 Jevons, William Stanley 39, 82 Jevons’ Paradox 82–4 Kahn, Louis 134–5, 141–2, 141 Korean Ondol 151 Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria 146–7, 146 landscape ecology 159–61, 160 Larson, C. Theodore 119–28 Le Corbusier 15–16, 133–4, 134, 138–9, 139 LEED certification 81 life-cycle analysis 33, 61 lighting 94, 97–9, 99, 137, 140–1 Lord, Lindsay 124–6 Lotka, Alfred 4, 19, 155 Louisgrand, Emanuel 71, 72 Lovins, Amory 82–3 Lustron homes 120–2, 121, 122 Lyon, France 71, 72 Marsupial Bridge, Milwaukee 77, 78 Masdar City, United Arab Emirates 10, 13, 44 matter, as energy 151 maximum power principle 20, 50, 53 mechanical services, as decoration 141–2, 141 Media-TIC building, Barcelona, Spain 109 Mertins, Detlef 16 Milton Keynes, UK 110 Milwaukee 77, 78 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 172, 173 mobility, designing for 101, 102 modernity 17 Monti, Mario 64 mortality 45

mortgage crisis (2008) 117, 118 multi-family dwellings 117 Museo Canoviano, Possagno, Italy 142–4, 143 Muthesius, Hermann 15 National Airport, Washington 99 natural cooling 93, 94, 96, 97 natural ventilation 93, 94, 96, 97, 98 negentropy 43, 44 Nelson, Paul 127 net energy analysis 32, 33 net present assets 72 net-zero buildings 9–11, 10, 84, 94; see also environmental architecture New York City 77, 78, 79 Obama, Barack 64 Odum, Eugene 43, 58–60 Odum, Howard T. 4, 33, 43, 53, 56, 155; recommendations for transition 58–60; systems ecology 19–20, 50–2; see also emergy analysis Office for Metropolitan Architecture (AMO) 164–6, 165 oil 51, 64–5, 66, 168, 174 Olgyay, Aladar 111–12 Olgyay, Victor 111–12 optimization 88, 151–2 overhangs: solar houses 172, 176; undulating 93 Owen, David 82–3, 85, 86, 87 Ozenfant, Amédée 15–16 Palladio, Andrea 142, 143 parking spaces 70 Passive House Certifications 118 passive renewable energies 101, 110; daylighting 94, 97–9, 99, 137, 140–1; natural cooling 93, 94, 96, 97; natural ventilation 93, 94, 96, 97, 98; passive solar heating 94–5, 95, 112–13, 113, 136, 148–9, 148 passive urbanism 88–9 patch shapes 159–61, 160 pavement removal 70, 70, 71 pay-back time analysis 32, 33 peak oil 65, 66, 168, 177 performance of buildings 87; high 2, 87, 118–19; simulations 111; and style 106, 107, 109–15, 109 photovoltaic panels 9, 10 physiological experience of buildings 153 Popular Science 173, 173 population 19, 25, 26, 58–9, 169 poured-glass façades 93 power delivery 20 precedents, built 111, 113 process analysis 28, 28, 29, 38 production hierarchies 20, 52–8, 54, 55, 58, 59 185

Index

prosperous living 60 Purists, The 15–16 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine 14 rabbits 161 rainwater management 100, 100 randomized fins 93 rebound effects 82–4, 86 regionally appropriate design 92, 101, 112 renewable energies 9–10, 65, 118–19, 169, 170–2, 171; see also passive renewable energies renewable resources 50–1 restoration of existing assets 27, 72 Richards Medical Research Laboratory, Philadelphia 141–2, 141 Rio+20 summit 65 Roman bathing complexes 151 Ruiz Geli, Enric 109 Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain 97 St. George’s school, Wallasey, UK 112, 113 Sarkozy, Nicolas 68 Scarpa, Carlo 142–4, 143 scrims 94 sealed buildings 93, 96 sea level rise 26 Seattle 10, 13 self-limitation 41–2 self-organization 19, 20, 22, 49–51, 56, 155, 161 self-sufficiency: cities 44; houses 176, 176, 177 semi-detached houses, UK 110, 110 Semper, Gottried 14–15 Seville, Spain 44 shading 95, 95, 108, 112, 141 shadow prices 33 shape 159–61, 160 simulation software 111, 153 single family homes: high-performance 118–19; post-war industrialized 119–28, 121, 122; rebound effect studies 83; size 117, 118; wastefulness 116–18; see also houses slow-renewable resources 50–1 Smart Growth America (SGA) 117 Smith, Adam 83 Smithson, Alison 144–5, 144 Smithson, Peter 144–5, 144 Smythson, Robert 135–6, 136 social hierarchies 49, 52–8, 54, 55, 58, 59 social role of energy 21–2 software 111, 153 Solar Decathlon 81 solar energy 172, 174–6, 175, 176; passive heating 94–5, 95, 112–13, 186

113, 136, 148–9, 148; photovoltaic panels 9, 10 solar houses 172–4, 173, 176, 176 solar stacks 107 spatial convergence 56, 57, 58, 59 spatial hierarchies 56, 57, 58, 59 sponge design 68–9 sprawl 42, 43–4, 79–81, 117 stormwater management 69, 70, 100 student green design competition 81 style see architectural style suburban living 80–1 suburban sprawl 42, 43–4, 79–81, 117 succession, ecological 41, 50, 51–2 sun furnace 173, 173, 174 sunlight see daylighting; solar energy suspended house design 127 sustainable design see environmental architecture sweat equity infrastructure 69–71, 70, 71 systems ecology 19–20, 50–2 systems energy assessment (SEA) 66 Taiwan: Hualien 53–8, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60; population 58–9 taxation and sprawl 80 technical solutions 79–80, 84–5 technological evaluation of energy 32–3 thermal bridges 93 thermal mass 93; see also time lag cooling thermal storage 172 Therme Vals, Switzerland 146–8, 147 thermodynamic capital 27; see also embodied energy thermodynamics 27, 33–7, 35 Thompson, D’Arcy 152, 154 Thoreau, Henry David 81 thunderstorms 50 time 45 time lag cooling 93, 94, 96, 97 transition, energy 25–6, 49–50 transportation 60, 101, 102 trees 154–7, 156 Trinity College library, Cambridge, UK 137, 138 twentieth-century architectural styles 11–12, 12 Two Mile Ash, Milton Keynes, UK 110 typology of buildings 13–17 universities 81–2 UN Scientific Conference on the Conservation and Utilization of Resources 170 Upper Lawn Pavilion, Wiltshire, UK 144–5, 144 urban agriculture 68 urban heat island effect 114 urbanism: ecological 114; passive 88–9 urbanization 42 urban living 81, 86–9; see also cities urban nature 68–9

Index

value, energy theory of 33–7, 35 van der Ryn, Sim 176, 177 Van de Velde, Henry 15 Vauban community, Freiburg, Germany 102 ventilation 93, 94, 96, 97, 98 Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, Finland 140–1, 140 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France 138–9, 139 walking 101 Wallasey, UK 112, 113 washing machines 82–3

waste, in energy use 18, 21–2, 41–2 water management 69, 70, 100, 100 Watershed Management Group (WMG), Arizona 70–1 waterways, urban 68–9 windows, erratic 93 world energy map 166–7, 167 Wren, Christopher 136–7, 138 Wright, Frank Lloyd 81 zero-carbon buildings see net-zero buildings zoning 13, 80 Zumthor, Peter 145–8, 146, 147

187