In an Architectural Forum article from 1947, Helmut Landsberg discusses how microclimates affect site selection.
Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning
By Daniel A. Barber (Princeton University Press, 2020)
It?s been more than 50 years since English architecture critic Reyner Banham wrote his ground-breaking The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, the first comprehensive history of the integration of mechanical and electrical systems into architecture. Lamenting the ?sheer paucity and poverty of academic discourse on the topic,? Banham set out to demolish the academic prejudices that had excluded these systems from serious consideration as integral to understanding the architecture of modernity.
In many respects, University of Pennsylvania Architecture professor Daniel A. Barber?s expansive Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning surpasses Banham?s considerable ambitions. Barber achieves this not just by his meticulous historical scholarship, but also in the way the book lays bare the principles that underpin our energy- and carbon-intensive built environment. Modern Architecture and Climate is a fresh and original history that chronicles the intense research undertaken by designers to adapt modernist architecture to various climate conditions, as modernism?s political and aesthetic influence reached across the globe. Barber?s history of the period stretching from the mid-1930s to the 1960s?preceding the widespread...