Reviewed by:

• Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning by Daniel Barber
• Betsy Frederick-Rothwell (bio)

Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning By Daniel Barber. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. 336.

If Daniel Barber's previous book, A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2016), was about letting the sun in, then his current book is about keeping it out. In both cases, Barber explores architects' engagement with climate through "modern techniques," which in this present narrative take the form of the architectural brise-soleil, or sun breaker. Investigating the period from 1930 to 1965 closely, Barber does not necessarily dispute the longstanding narrative that architects abdicated responsibility for climate—both indoor and out—with the introduction of refrigerated air conditioning around mid-century. But by concentrating on the decades leading up to this point, he is able to draw out themes and figures operating in the realm of "climatic modernism" that have not previously received sustained historical attention.

In this valuable contribution, Barber's approach focuses less on architecture's material output (although built works are certainly not ignored) and instead emphasizes the symbolic techniques of climatic modernism. Thus, the primary subject of inquiry is the technical imagery of architecture-climate analysis and design, everything from sun-path diagrams and dynamic-façade sections to microclimate maps and human-environment interaction schemas. This selective flattening of the analytical plane allows Barber to observe architectural production within broader systems of socioenvironmental transformation. As such, Modern Architecture and Climate aligns with a growing area of scholarship that treats the environmental technologies of buildings as critical sites for analysis of nineteenth-and twentieth-century capitalist formations, such as Michael Osman's recent Modernism's Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). This orientation also differentiates the work from the decidedly internalist approach favored by Reyner Banham in Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, the much-cited 1969 publication to which Barber's book will inevitably be compared.

The text itself is divided into two parts. The first section, "The Globalization of the International Style," centers on the climatic strategies of high-style architects, including Le Corbusier, the firm M. M. M. Roberto, Richard Neutra, and others. Yet this is not a study of aesthetics or influence. Rather the work of these well-known figures allows Barber to examine how wider networks of actors endeavored to render the environment an active agent in the ambitions of European colonialism, Brazilian sociopolitical modernization, and U.S. technocratic imperialism. The full accounting of [End Page 632] Le Corbusier's climatic design proposals is a welcome addition to a formerly piecemeal understanding, although the other insightful narratives traced in this section could indeed benefit, as Barber himself seems to recognize, from fuller engagement with recent scholarship on colonial and postcolonial practices of so-called tropical architecture.

The second section, "The American Acceleration," best demonstrates Barber's method, particularly the two chapters positioning House Beautiful magazine's Climate Control Project and the work of Victor and Aladar Olgyay's Princeton Architectural Laboratory within discourses of resource allocation and commercial development in the post-war U.S. housing industry. The final chapter signals the arrival of air conditioning, and a discussion of hybrid architectural-mechanical configurations leaves one with a sense of ambivalence (also perhaps Barber's own). In the end, it remains unclear whether the design or computational approaches discussed earlier amount to a genuine counterproposal to the fully conditioned "planetary interior" (p. 274). In one sense, they simply seem as different means to the same end—albeit with a somewhat lessened energy load—not a full reimagining of economic or cultural systems that could potentially reverse the entrenched matter of "people conditioning" (p. 262).

Given Barber's chosen method, it is expected that the material dimensions of interiors are not a focus. However, this leads to two minor points of contention. First, while Barber suggests that brise-soleil can stand in for a wide variety of thermally mediating building elements...

审核人：

• 现代建筑与气候：丹尼尔·巴伯的空调前设计
• Betsy Frederick-Rothwell（生物）

现代建筑与气候： Daniel Barber 的空调前设计。普林斯顿：普林斯顿大学出版社，2020 年。Pp。336.

如果丹尼尔·巴伯 (Daniel Barber) 的前一本书《阳光下的房子：冷战中的现代建筑和太阳能》（牛津大学出版社，2016 年）是关于让太阳进来，那么他现在的书是要让太阳进来。在这两种情况下，巴伯都通过“现代技术”探索了建筑师与气候的关系，在目前的叙述中采用建筑遮阳的形式，或防晒霜。仔细研究 1930 年到 1965 年的这段时期，巴伯并不一定反对长期以来的说法，即建筑师在本世纪中叶左右引入了冷藏空调，从而放弃了对室内和室外气候的责任。但通过专注于这之前的几十年，他能够描绘出在“气候现代主义”领域中运作的主题和人物，这些主题和人物以前没有受到持续的历史关注。

在这个有价值的贡献中，巴伯的方法较少关注建筑的材料输出（尽管建筑作品肯定不会被忽视），而是强调气候现代主义的象征技术。因此，研究的主要主题是建筑气候分析和设计的技术图像，从太阳路径图和动态立面剖面到微气候图和人类-环境交互模式。分析平面的这种选择性展平使 Barber 能够在更广泛的社会环境转型系统中观察建筑生产。因此，现代建筑和气候与越来越多的学术领域保持一致，该领域将建筑物的环境技术视为分析 19 和 20 世纪资本主义形态的关键场所，例如迈克尔奥斯曼最近的现代主义的可见之手：美国的建筑和法规（明尼苏达大学出版社，2018 年） ）。这种取向也使该作品与 Reyner Banham 在《温和环境的建筑》中所推崇的绝对内在主义方法区分开来，这是一本被广泛引用的 1969 年出版物，Barber 的书将不可避免地与之进行比较。

文本本身分为两部分。第一部分“国际风格的全球化”以高级建筑师的气候策略为中心，包括勒柯布西耶、MMM Roberto 公司、Richard Neutra 等。然而，这不是对美学或影响的研究。相反，这些知名人物的工作让巴伯能够研究更广泛的参与者网络如何努力使环境成为欧洲殖民主义、巴西社会政治现代化和美国技术官僚帝国主义野心的积极推动者。的完整的会计[尾页632] 勒柯布西耶的气候设计提案是对以前零碎理解的一个受欢迎的补充，尽管本节中追溯的其他有见地的叙述确实可以受益，正如巴伯本人似乎认识到的那样，从更充分地参与最近关于所谓的殖民和后殖民实践的学术研究中获益。热带建筑。

第二部分“美国加速”最能体现巴伯的方法，尤其是定位House Beautiful的两章杂志的气候控制项目以及 Victor 和 Aladar Olgyay 的普林斯顿建筑实验室在战后美国住房行业的资源分配和商业发展方面的工作。最后一章标志着空调的到来，对混合建筑机械配置的讨论让人产生一种矛盾感（也许也是巴伯自己的）。最后，尚不清楚前面讨论的设计或计算方法是否相当于对完全条件化的“行星内部”（第 274 页）的真正反建议。从某种意义上说，它们似乎只是达到同一目的的不同手段——尽管能量负荷有所减轻——而不是对经济或文化体系的全面重新构想，这可能会逆转“根深蒂固的问题”。

鉴于 Barber 选择的方法，预计室内的材料尺寸不是重点。然而，这导致了两个小的争论点。首先，虽然 Barber 建议 brise-soleil 可以代表各种各样的热中介建筑元素......