As the current climate emergency deepens, it is no longer adequate to leave ideas of sustainability to engineers, practitioners, and studio-based educators. Ways of understanding and teaching architecture’s history must also respond. This needs to go beyond highlighting exemplars and models from the past for what they may teach us practically in terms of passive environmental conditioning. The very terms and frames of reference we use to discuss buildings in the context of history require reconsideration. This article proposes that understanding architecture from a radical material perspective has the potential to foreground the entrenched relationship between architecture and energy consumption in the history of architecture. Energy consumption is the key factor in climate change. Making historians and students more aware of how this critical relationship shaped the built environment through time places an emphasis, and thus responsibility, on the very high energy consumption of architecture. We propose two essential questions: how has humanity’s changing ability to harness useful energy interacted with the history of architecture? And how might we understand buildings through time not as objects fashioned solely by individual genius, patronage, stylistic movements and/or theoretical considerations, but as products that also result from the powerful nexus between assemblage and energy? This article attempts to demonstrate a possible approach, by sketching out three historical ‘scenarios’ that speak to different periods in time (pre-industrial, agrarian; industrial, coal- and steam-based; and late industrial, oil- and electricity-based). In these scenarios we trace regimes of energy consumption and their attendant networks of production, suggesting the centrality of such an approach to a full appreciation of building as a material process. We propose that this approach might form a new and complementary basis for research and teaching in the history of architecture.

中文翻译：

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建筑与能源：气候紧急情况下的建筑史

随着当前气候紧急情况的加深，将可持续性的想法留给工程师、从业者和工作室教育工作者已不再足够。理解和教授建筑历史的方式也必须做出回应。这需要超越强调过去的范例和模型，以了解它们在被动环境调节方面实际上可以教给我们什么。我们用来在历史背景下讨论建筑物的术语和参考框架需要重新考虑。本文提出，从激进的材料角度理解建筑有可能突出建筑史上建筑与能源消耗之间根深蒂固的关系。能源消耗是气候变化的关键因素。让历史学家和学生更加了解这种关键关系如何随着时间的推移塑造建筑环境，从而将重点和责任放在建筑的高能耗上。我们提出了两个基本问题：人类利用有用能源的不断变化的能力如何与建筑史相互作用？我们怎么能不将建筑理解为完全由个人天才、赞助、风格运动和/或理论考虑塑造的物体，而是作为组合与能量之间强大联系的产物？本文试图通过勾勒出三种不同时期的历史“情景”来展示一种可能的方法（前工业时代、农业时代；工业时代、煤炭和蒸汽时代；以及晚期工业时代，石油和电力）。在这些情景中，我们追踪能源消耗制度及其伴随的生产网络，表明这种方法对于全面理解建筑作为一种物质过程的核心作用。我们认为，这种方法可能会为建筑史的研究和教学形成一个新的互补基础。