Technology and Culture

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...