Buildings and energy: architectural history in the climate emergency

Abstract

As the current climate emergency deepens, it is no longer adequate to leave ideas of sustainability to engineers and practitioners. Ways of talking about 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.

Towards the microbial home: An overview of developments in next‐generation sustainable architecture

“…To keep up with the demand, a new kind of fuel was used—fossil fuels (first, coal and then oil, which is even more energy dense than coal)—were burned to generate energy, which released a seemingly ‘clean’ gas (colourless, odourless) called carbon dioxide (chemical formula CO 2 ). Barnabas Calder notes that form follows fuel , where the ready supply of effectively unlimited energy from fossil fuels could drive powerful machines (diggers, cranes) that enabled new methods of construction, expanding the repertoire of architecture (Calder, 2021 ). Associated new types of buildings were characterized by a particular machine aesthetic, as in the International Style, which were typified by rectilinear forms; light plane surfaces; open interior spaces; concrete, steel, sheet glass and cantilever constructions that sought to integrate traditional precedents with new social demands and technological possibilities.…”

Students in the Forest: The Role of Design‐Build Pedagogies in Repairing Material Disconnections in Architecture Education

“…This conceptual disconnection relates not only to an awareness of the carbon emissions of the buildings we are making today but also to the cultural status of the architectural canon. In his recent synoptic history of the discipline, Calder (2021) presents a radical reinterpretation of architectural history, not according to empire, style, or material, but according to human access to energy. According to this narrative, architectural modernism was not a product of the industrial revolution, but a product of an energetic revolution, one in which sudden and plentiful access to vast amounts of fossil energy allowed architects to create buildings in ways that were taller, wider, bolder, and, ultimately, more carbon‐emitting than ever before.…”

Icelandic Farmhouses

“…This book tackles the changes that occurred in Icelandic construction techniques within the specific frame of rural architecture. According to Barnabas Calder's interpretation of architectural history through its energy resources (Calder 2021), the history of Icelandic rural architecture can also be understood within an energy framework. The evolution of Icelandic farmhouses from turf to concrete is a clear example of how an energy system -that of fossil fuels, allowing more frequent travel, material exchange, and new building materials, especially Portland cement -was able to transform a thousand-year-old vernacular tradition at the northernmost tip of Europe.…”