This article was downloaded by: [University of Florida] On: 06 March 2015, At: 12:27 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Architectural Education Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjae20 The Greening of Architecture: A Critical History and Survey of Contemporary Sustainable Architecture and Urban Design Vandana Baweja a a University of Florida Published online: 06 Mar 2015. Click for updates To cite this article: Vandana Baweja (2015) The Greening of Architecture: A Critical History and Survey of Contemporary Sustainable Architecture and Urban Design, Journal of Architectural Education, 69:1, 121-122, DOI: 10.1080/10464883.2015.989005 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2015.989005 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. 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Senem Deviren Ashgate, 2014 216 pages, 215 black-and-white illustrations $54.95 (softcover) The Greening of Architecture: A Critical History and Survey of Contemporary Sustainable Architecture and Urban Design is a historical survey of architecture’s disciplinary engagement with environmental discourse starting with the rise of the modern environmental movement that began in the 1960s with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. The Greening of Architecture traces the paradigmatic transformation of green architecture and urbanism from its beginnings, as a set of remedial practices to offset the negative impact of architecture and urbanism, to more holistic multidisciplinary practices that engage ecology through systemic processes. The book, vast in its scope, is a linear chronological narrative organized along decades—1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The introductory chapter situates how environmental and architectural histories intersect. Although “green architecture” is a relatively new term, the authors argue that architecture and urbanism have a long history of environmental adaptive strategies beginning with ancient Greek civilization. The second chapter on the 1960s chronicles how the prevalent modernist architectural practices were questioned by environmental discourses as environmentalism entered public consciousness. The authors locate texts from the disciplines of architecture and urbanism, such as the Olgyay brothers’ Design with Climate (1963) and Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature (1969), within emerging environmentalism. Design with Climate was a manifesto for an alternative modernism that questioned the universality of a fossil fuel–dependent architecture. Design with Nature proposed a system through which tracts of land that needed to be preserved could be distinguished from land that was most suited for development. The third chapter addresses how events such as the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe and the OPEC oil embargo impacted architectural discourses and practice in the 1970s. The chapter chronicles how the renewed interest in research on solar architecture, fueled by the OPEC crisis, produced a range of responses that included the development of active and passive solar technologies, optimal urban configurations to harness solar energy, off-the-grid projects, and solar communities. Research on solar architecture—supported by Congress’s Solar Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration Act—led to significant progress in the application of active solar technologies with advances in solar collector designs. Institutional projects—such as the Colorado School of Mines (1975) by Anderson, Mason, and Dale architects and the Celestial Seasonings Headquarters Building (1977) by Joint Venture Architects—were at the forefront of innovations in active solar technology. Developments in active solar technology were directed at improving solar cell efficiency and reducing cost, in order to make active solar Reviews technologies mass consumable. The emergence of postmodern discourse is addressed in the fourth chapter on the 1980s. This chapter synthesizes the cultural responses to the placelessness of modern architecture and urbanism with environmental solutions to the problems produced by modern architecture and sprawl. The next chapter in the book, on the 1990s, examines how the Brundtland Report, published in 1987, transformed architectural practice in the 1990s. Sustainable development was first defined in the Brundtland Report, titled Our Common Future, as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” 1 Consequently, architecture and urbanism emerged as the key areas of intervention to achieve sustainable development. This chapter chronicles multiple technological responses to sustainability such as the rise of digital technologies to achieve economies of environmental performance, experiments with tectonic expressions of sustainability, emergence of the eco-technic paradigm, the simultaneous rise of low-tech building types, and the emergence of environmental assessment rubrics such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). This chapter is based on the premise that architecture absorbed the idea of sustainability largely as a technological solution to achieve efficiencies of environmental performance. The further development of green architecture and urbanism in this century constitutes the chapter on the 2000s. The authors propose that achieving sustainability required diverse strategies at different scales, from the molecular composition of building materials to regional transportation systems. This complexity led to the engagement with different disciplines to generate heterogeneous discourses on JAE 69:1 121 Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 12:27 06 March 2015 sustainable architecture and urbanism. As a response to the imbalance between anthropogenic activities and earth’s regenerative and carrying capacity, new nature-inspired biological paradigms—cradle to cradle, biomimicry, and ecological design— entered the field of design. Along with the development of new paradigms that redefined architecture’s production and consumption cycles, the authors trace the evolution of green architecture and urbanism as empirical domains of enquiry through the development of performance matrices—the carbon cycle, ecological footprint, and zero net energy (ZNE)—that define and measure “greenness.” The penultimate chapter is a brief account of global developments in green architecture, which is followed by a chapter that sums up the book. The relationship between architecture and sustainability is largely defined by applied environmental, construction, and material sciences. Architectural histories that explore architecture’s relationship with the histories of environment, such as Peder Anker’s From Bauhaus to Ecohouse (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), constitute a small and expanding field. This book fills an important gap by presenting the first broad history survey of green architecture. The book’s most important contribution is its synthesis of cultural and environmental histories of architecture. It is a valuable and much needed addition to the disciplines of architectural and environmental histories. Vandana Baweja is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and the Sustainability Program at the University of Florida. She received her PhD in history and theory of architecture at the University of Michigan in 2008. She was trained as an architect in New Delhi and received a master’s in the history and theory of architecture at 122 the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London. Her research focuses on the history of tropical architecture along the networks of the British Empire. She has presented her work at several conferences nationally and internationally. She was awarded the Oberlin-Michigan Exchange Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2008. Notes 1 World Commission on Environment Development, Our Common Future (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Broadcasting Buildings: Architecture on the Wireless, 1927–1945 Shundana Yusaf MIT Press, 2014 352 pages, 77 black-and-white illustrations $29.95 (hardcover) From the title, I thought this was a book about buildings for broadcasting from. But it’s not—it’s about architecture on the radio, architecture as a subject for broadcasting. If what distinguishes architecture from building is its capacity to be spoken about, to draw language into its orbit, then the question of the medium becomes important. A journal article, like this, differs from an impromptu conversation. And in the history of new media, radio offered a radically different means of representing architecture and the built environment. Though it robbed General architecture of its visual and material properties, the disembodied voice of the speaker inside the listener’s home turned out to be a singularly effective means of asserting the symbolic function of architecture, and of re-creating its aura. In the plethora of studies on architecture’s relationship to its media of representation, Yusaf takes a topic that no one has looked at before and has written a clever and perceptive account of architecture broadcasting in the early years of radio. The book is about the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC’s) architecture programs during the first eighteen years of its existence. Halfway through, there is a remarkable statistic: that for every two programs about visual arts—painting and sculpture—there were nine about architecture and the built environment. And there were twice as many programs about architecture and the environment as there were about literature. By 1939, the BBC was broadcasting one program a day that had something to do with architecture or the environment. Furthermore, these programs heavily favored topics having to do with modern architecture and design. Without doubt the BBC’s attention to architecture was to the advantage of architects, turning them into public intellectuals in a way that they never had been before, and giving authority to a profession that still struggled with its association with trade. But at the same time, architecture and design topics clearly served the interests of the BBC. It is the story of this mutual relationship that Yusaf unfolds so well, while at the same time explaining why the BBC chose to favor modernism, thereby adding a dimension to the account of prewar modernism in Britain that has not been told before. The BBC, under its first director general, John Reith, sought to include “people previously left out from the notion of public” (11), and
