In his seminal work on environmental management and architecture, The Architecture of The Well–Tempered Environment, engineer-turned-architectural-critic Reyner Banham begins with two conceptions of environmental management. To illustrate them, Banham describes a tribe who come upon a pile of wood and must decide how to use it to improve their environmental condition. Should they build with it or burn it? That is, should they use the material to form an enclosing structure, or to directly warm what is capable of being enclosed?1
Fire produces both warmth and smoke, which must be simultaneously managed to balance their respective advantages and disadvantages. In open-air conditions, with plentiful clean air and breeze, smoke is an easily manageable disturbance, while warmth is elusive at even a small distance from the fire. Bringing an open flame indoors amplifies its warmth-giving potential, but also its consequences, for instance, by filling the static air with smoke and exposing the structure to the risk of catching fire. The intertwining of comfort and enclosure thus necessitated builders and designers to invent new forms of environmental management.
On Air
Domestic heating and cooking infrastructure has been central to architectural thinking ever since the kitchen was brought indoors.2 In 1842, the homemaker Catherine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy sought to empower other homemakers, predominantly women, to become involved in the design of their homes so as to make them more efficient.3 When writing about the hearth, Beecher engaged questions of a building’s thermal performance: how to warm spaces and how to move, draw, and exhaust air.4 Her design for a single-story house includes a thickened central massing consisting of three fireplaces, two closets, and a staircase.5 These elements were surrounded by the main spaces of the home, such as the parlor, the dining room, and the kitchen, which all receive warmth from the centralized hearth—and in the case of the kitchen, a fire for cooking. This radial organization allowed fireplaces to abut multiple rooms while retaining a small footprint.
Beecher’s theories centered the hearth as both a design and functional element, emphasizing how it was both programmatic and performative, both social and thermodynamic. However, this was not a particularly new idea: in ancient Greece, the hearth was dedicated to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, home, and family and linked to everyday and communal life. By the Middle Ages, the hearth had become a central feature in European homes, castles, and monasteries. In the Certosa di Padula monastery, for instance, which was founded in 1306, cooking took place beneath a vast stone ventilating shaft.6 Cooks would regulate flame strength and consistency to ensure both the quality of the dish and the livelihood of the space’s occupants.7 The monastery’s kitchen is tucked beneath a barrel vault adjacent to a larger dining hall, with fireplaces and stoves lining the back wall. A large cooking worktable anchors the center of the space beneath the shaft’s sloping roof. Its steeply inclined surfaces guide smoke upwards, while three arched openings articulate the kitchen’s boundary. The space is at once a kitchen, chimney, room, and appliance.
The monumental chimney at the Padula monastery—operating at the scale of a room—and Beecher’s central hearth both frame acts of ventilation as fundamentally architectural, deploying walls, roofs, and vaults to contain both flame and spent air. As both an architectural and scientific concern, ventilation has long been expressed through architectural form and material. Chimneys were historically among the first elements to be constructed, frequently serving as prominent vertical markers on a building’s exterior, and were built from more durable materials like brick or stone. With the rise of industrialization and new heating technologies, however, the hearth’s performative and architectural centrality began to shift.
Cookstoves, for instance, first introduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as indoor kitchens became standard across middle-class households, burned solid fuels such as firewood below a cooking surface in an enclosed oven called a firebox and exhausted soot and other gaseous byproducts through a vertical duct. The cookstove made kitchens more accessible and smoke free, as not everyone could afford to have a room-scale hearth in their home. But as a result, concerns once centered on the hearth’s performance, including airflow and combustion, shifted away from the domain of architectural design to broader changes in technology.8
The hearth has not disappeared from design consideration altogether, as it still retains symbolic resonance as a marker of intimacy, comfort, and the idea of “home.” But the legacy of their spatial, formal, and aesthetic significance has created lasting tension between technical function and architectural expression. This can be seen in typical early-twentieth-century American kitchens, where new cookstoves and their exhaust flues would sit within old fireplace nooks. Opportunistically stuffing the stove’s flue into the chimney’s vertical shaft anticipates the wider practice of enveloping building technologies within architectural elements. Plumbing is another example of this: what was once a building—a separate outhouse, a visible aqueduct—has become an invisible network of pipes embedded in walls and slabs. So is the range hood, which in separating ventilation from the stove intensifies the dissociation of consumption from exhaust. This migration of environmental systems from architectural space to concealed infrastructures has both transformed architecture’s capacity to design environmental relationships, as well as the inhabitant’s understanding of how their environment is being managed.
Rather than designing environmental control as a spatial, architectural act, the architect’s role today is increasingly to coordinate pre-designed mechanical systems within and around architectural elements. This act of coordination is also an act of design—or rather disguise, through enclosing walls, millworks, organized patterns, and dropped ceilings—but points to two critical tensions at the intersection of architecture and building technology. First, architecture shapes people’s ability to sense and understand the environmental processes at work within buildings. Second, it signals a loss of understanding of these environmental techniques as architectural. As a result, architecture has distanced itself from building technologies rather than embracing them as architectural acts. In doing so, it casts contemporary forms of environmental management as external or secondary—as “other”—to the discipline itself.
On Envelopes
Architectural envelopes make it possible to distance oneself from surrounding (environmental) conditions. They aim to remove the discomforts inherent to a life dependent on the Earth’s temperament and geographic specificity—conditions often framed as uncivilized or non-modern. According to Victor Olgyay, “the primary task of architecture is to act in man’s favor; to interpose itself between man and his natural surroundings in order to remove the environmental load from his shoulders.”9 Such favorable environments are delineated through a membrane or enclosure—often represented in drawings as a single, continuous, thick black line closing back in on itself—and the mechanical technologies which manage and act upon the enclosed atmosphere. The contemporary terminology of energy efficiency—insulation, resistance-values, vapor barriers—is replete with the rhetoric of isolation and further positions the building enclosure as an element that separates and delineates.
Within this paradigm of enclosure, “sustainability” has emerged as an ethos towards architectural engagement with the climate crisis. Yet, sustainability and its rhetorics have singularly focused on energy efficiency, especially in the measurement of the envelope’s efficacy in keeping the inside in and the outside out. This delineation is sustained through tangible, thicker, and ever thicker amounts of insulation, window panels, framed walls, caulk, and membranes. Yet, to read the building enclosure as a bubble or shell is to abstract what is in reality an entanglement of nuanced thicknesses, perforations, and protrusions that are always and will forever be engaged in a constant and complex negotiation with our surroundings. The idea of an enclosed space, then, one that provides an absolutely isolated thermal or sealed space, is a myth.
But there exists another, often overlooked, narrative. Upon even a cursory closer look, building envelopes are made of many parts, each with their own gaps, expansions, and contractions. A plethora of pipes and flues penetrate the supposed purity of the thickly drawn line separating the interior from the exterior. These transgressions often go overlooked in educational settings, such as building technology and environmental coursework for aspiring architects.10 Envelope design, when discussed at all, often is presented as a “facade” project, focused on the semiotics of the exterior and projecting symbolic, aesthetic, and visual concerns, rather than focusing on the complexities of environmental mediation.
Within these pedagogical models, one can easily forget that, in the infamous yet canonical words of engineers Walter T. Grondzik and Alison G. Kwok, “the envelope of a building is not merely a two-dimensional exterior surface; it is a three-dimensional transitional space—a theater where the interactions between outdoor forces and indoor conditions occur under the command of materials and geometries.”11 Architect Sheila Kennedy even goes as far as to theorize this space as a public realm populated by infrastructure that is provisioning municipal services.12 Yet matter does not move only within the envelope’s cavity: it also moves through it.
Roofs, foundation slabs, and wall surfaces appear as agents of separation, but in fact carefully filter, connect, or slow environmental processes.13 Ventilation ejects unwanted, spent air from the interior. Flue and vent pipes circulate gases within the cavity of framed walls and ceilings before depositing them outside. Baffles, pipes, and caps inconspicuously protrude through the building envelope. These transgressions between the interior and the exterior hint at a building’s inhalation and exhalation, and reveal how the envelope is an interconnected, hybrid agent, complex and nuanced in its relative and inconsistent tightness.
Of Envelopes and Air
With the increasing presence of air pollution, toxins, greenhouse gases, and urban heat, it has become difficult to maintain a meaningful distinction between inside and outside.14 Interior air is always dependent on, and continuous with, exterior air. Thermal conditions are dynamically mediated across and through envelopes. Given the ongoing imperative to seek more radical and environmentally appropriate ways of building, and being in buildings, we might move away from increased tightness and separation, and towards synthesizing, mediating inhabitation with the ongoing processes that surround us, embracing their temperamental and cyclical natures. Towards these ends, air handling, plumbing, ventilation, and other systems can be seen to operate not only technically, but also as ideological framing devices.15 As such, they are media for speculating on new relationships between people and the environment.16
The installation Of Envelopes and Air features three walls and seven holes.17 This series of carefully designed envelope transgressions foregrounds the relationships between interior and exterior air. Rather than imagining the wall as a solid separator, the installation treats the wall as a porous medium traversed by specific devices. In this way, it works to collapse the illusion of a sealed interior, and shows, quite literally, that “nothing goes away.” Odors, heat, and contaminants do not vanish; they are displaced, transformed, filtered, or dissolved into larger atmospheres. For architecture and architects to have agency in shaping more sustainable ways of living, the discipline must return to fundamental questions of environmental management. This means confronting the relationships between building technologies, energy use, fossil-fuel and material extraction, and the ways buildings are made and operated towards the goal of conditioning our surrounding environments.
Banham Reyner, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (University of Chicago Press, 1969), 19.
For most of human history, cooking was done outdoors over open fires or indoors in semi-open hearths. Around the twelfth century, the introduction of the chimney in Northern Europe was transformative, allowing fires to be located indoors and their residual smoke directed outwards. See: Putnam, J. Pickering, The Open Fireplace in All Ages (Boston: J. R. Osgood and company,1882).
Catharine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, For the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School (Boston: Thomas H. Webb, & Co., 1842).
Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, 419–32.
Catharine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy: for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School, Rev. ed., with numerous additions and illustrative engravings. (Boston: T.H. Webb & Co.), 1843.
“Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park with the Archaeological Sites of Paestum and Velia, and the Certosa di Padula,” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed November 21, 2025, ➝.
Medieval Italian recipes even included architecturally-scaled climatic and ventilation strategies, such as references to the chef’s management of fireplace trammels, hooks, strings, and a variety of legged containers. Odile Redon et al., The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, trans. Edward Schneider (The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 16–17.
For the scientization of air management see, Liz Gálvez, “Cooked Air: The Kitchen and its Exhalate,” Footprint 15, no. 1, issue 28 (Spring/ Summer 2021): 127–39, ➝.
Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Design with Climate: A Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (Princeton University Press, 1963), vxi. Note that the gendered terminology comes directly from the citation.
Kiel Moe, Insulating Modernism: Isolated and Non-Isolated Thermodynamics in Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, 2014).
Walter Grondzik and Alison Kwok, Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings (Hoboken: Wiley, 2014), 175–80.
Sheila Kennedy, “Material Presence,” in Material Misuse (AA Publications: London, 2001), 6–8. See also my description of the cavity wall as a space of common detritus in Liz Gálvez, “If Walls Could Smell,” Disc 2.0: Intimacy, ed. Ian Erickson (2023).
Grondzik and Kwok, Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings, 175–80.
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992).
See for example, Slavoj Žižek’s lectures on “The Hermeneutics of Toilets” where he uses the example to show how a seemingly mundane object can reveal deep-seated cultural attitudes and ideologies.
See the discussion on media, in Daniel A. Barber, “Architecture, Media, and Climate,” Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton University Press, 2020), 2–21.
On view from June 9 through July 1, 2021 at the Farish Gallery, Rice School of Architecture, Houston, TX.