On McBride, see Daniel A. Barber, “Ringing Bells, Blowing Whistles,” in Frances Richard, ed., I Stand in My Place with My Own Day Here: Site Specific Art at The New School (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019): 194–197. As Walter Benjamin insisted in the early 1940s, and Giorgio Agamben has elaborated since, the state of emergency is not the exception but the rule. Neither Benjamin nor Agamben will figure prominently in what follows, though their imperative for a “new conception of history” hovers around this project.
He cites the importance of emigration and the ability to leave as essential to the strengthening of intellectual engagements and emotional stability, and then notes that “exit is really a meta-concept: it’s about alternatives… it means giving people tools to reduce influence of bad policies on their lives without getting involved in politics: the tools to peacefully opt out,” ➝.
Sarah Sharma, “Exit and the Extensions of Man” in Transmediale Online Journal (April 2017), ➝.
Thus the dark underbelly of Barry Commoner’s “four laws of ecology” from 1971: “Everything is connected to everything else; Everything must go somewhere; There is no such thing as a free lunch; Nature knows best.” Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature. Man, and Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971); see also John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet: A Short Economic History of the Environment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999) and Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive (London: Zed Books 1989). See also Felicity Scott, Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurty/ Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York: Zone Books, 2016).
Bruno Latour, “Which Protocol for the New Collective Experiments?” in Henning Schmigden, Peter Geimer, and Sven Dierig, eds., Kultur im Experiment (Berlin: Kadmos Verlag, 2004).
See ➝.
See ➝.
There are numerous discussions online about the impossibility of The Rock’s leaps between The Pearl’s twinned towers, with extrapolated arrows pointing him towards a sudden fall to the ground, ➝.
The seminal text here is Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).
See the three volumes on “Asset Architecture” published by the University of Pennsylvania’s Advanced Architectural Design program, ➝.
Herman Daly and Benjamin Kunkel, “Ecologies of Scale: Interview with Herman Daly” in New Left Review 108 (Jan/Feb 2018); see also Herman Daly, Steady State Economics (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1977). Daly defined a steady-state economy in 1973 as “an economic system made up of a constant stock of physical wealth (capital) and a constant stock of people (population), both stocks to be maintained by a flow of natural resources through the system.” The premise was that the consistency of the capital and population led to a regulated throughput.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (New York: Penguin, 2016): 132.
Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Bjarke Ingels has dubbed it “hedonistic sustainability.” See ➝.
The eco-modernist manifesto, signed by a number of prominent environmentalists, proposes that technology will allow humans to continue economic growth without undue environmental harm, ➝.
Some exceptions: SOOG, Crinson, Hein, etc.
See my: “Heating the Bauhaus: Architecture, Energy and Policy” Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, September 24, 2019, ➝.
The quote is from Belluschi’s entry to “New Buildings 194x–Office Building” in Architectural Forum (May 1943): 108, in which he described an early scheme for the project; it is quoted in David Arnold, “Air Conditioning in Office Buildings After World War II,” ASHRAE Journal (July 1999): 33–40. Seealso Meredith L Clausen, “Belluschi and the Equitable Building in History,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50, no. 2 (June 1991): 109–129; Thomas Leslie, Saranya Panchaseelan, Shawn Barron, and Paolo Orlando, “Deep Space, Thin Walls: Environmental and Material Precursors to the Postwar Skyscraper” in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 77, no. 1 (March 2018): 77–96; Joseph M. Siry, “Air-Conditioning Comes to the Nation’s Capital, 1928-1960” in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 77, no. 4 (December 2018): 448–472; and Leland Roth “Equitable Building” in The Oregon Encyclopedia, ➝.
PLANYC, “New York City Local Law Benchmarking Report” (New York: Office of the Mayor, September 2013).
Mireya Navarro, “City’s Law Tracking Energy Use Yields Some Surprises” The New York Times, December 24, 2012, ➝.
Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 172.
See Richard Neutra, Architecture of Social Concern in Regions of Mild Climate (Sao Paulo: Gerth Todtmann, 1948).
The drawings were published widely, in Architecture Forum, L’Architecture d’aujoud’hui, Progressive Architecture, and exhaustively in Neutra’s Architecture of Social Concern.
Neutra, Architecture of Social Concern, 112ff.
Kohr was also focused on urban dynamics, and in the 1960s and 70s had a regular column in the San Juan Star and wrote frequently for El Mundo, San Juan’s main newspaper. These articles were translated and collected as The Inner City: from Mud to Marble (Talybont, Dyfed, Wales: Y Lolfa, 1989). Schumacher acknowledged Kohr’s influence, as did the Schumacher Center for New Economics; see E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond and Briggs,1973): 17ff; and Ivan Illich, “The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr,” in The Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 17, no. 4 (1997): 157–165.
Daniel A. Barber, A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016): 63–88.
M. King Hubbert, “Energy from Fossil Fuels” in Science, vol. 109, no. 2823 (Feb. 4, 1949): 103-109; see also Hubbert, “Exponential Growth as a Transient Phenomenon in Human History.” Other Issues 3 (1976); Ayres seminal text is Eugene Ayres and Charles A. Scarlott, Energy Sources: The Wealth of the World (New York: McGraw Hill, 1952) which developed out of a 1948 report commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute.
Leopold Kohr, The Overdeveloped Nations: Diseconomies of Scale (New York: Schocken, 1977), originally published in Spanish and German in 1962. See also Herman E. Daly, Steady State Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral Growth (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977); and Herman E. Daly interviewed by Benjamin Kunkel, “Ecologies of Scale” in New Left Review no. 109 (January-February 2018).
Kohr, “The Overdeveloped Nations,” 107.
Appropriate Technology was a capacious framework for thinking about architecture, energy, and technology in the 1960s and 70s. See, for example, Simon Sadler, “An Architecture of the Whole” in The Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (May 2008): 108–129; Panayiota Pyla, “Hassan Fathy Revisited: Postwar Discourse on Science, Development, and Vernacular Architecture” in The Journal of Architectural Education 60, no. 3 (February 2007): 28–39; Carroll Purcell, “Sim van der Ryn and the Architecture of the Appropriate Technology Movement” in Australasian Journal of American Studies 28, no. 2 (December 2009): 17–30; Chelsey Schelley, Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017). Texts are forthcoming on the topic from Lee Stickells of the University of Sydney, and out of Meredith Gaglio’s recent dissertation on the California Office of Appropriate Technology.
Walter Gropius, “Houses, Walk-ups or High-Rise Apartment Blocks?” (1931) in The Scope of Total Architecture: A New Way of Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1943), 119–135; and CIAM, Rationelle Bebauungsweisen: Ergebnisse des 3. Internationalen Kongresses für Neues Bauen (Stuttgart: J. Hoffman, 1931).