We Shape Design

As a recent panel discussion at PennDesign made clear, the emerging discipline of environmental histories of architecture is a complex and layered field of study. The discussion was motivated by the publication of A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2016), the new book from Daniel A. Barber, Assistant Professor of Architecture. The event was organized by Barber and moderated by Anna Vallye, Mellon Junior Fellow in Humanities, Urbanism and Design at Penn, and featured lightning talks and conversations with: Etienne Benson, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology of Science at Penn; Daniela Fabricius, Adjunct Lecturer in Architecture, PennDesign Sophie Hochhäusl, Assistant Professor of Modern Architecture at Boston University; and Mark Wasiuta, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP and Co-Director of the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program.

The evening’s discussion drew on the underlying themes of Barber’s book, including how solar energy experiments shaped architectural design in 1940s and 1950s America, and how architecture in turn mediated the relationship between humans and the biotic world. With those premises in mind, Daniela Fabricius discussed her own investigation of the relationship between German architect Frei Otto and his anthropologist colleague Johann Helmcke. Otto and Helmke shared an investigative interest in the evolution and physical structure of the human form—an intersection between biology and design that influenced Frei’s work as a structural engineer and coincided with the mid-century design experiments addressed in Barber’s book.

Etienne Benson’s remarks considered architecture’s role in the ongoing cycle of creating and reforming environments, both natural and built. With an image of a railroad cattle guard in the background, Benson reflected on the manner of life within the built environment—in the 1940s solar houses of Barber’s research, for example—and how human interventions in the landscape shape our relationship with the natural beings around us. When the railroad obliterated territorial boundaries in the 19th and 20th centuries, the guard became a necessary construction to deter cows from train lines and reestablish a physical barrier between the built environment and the natural world.

Sophie Hocchäusl’s presentation also approached environmental history through the lens of territory—in this case, of the wartime environment and the body. Her presentation focused on produce gardens in World War I Germany, and how the rationalization of food scarcity escalated from an environmental concern to social anxiety towards the human body and national identity. Mark Wasiuta’s presentation followed, looking at an environmental history of architecture from a different continent and era, but one that was no less fraught with tension between the body and the state. Grounded in the photography of the 1960s media collective Environmental Communications (EC), Wasiuta spoke to the ways that environmental imagery can influence architectural design. EC’s images highlighted environments of tension, centering on depictions of state control and spaces that enabled that control.

In the course of the evening, common themes of boundaries, technology, and communications emerged from the panelists’ distinct narratives. What united them is what Wasiuta called the feedback cycle of causality and invisible influences in the prospercts for more environmentally engaged design—in other words, how design affects us, and how we shape design.