Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies

Joseph M. Siry

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780271089256
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970, documents how architects made environmental technologies into resources that helped shape their spatial and formal aesthetic. In doing so, it sheds important new light on the ways in which mechanical engineering has been assimilated into the culture of architecture as one facet of its broader modernist project.

Tracing the development and architectural integration of air-conditioning from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the advent of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, Joseph M. Siry shows how the incorporation of mechanical systems into modernism's discourse of functionality profoundly shaped the work of some of the movement's leading architects, such as Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gordon Bunshaft, and Louis Kahn. For them, the modernist ideal of functionality was incompletely realized if it did not wholly assimilate heating, cooling, ventilating, and artificial lighting. Bridging the history of technology and the history of architecture, Siry discusses air-conditioning's technical and social history and provides case studies of buildings by the master architects who brought this technology into the conceptual and formal project of modernism.

A monumental work by a renowned expert in American modernist architecture, this book asks us to see canonical modernist buildings through a mechanical engineering–oriented lens. It will be especially valuable to scholars and students of architecture, modernism, the history of technology, and American history.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building and Mechanical Cooling, 1890–1910
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter 2: Industrial Air- Conditioning from the Daylight Factory to the Windowless Factory, 1905–40
• Notes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: The Architecture of Air- Conditioning in Movie Theaters, 1917–40
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: Air- Conditioning Comes to the Nation’s Capital and the South, 1928–60
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: The First Air- Conditioned Tall Buildings, 1928–32
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Chapter 6: Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Windowless” Buildings for SC Johnson Company and the Air- Conditioned Tower
• Notes to Chapter 6
• Chapter 7: Air- Conditioned Glass Buildings in the Mid- Twentieth Century
• Notes to Chapter 7
• Chapter 8: Louis I. Kahn’s Architecture and Air-Conditioning to the 1970s
• Notes to Chapter 8
• Notes
• Notes to Introduction
• Bibliography
• Index