PS04 Energy and Architecture: A History and Pedagogy for Our Times

In the essay “Monumental Architecture: A Thermodynamic Explanation of Symbolic Behaviour,” the late McGill professor of archaeology Bruce Trigger argued that energy is crucial to the governance over material extraction and infrastructures of transport, and that the rhetoric of power—displayed in the erection of monuments—is carried through time in the realm of the symbolic. If the monument is intended to be an eternal image, and the symbolic is to be received by future viewers, one of my questions on the larger theoretical issue is how far through the historical record can the rhetoric of power and material symbolism travel? In this paper I consolidate the Renaissance reception of one monumental ancient Egyptian building material—granite—and the thermodynamic infrastructure that, through historical texts and material agency, afforded the earliest archaeological insights into its symbolic meaning.

Egyptian granite as an architectural material originated in religious myth as a substance of solar power and evolved into a stone associated with the solar cult, dynastic strength, and the unification of Egypt. Around 3000 BCE, red granite slabs from the south were brought north on the Nile River. For nearly three thousand years, Egyptian kings continued to transport red granite north and employ it in architecture as a symbol of the south and of the sun. Roman emperors appropriated and modified Egyptian architectural iconography and continued the tradition of building with Egyptian granite despite the fact that there were known granite deposits in Italy. When faced with the exhaustive expenditure of energy required to move and cut granite monoliths in Rome, and when questioning the ancient transport of the colossal columns on the façade of the Pantheon, Renaissance architects began to rediscover the symbolic meaning of granite—not only in ancient Rome, but also in ancient Egypt. It was a thermodynamic Renaissance.

Stranded Assets explores how the cultural dynamics of architecture have mediated changing relationships between energy use and social patterns. Cultural relations to energy are foundational both to the patterns and contours of social life, and also to understanding how to adjust these patterns as new contingencies emerge. Architecture sits in the center of this dynamic.

A stranded asset, in economic parlance, is a mine or well for which the costs of extraction are no longer viable. There is still something there of value, but emergent logics no longer support the means to transform materials into products. The project speculates into the near future to imagine how some buildings from the relatively recent past will fare after carbon costs increase considerably. 

A first iteration of the project investigated icons of the modern movement that have since, or will soon, fall into dis- or re-use, as a consequence of poor energy performance and rising regulations on carbon emissions. 

This second round involves buildings constructed for oil companies: the activities inside these buildings will also be threatened by the increasing social cost of carbon emissions. 

This presentation examines three buildings constructed for oil companies, that also have shading devices on their exterior - British Petroleum Headquarters (Fry, Drew, Drake and Lasdun; Lagos, 1960); The Humble Oil Building (Welton, Becket and Associates; Houston, 1963); and Petrobras Headquarters (Mario Gandolfi, Rio de Janeiro, 1972). Of interest: why there were constructed with ambitions to minimize cooling costs (i.e. with shading devices); how the buildings supported resource, labor, and ecosystem violence endemic to methods of oil extraction; and how they might remain viable in a future of radically reduced carbon use. The presentation will involve analytic diagrams exploring potential futures for these buildings, produced by students in the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Environmental Building Design program. 

Historiography of modern architecture largely overlooks the important collaborative role of mechanical engineers in the making of major buildings that have held a place in the evolution of the modernist tradition. The career of mechanical engineer Fred Dubin (1914–92) spanned from the onset of air-conditioning as an energy-consuming technology for institutional and public buildings in the 1930s to the rethinking of architecture to conserve energy into the 1980s. Through the 1950s and 1960s Dubin was a close collaborator with major American modernist architects before he became one of the earliest and most influential advocates of reducing the operational energy of buildings through the innovative use of both passive and active technologies. Trained first as a mechanical engineer and later as an architect, Dubin led in the reconceptualization of both fields. This paper traces his intellectual and professional evolution as an advocate both of rethinking the design process around energy use and of closely integrating mechanical issues with spatial, structural, and formal solutions to make the first generation of energy-efficient buildings in the 1970s. Dubin’s collaborations included work with Harrison and Abramovitz on the First Presbyterian Church, Stamford, Connecticut (1953–58); Louis Kahn on the Phillips Exeter Academy Library, New Hampshire (1965–72); Pieri Luigi Nervi on Leverone Field House, Dartmouth College (1960–62); Nicholas and Andrew Isaak on the federal Norris Cotton Building in Manchester, New Hampshire (1972–76), the first multi-story office building designed to conserve and monitor energy use; and finally Dubin’s central role in the first unbuilt design of the federal Solar Energy Research Institute’s headquarters near Boulder, Colorado (1979–80), as a model of energy efficient building. In its exploration of Dubin’s career, this paper offers an alternative historiography of mid-twentieth century American architecture that deals centrally with design and energy. 

Experimental architectural culture in the mid-twentieth century was acutely weight conscious. For architects as different as Buckminster Fuller, Jean Prouvé, Frei Otto, Kisho Kurokawa, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, lightweight construction embodied a malleable range of virtues: from material efficiency to constructive finesse, and from flexible programming to the circumvention of capitalist property relations. While the success of light construction in recent decades has been critiqued as ideologically linked to processes of derealization and sublimation (Foster, 2011), a critique founded in the analysis of energy moves in a different direction. Embodied energy analysis provides an important avenue for challenging the persistent assumption that lighter buildings inherently consume less energy, a myth bound up with the historical prominence enjoyed by this corpus of mid-century architecture. This paper builds on such analysis by proposing a reading the “energy unconscious” of several projects fascinated by lightweight materials and structures (Szeeman and Boyer, 2017). The enduring resonance of the systems envisioned in many lightweight mid-century architectural projects lay in their articulation of imaginaries associated with new ways of energy intensive living. Drawing on the sociology of energy (Sheller, 2014, Urry, 2014), projects by Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, and Utopie are comparatively analyzed for the ways in which they accelerated the embedding of energy in particular forms and practices that became routinized in the decades after WWII. The energy cultures implied in these projects were bound up with important shifts in the conceptualization of energy in Europe at mid-century. The architecture of lightness in these experimental projects, this paper argues, finds its conceptual analogue in theorizations of “abstract energy” developed by Georges Friedmann and the Groupe de Sociologie du Travail, a form of energy no longer rooted in the laboring body or fossil fuels, but in the infrastructures of nuclear fission.

As urban change in the Gulf cities is “the most tangible outcome of oil wealth,” the recent urbanization in these cities has often been characterized as petro-urbanism. Likewise, as the distribution of oil rent (or revenue) is central to understanding politics in the Persian Gulf, the states in that region are seen as oil states. These theories of petro-urbanism and oil state have, however, been challenged recently. A number of scholars argue that all industrialized countries are also oil states given their dependency on oil and all car-based cities that rely on oil to operate and navigate are examples of petro-urbanism. While this argument rightly questions the tendency of seeing the Gulf cities as exceptional without deeper probing, it ignores the quantitative and qualitative differences heavily-subsidized and widely-available oil and energy in the Gulf cities made to their urbanism, politics, and societies. The key to a more nuanced revision of petro-urbanism is to understand how oil is mediated through space. More specifically, given that natural gas is the other major fossil fuel resource in the Gulf, it is “to follow the carbon” (Timothy Mitchell in Carbon Democracy) through space in order to understand how it circulates and converts from one form of resource and power (in both the energetic and interpersonal senses of the word) to other forms spatially, materially, environmentally, and—given my interest in air-conditioning and climate change—atmospherically. Focusing primarily on post-1950s Doha, I plan to follow the carbon while incorporating interdisciplinary theories of petrodollars recycling and urban metabolism to understand its built environmental and atmospheric transformations. I argue that these transformations have to be understood in connection to the circulations and translations of hydrocarbons into petrodollars, energopower (a combination of energetic and biopolitical power), and carbon-intensive forms of architecture and urbanism with energy-profligate technologies of air-conditioning.