Ventopenings: Conditioning in Pandemic Times. Part 2—Air Change
This is the second post in a three-part series. You may read Part 1 here.
Open Air
Our reliance on mechanical air conditioning was not inevitable. The history of architecture is replete with techniques, styles, materials, and processes that form a building in response to its climatic surround—rather than as a sealed, isolated, conditioned monolith. Indeed, as argued in the first post in this series, the period for architecture and its theories to be elaborated without attention to carbon and air conditioning has passed. It was a relatively short period, just a few decades—a period of unsustainable carbon intensity during which such building practices were facilitated by a petroleum-soaked global energy regime. From this perspective, modernism was in large part the mechanization of pre-existing climate-integrative practices. In sum: modern architecture developed in a period without air conditioning and developed as part of a range of techno-social activities that sought to adapt social habits to climatic patterns. Reconsidering those practices, as architectural devices and social possibilities, can help to lay out prospects for a post-carbon future (Figure 1).
Figure 1. M.M.M. Roberto, section of the façade of the Edifício Mamãe, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1945. From Progressive Architecture, Nov. 1947. Use courtesy of the Núcleo de Pesquisa e Documentação, Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Univesidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
One example is especially potent in the context of today’s concerns around the aerosol motion of the Covid-19 virus, and the retour à la normal: the interior environment of schools. In the 1940s the Austro-American architect Richard Neutra designed schools and community centers for the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico (Figure 2). Few were built, in large part because the governor, Rexford Tugwell, installed by Harry Truman, faced dwindling power amidst an eventual change to self-rule. Neutra saw in the project an opportunity to develop a method of architectural activity that took into account energy independence and mitigation of climate extremes through design, a sort of operational approach to architectural modernism that sought to manage the population and the landscape. In his 1947 book An Architecture of Social Concern for Regions of Mild Climate Neutra referred to the work as a “planetary test”: an attempt to configure the design project as a scale-able approach to territorial occupation—eventually, here, with schools, community centers, hospitals, housing and other buildings, all self-reliant in terms of cooling and climate management without energy infrastructure. [1]
Figure 2. Richard Neutra, School outside San Juan, Puerto Rico, with Rexford Tugwell (left), 1944. Use courtesy of Dion Neutra, Architect © and Richard and Dion Neutra Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
“The history of architecture is replete with techniques, styles, materials, and processes that form a building in response to its climatic surround, rather than treat it as a sealed, isolated, conditioned monolith.”
Open air schools were also a strong arena for research in northern European modernism in the 1920s and 30s, appreciated according to theories that valued fresh air as a salutary health benefit in the context of tuberculosis and the flu pandemic; theories that now inform a general reliance on increased mechanical ventilation. [2] Neutra’s schools deployed a hinge wall, not just a window. The entire wall opens to the yard (Figure 3). This allows the classroom to be part of the atmospheric conditions of the exterior—to be outside in terms of air quality and air exchange—while the remaining three walls protect from some transmission of sound and direct sunlight. The classrooms were arranged in a J-configuration with classroom yards open to each other, with lunchrooms at the intersections. The open school allowed for fresh air to be a constant part of the school days, in a rural setting and a comfortable climate.
Figure 3. Richard Neutra, plate illustrating designs for rural schools, from An Architecture of Social Concern for Regions of Mild Climate (São Paulo: Gerth Todtmann, 1947). Use courtesy of Dion Neutra, Architect © and Richard and Dion Neutra Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Neutra developed a design formula he referred to as the “continuous subsoffit airchange over lowered spandrel” (CSSA/LS) that attempted to model the specifics of Puerto Rico as a more general design formula (Figure 4). By inserting an air space between the ceiling and the roof, for which he coined the multi-lingual term “ventopenings,” breezes could enter deep into the room. As this structural frame was continuous through the building, the breezes could continuously circulate air through the rooms and corridors—although it is not clear how this ventilating breeze would circulate below the lowered spandrel. CSSA/LS is a sort of media architecture of the building envelope, framing it as a site for climatic innovation, for the production of comfort, for the facilitation of social adapt-ability. It is the opposite side of many spectra from the sealed, curtain-walled, conditioned office tower; it suggests a completely different reference for architectural innovation and economic growth. [3]
Figure 4. Richard Neutra, “Continuous Subsoffit Airchange Over Lowered Spandrel,” from An Architecture of Social Concern for Regions of Mild Climate (São Paulo: Gerth Todtmann, 1947). Use courtesy of Dion Neutra, Architect © and Richard and Dion Neutra Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
Relatively few locations, in the end, can support an open-walled classroom (Figure 5). The importance of Neutra’s experiments is in the demonstration of a nascent technique—an architectural, non-mechanical means of climatic mitigation—intended to be elaborated upon. With the CSSA/LS drawing Neutra clarifies a more general approach, a design method prevalent in the period surrounding World War II, before air conditioning was mechanically or economically viable, wherein the design and construction techniques for a given building on a given site were informed by an assessment of seasonal and diurnal conditions of the climate. The building was seen a device to maximize health and well-being.
Figure 5. Richard Neutra, Corona School, Bell, California, 1935. Use courtesy of Dion Neutra, Architect © and Richard and Dion Neutra Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.
For many, this was the promise of modern architecture—a capacity to adjust techniques and practices according to climatic analyses, and to improve life in the interior. Just a few years after Neutra’s Puerto Rico experiments, and with his express encouragement, the Hungarian émigré architects Victor and Aladar Olgyay began to codify methods for designing with climate. Their well-developed techniques may appear naïve in the context of more recent computer-driven modeling and simulation software tools, yet they were innovative in their time. [4] Aladar Olgyay in 1957 referred to a skyscraper façade as “an environmental filter.” Thinking here primarily of light and heat, he encouraged architects and their clients to assess façade and HVAC systems in tandem; that is, to consider the cost of the sealed façade in the context of the mechanical system it necessitated, on the assumption that, given those variables, a shaded, dynamic, bioclimatic façade would win out (Figure 6). [5] The Olgyays’ experiments with climatic analyses, and with the graphic representation of the same, elaborated on the logic of a shaded, dynamic façade to a system of micro-climatic analysis and application—a sort of pre-computational, non-mechanical, ventilated, interactive thermal interior, aiming to produce, rather than an engineered state of carbon fueled consistency, a space for climatic adaptability. This same space of climate mediation—the “comfort zone” as the Olgyays called it—and its energy and physiological optimization, is the target of contemporary performance metrics.
Figure 6. Aladar Olgyay, “Thermal Economics of Curtain Walls,” Architectural Forum, Oct. 1957. Reproduced with permission of Victor Olgyay.
Yet here we face another seemingly intractable obstacle in the forms and systems by which climatic knowledge is applied in architecture. Building performance optimization today tends towards finding means to meet comfort standards with less carbon through-put, while still operating within a carbon-based design method. Some of these endeavors imagine new ways of living, in new kinds of open, ventilated environments, but this is not the norm. The Passivhaus movement, as one prominent example, is predicated on a fully sealed system, maximized and optimized for health and energy efficiency. The “green building” template is too often just a scaled-down, less energy intensive version of the sealed curtain wall in the office tower, more attuned to its efficiency potentials.
Openings
Neutra’s examples don’t offer directly relevant solutions to the need today to reopen schools safely. Instead they illustrate our collective acceptance of the sealed interior as the model for contemporary social life. And yet, our computation-assisted knowledge of climate patterns and architectural design possibilities in the present so far exceeds the devices and methods of the 1940s and 50s, that we can only reel at the possibilities of a now computationally sophisticated discussion of non-mechanical means of heating and cooling; one that has, as the third article in this series will evidence, been going on for decades. We have a surfeit of techno-social knowledge to introduce, explore, and render comfortable a zero-carbon building. We scream to the rooftops not for technological knowledge, but for the cultural transformation and economic arrangements that open up to non-mechanical systems and the news ways of life they induce.
“For many, this was the promise of modern architecture—a capacity to adjust techniques and practices according to climatic analyses, and to improve life in the interior.”
In the face of the aerosol nature of the Covid-19 virus, we can expect that carbon emissions of buildings will increase: schools in August were advertising the intensification of their conditioning and ventilation systems, the more frequent changing of filters, the ascension to higher minimum efficiency reporting value (MERV) filtration ratings. More intensive conditioning of the air is needed because it will reduce the virus transmission. The given in this formula is that the built environment has no conceptual or mechanical infrastructure to manage airflow otherwise (i.e. through opening windows, not to mention ventopenings) (Figure 7). In some regions, holding classes outside, usually under tents, comes close to the examples briefly discussed above.
Figure 7. Diagram showing airflow circulation by thermosphere at the Douglas Kelbaugh House, Princeton, New Jersey, ca. 1975. Electrophotographic print on paper, 21.6 x 28.1 cm, ARCH254191. Courtesy of Douglas Kelbaugh Fonds, Canadian Center for Architecture. Gift of Douglas Kelbaugh, Copyright Douglas Kelbaugh.
As much as we are stuck inside, isolating ourselves and (hopefully) decreasing the vectors of viral transmission by minimizing contact, so will our built world likely intensify its reliance on the hard barrier of the building façade. The potential of the façade as “environmental filter” is both an obvious solution to our ventilation challenges, and seeming impossible to enact at a scale that matters, given the HVAC reliance built-in to our built environment. These are not problems with easy solutions—increased, targeted ventilation rates will save lives over the next few months, even as it further ossifies an infrastructural and cultural path dependency that was beginning, just barely, to open towards other conditioning options. It would be difficult to calculate the cost, in health or morbidity, of those lives or lungs saved today by increased mechanical ventilation relative to the lives and livelihoods soon to be compromised or destroyed by the warming climate, rising seas, and other impacts of carbon emissions. Yet these costs exist. The challenge, in the end, is to push forward on both fronts, managing near-term needs of minimizing viral spread, while also recognizing that novel and creative approaches to life in the built interior are increasingly necessary.
This is the second post in a three-part series. You may read Part 1 here. Part 3 will take the form of a discussion between historians and technologists Daniel Barber, Marta Gutman, Dorit Aviv, and Ahu Aydogan about ventilation, air quality, schools, and the challenges of the pandemic.
Notes
[1] Richard Neutra, “Regionalism in Architecture,” Plus 2 (Feb. 1939), np; see also Richard Neutra, “Planetary Reconstruction,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 3, no. 1 (Jan. 1945): 29-33.
[2] Paul Overy, Light, Air, and Openness: Modern Architecture Between the Wars (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008).
[3] See Richard Neutra, An Architecture of Social Concern for Regions of Mild Climate (São Paulo: Gerth Todtmann, 1948).
[4] Victor Olgyay, Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015) and Aladar and Victor Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices (New York: Reinhold, 1957).
[5] Aladar Olgyay, “Thermal Economics of Curtain Walls,” Architectural Forum 106, no. 10 (Oct. 1957): 154-164.
