coe066_barber.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Welcome back, everybody, to the Cultures of Energy podcast, you are here with us in the house, literally. And we're glad that you're here.

Speaker2: [00:00:32] This is the most exciting week of the year for those of us at SENCE at Rice University, and I'll tell you why this is. Well, it's also the most tiring week of the year. This is the week of the Cultures of Energy Symposium or Annual Energy Humanities Symposium. Maybe the only one in the world that's annual, we're not sure. But for us, it's like Christmas and Easter and Passover and Ramadan and St. Patrick's Day all wrapped into one, right? It is our holiday of the year. It is our celebration of our work. And so, yeah, it's exciting. So we're going to post this episode a little early because we're going to have a very busy few days ahead of us,

Speaker1: [00:01:11] Except instead of stuffing stockings or Christmas stockings where we're stuffing rooms full of brilliant people to talk about energy, humanities and instead of buying like video games, Christmas gifts, we're distributing energy, humanities

Speaker2: [00:01:26] Books. You don't have to follow through with every permutation of that.

Speaker1: [00:01:29] And in addition, instead of drinking green beer, right, we're drinking decent

Speaker2: [00:01:35] Red wine, chartreuse margaritas, probably. And well, that too.

Speaker1: [00:01:39] Anyway, so yes, it's a very big time. There's lots going

Speaker2: [00:01:42] On, there's lots going on and on the podcast today we have a very special guest architectural historian Daniel Barber, who is going to be talking about his work on solar homes from the Nineteen Forties and the nineteen fifties, and also on his more recent work on how architects from the nineteen thirties to the nineteen sixties figured climate issues into their work before there was really any climatology proper. So we're getting deep into architectural history today, and it's a really interesting story. I think I mean, I love this. I love looking at these height of petro culture moments that actually, you see, there was quite a lot of stuff going on with renewable energy technologies there. There are all these alternate futures that just didn't get pursued that now perhaps we can look at for some ideas as to where we should go right next.

Speaker1: [00:02:32] And also, I think one of the interesting things about this story is that he traces in the book that we talk about is that it's not just energy in terms of the production of electricity, it's about installation in terms of heating homes. Yeah. And so the sun and the home or the solar home is not it's not a home of solar panels and might immediately think, but it's actually a home that has a lot of window facades and allows in a lot of heat and kind of builds off of the environments of the southwestern United States, which is booming at that time. So it's a very, very interesting tale. I learned quite a lot.

Speaker2: [00:03:07] Oh, me too. Definitely. Yeah. And what else is going back this week?

Speaker1: [00:03:12] Well, I still like Veep, even though it may be the fault of all those brilliant writers that, in fact, Hillary Clinton lost the election. But you know

Speaker2: [00:03:21] What? Have I said this on the podcast already, if I haven't? Just give me 30 seconds to explain my theory that I think and this harkens back actually to that show. Twenty, for which you may remember from the heart of the bush years and

Speaker1: [00:03:35] Remember that had Kiefer Sutherland in

Speaker2: [00:03:37] It. Yeah, but not Kiefer Sutherland. And I'm sorry, I don't remember the actor's name from a different actor. The African-American actor who played the president and I remember that actor whose name I will now look up said after I think Obama was elected, he said, you know, Obama wouldn't have been elected had I not played that role because this was a show that everyone watched and he played this hyper competent. I think possibly conservative.

Speaker1: [00:04:01] Yeah, I think it was a Republican

Speaker2: [00:04:02] Or Republican president,

Speaker1: [00:04:04] But it was very statesmanlike

Speaker2: [00:04:06] And he was a good guy. He was a good guy. Honest, hard working.

Speaker1: [00:04:10] Remember that everyone wants a lot

Speaker2: [00:04:12] Of people watch, right? So his ideas, he kind of modeled a certain kind of presidential behavior. And then I thought, you know, in the last several years, we've had some, you know, a couple of brilliant comedies, at least featuring women in political life. One of them, of course, is Leslie Knope from Parks and Rec, who I think, you know, certainly was the person who put dignity, seriousness, commitment into public service, right in a way that was, you know, maybe a certain kind of model of what we imagine a public servant to be. And then we had Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing Selina Meyer on Veep, which is an utterly empty, soulless politician who is interested in nothing more than power. And what was scary as it was as though, you know, the Clinton persona was either deeply written into the DNA of that character or that we began to see that. I mean, I think the Clinton hatred went before Veep. I mean, long before it had much deeper.

Speaker1: [00:05:12] Right? Because people have been hating on Hillary for decades.

Speaker2: [00:05:14] But it was almost like this kind of caricature distillation of that Clinton stereotype that she was playing. And that's the sad thing is that, again, very popular show. And I wonder how many people were laughing along with that, a show that, you know, many political insiders say, is the one that is really what it's like to be in the White House, right? More than West Wing. How many people are thinking, Yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to like Selina Meyer President Yeah. Somewhere, I'm just not in a very deep in the subconscious or whatever.

Speaker1: [00:05:45] Right now, I think it's definitely possible, though in some ways, Selina Meyer is pretty different than than Hillary in the sense that she's constantly being hilarious and kind of, I mean, tragic but lighthearted at the same time. She's sort of the opposite of the seriousness of Hillary. I think it's an interesting proposition. Also, Veep is on HBO, which is an elitist cable television.

Speaker2: [00:06:05] Yeah, definitely.

Speaker1: [00:06:06] And twenty four was on cable. I mean, was it Fox?

Speaker2: [00:06:10] Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:06:10] So I think probably more people watch twenty four than watch TV, but still it's been. Veep is hugely

Speaker2: [00:06:17] Popular. I'm sure you're right about that also, because just in general, ratings have declined substantially over the years.

Speaker1: [00:06:24] I was actually not even going to talk about the return of Veep, which I'm excited about because I like her a lot too.

Speaker2: [00:06:30] Can I say one more, one more little thing about it? Ok, so and this is not a spoiler to anyone who's been following this, but apparently the next season is going to take place a year after she dropped out of the presidency. Oh, and I was listening to an interview with the showrunner who said this is actually it was a great decision to have made, because now that the current presidency is making it almost impossible to satirize things like it's push the boundaries of unbelievably so far, there's almost no way you could make the kind of inside White House drama funny anymore, because what's coming out of the actual house, you know, presidential speaker's office is funnier than anything they could write. That is a very unique type of satirical dilemma that they're facing now. Right? I think so.

Speaker1: [00:07:13] What are we going to say? Press secretary himself, like Hitler, didn't use chemical weapons. I mean, yeah, you can't even you can't even write this stuff. But the other thing, one more tiny little shout out to Julia Louis-Dreyfus is that she has a shtick with Amy Schumer. Yeah, Schumer, Amy Schumer. She and there was another comedian, comedic actress, The Last Fuckable Day.

Speaker2: [00:07:36] Oh, Tina Fey.

Speaker1: [00:07:37] That was Tina Fey, right? So anyway, so look that up. If you can find out, I don't want to give away the the plot as it were, but it's

Speaker2: [00:07:43] Like, I think you just whispered into your breath. Yeah, I

Speaker1: [00:07:45] Did. But that was so the listeners couldn't hear.

Speaker2: [00:07:48] But it's it's on the Amy Schumer show.

Speaker1: [00:07:49] It's on Amy Schumer.

Speaker2: [00:07:50] It's the last fuckable day.

Speaker1: [00:07:52] But the segue where I was going to make about five minutes ago was from the technology of the solar home to the technology of the new AAA website. Oh God, no. And that is that for those who it's not the American Automobile Association. Never fear it is the American Anthropological Association. And I know that many of our listeners

Speaker2: [00:08:12] Mentioned skip, skip the rest of that and just go right to the rant

Speaker1: [00:08:15] Start. I think it's hilarious because it's sort of like this Borg creature. So somehow the first. Well, first of all, there's an impossible set of quick forms that you have to go through, and it seems like every time you try and fill your forms, another one appears right like rise dramatically. It's like there's another consent form that you have to sign saying, like, I have read this form and sign this form now, click here. Now, read this form and sign this form and say that you read it and sign.

Speaker2: [00:08:40] You have to consent to having read the previous form and then sign off that it's like the most bizarre and like creepy thing, because I feel like you're you're basically signing loyalty oath to the Triple A. at some point, but

Speaker1: [00:08:53] I think the funniest thing. I mean, it's been madly frustrating to everyone. But people are going bonkers. But the funny thing about it is that it keeps like transmogrified the identity of people who are on these panels.

Speaker2: [00:09:06] People change into new people.

Speaker1: [00:09:08] Yeah. So like, I got dropped off of one person's panel in the middle of the night, right? Like she had checked it the night before. And then so it's somewhere like 3:00. In the morning I got taken away, I was disappeared and I got replaced by Chris Kielty

Speaker2: [00:09:20] On somebody else's panel. Yeah, that's amazing. Thing is, everyone on everyone

Speaker1: [00:09:24] Became Chris Quilty

Speaker2: [00:09:25] On our panel. Everyone who it's like being John Malkovich. Yes, being Chris Keltie, it's on our panel. Everyone who's signing in is suddenly finds that they are Chris Keltie. Like Chris Keelty's dashboard. They're trying to do Chris, Keltie things. And I don't even think that there's the whole kind of subtext of like achieving immortality through this identity, like in Being John Malkovich. I think it's simply, it's simply the computer is just like, is actually either a brilliant, surreal actor or is absolutely f.

Speaker1: [00:09:55] I mean, on the other hand, like being Chris Quilty, you know, in principle, is not a bad thing. He's great guy. It's very smart, very funny, very clever. You could do worse things to be than Chris Keltie, but

Speaker2: [00:10:06] Not naming names. But there are people who could do worse than to take on Chris Keelty's identity.

Speaker1: [00:10:10] And so many of us are occupying his body now. It's a little frightening. I mean, these are just this is just who we know about. Yeah, how could be like another seven hundred people out there who are now Chris?

Speaker2: [00:10:21] Keltie Yeah. How many, Chris? Eltis are out there a lot, probably, and they're all through the AAA website. Yeah, it's it's

Speaker1: [00:10:29] The to rearranges your rolls. It's like you're not presenting, you're an organizer. It's been quite quite funny. It's like you're not at the helm.

Speaker2: [00:10:37] You've been at. The hall is chaotic. It was all I've got to say. So yeah.

Speaker1: [00:10:41] Ok, so only costs like several hundred thousand

Speaker2: [00:10:44] Thumbs down to the days like submission system. This time around, they are sucking more butter than popcorn.

Speaker1: [00:10:51] Yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, it's sort of like probably worse than the Obamacare rollout, actually.

Speaker2: [00:10:56] Oh, considerably. Yeah. Right? Oh, well, OK. Well, let's get tried. Let's get out to the suburbs. Let's get out to the solar suburbs. Maybe take a little trip into the past into America's golden years with a certain Daniel Barber. What do you think?

Speaker1: [00:11:11] Yes. Go, Daniel. Daniel. Welcome back, lovely listeners to the Cultures of Energy podcast we are here today, live with the wonderful Daniel Barber. Hi, Daniel. Hi, how are you? Good. Good to have you here on the show. I'm here with my co-host, my fabulous co-host Dominic Boyer, who is going to launch us into our first set of questions.

Speaker2: [00:11:55] Our listeners are only lovely, but I am fabulous. Oh, but I want to recognize that the hierarchy of values that's been Daniel. It's so great to meet you. And again, we're going to shout out Mark Vardy again from the Princeton Environmental Institute for helping to make this happen. It was so great to meet you at Princeton a couple of weeks ago and to get to know your work. We had a really fascinating dinner and maybe we'll get around to that, hoping we can get back to that really interesting conversation about Grid at some point in this in this conversation. But I want to talk about your work first because it's fascinating and you had a you had a chance to or rather you shared with us your your book, your first book, A House in the Sun, modern architecture and solar energy in the Cold War. And I think it's a particularly fascinating work right now as people are thinking about a solar future, a solar economy and energy transition. And this is one of those terrific projects where you're looking backwards at not only the particular architectural spatial forms that came up around solar energy in the past, but also maybe some routes that weren't taken. So maybe just to get us started, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what what a solar home meant back in the 1940s and 1950s.

Speaker3: [00:13:03] Yeah, sure. No. And it is certainly one of the questions of how the past can open up different futures, and I think that was really an important aspect of the project. Part of what I try to document and in the archive was really sort of overwhelming in a sense, once I once I opened it up. But the two different aspects of solar housing in terms of design questions or sort of design and technology questions, which, you know, we still sort of operate according to this notion of the passive and the active. And so one piece was to use a number of, you know, architectural strategies, which is to say the way that the building is designed relative to orientation and the amount of glass on the facade, the kinds of materials that were used relative to their thermal conditions right to. So what developed was, I mean, what was even called at the time a solar house principle, which was just sort of a straightforward means to adjust a house to its solar potential, facing it to the south, opening up that southern facade with glass. And in fact, with some of the first uses of double pane glass to allow for a certain amount of insulation. So, you know, you sort of put all the living areas facing the south, let them get warmed up by the Sun during the day. And then the other sort of trick to that that sort of set of principles was the eve, right? The sort of extension of the roof as it goes over those windows was pretty precisely determined relative to the seasonal angles of the Sun, right? So that the sun in the winter, when it's low, could go into the house and warm it up and then the sun in the summer, when its high would actually be blocked by that protruding eave and not be able to enter the house, right? So just some pretty basic strategies on passive terms that allowed for the house to sort of correlate itself to its its regional condition.

Speaker3: [00:14:46] And and, you know, part of the I mean, it's not exactly an irony, but you know, one sort of aspect of this certainly is I'm working a lot as I do when I'm teaching with architects. And training today is is a specifically that question of the eve and its precise extension. I mean, that's something that can be determined with just a few keystrokes with the right software platforms. It took these guys in the forties about three and a half months. You know exactly what was going to happen. So so there's an aspect of how technology allows us to design differently. As much as there's an aspect of actual technologies one might be sort of placing in the house, right, right on those terms.

Speaker2: [00:15:24] And it seems like, you know, if you were to say Solar Home today, obviously people would be thinking photovoltaics, but this isn't at all what you're talking about at the time because photovoltaics hadn't been essentially invented yet. But it does seem to be something that has to do with energy and fuel. And I wondered if you could say a little bit about the context of why this happened in the 1940s that people first got interested in the idea of using solar thermal energy in in a different way?

Speaker3: [00:15:49] Yeah, no. I mean, it's again, it's it's a big sort of part of the story. And on the one hand, you know, photovoltaics were sort of being bandied about by the mid-50s, but they were not even worth exploring on kind of how seeding terms until the later, later in the seventies. One of the things that I discovered in the research and in terms of trying to ask my asking myself that same question sort of in this period of consumer expansion and economic booms, et cetera, like why? Why would the solar house even be on the table? And on the one hand, there is this sort of tail end of of scarcity questions during the war right and questions of material concerns and restrictions and. Certainly energy restrictions that were playing out during World War Two, that that inspired or encouraged a certain amount of exploration. But but one of the things sorry, an issue that I really sort of came to focus on was the the amount of interest right after the war, not only in architecture, really more at the sort of policy level and certainly within oil corporations. That was, you know, sort of anxiety concern about where oil was going to come from or sort of I mean, I listened recently to your podcast with Timothy Mitchell, and there were some aspects of his book that really helped to open up some of these issues for me in terms of the way he sort of frames the question of scarcity as a instigation towards forming certain policies around oil and encouraging government entities to sort of go out and find means to bring oil into the U.S..

Speaker3: [00:17:22] And that was certainly a piece of it. But you know, one of the story I tell in one of the chapters is what I refer to as the first post-war oil crisis, which is this sort of brief moment over the winter of forty seven forty eight, when there was actually a lack of heating oil in the American northeast, right along the eastern seaboard and a lot of complications about sort of breaking through those bottlenecks. And ultimately they were broken through and people's houses were kept warm. But there was just this sort of month long period of a lot of anxiety. A lot of press about sort of where's our oil going to come from? Concern about sort of how the U.S. would continue to maintain the flow of resources that it saw itself to be requiring. And that led to, on the one hand, the sort of stories we know about the, let's say, diplomatic, military and other sorts of efforts to secure a steady flow of oil into the U.S. from largely from the Middle East and Venezuela. But it also led to these experience experiments, you know, almost as a sort of hedge, right? I mean, sort of even if we do find some oil that's going to run away, run out eventually.

Speaker3: [00:18:28] So we need to have some other mechanisms in place. I mean, this was precisely the moment when Hubbert's peak right. The sort of theory of peak oil was was first sort of put on the table. Forty seven, forty eight. So there were a number of conferences, U.N. run conferences, sort of institutional conferences at places like MIT that we're putting solar energy on the table is a sort of long term future. Like we might find some oil for now, but eventually this is going to come back. We have to be prepared. We have to develop the technology to really tease this out more effectively. And the solar house, or I should say, the capacity to heat a house with solar means was seen amongst a kind of number of other things that were on the table as one of the most immediately viable ways to to use solar energy. So it became part of what I try to argue. And in a way that sort of persists to the present is that architecture in that sense sort of became a very appealing site for again, sort of corporate entities, policymakers, cultural actors as well to sort of think about these possible solar futures, right? So the house can sort of symbolize many other trajectories and kind of flows of knowledge and information.

Speaker1: [00:19:36] Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one of the things that I think is very interesting in this historical narrative is that the emphasis is upon heat rather than electricity, right? Because right? You know, in contemporary discussions, largely the discourse of the day really has has has focused on renewables as electricity producing resources. And what we see throughout your book is that it really is about heating a home. It's about solar insolation as well as insulation, right? And even even in this narrative of the, you know, the heating oil in the Northeast, it's all about, it's all about heat. But I wanted to bring us back to actually the first page of your book where you say something that I think is very important. What you say is that the growth in both energy resources and an energy efficiency was a necessary, if often unacknowledged component of the post-war economic boom. So I'm curious as to why you think that it it has gone largely unacknowledged. What is the dynamic there? Why? Why hasn't this been a more central conversation about, you know, the late 1940s or early 1950s? Economy and energy? How how do you see that omission?

Speaker3: [00:20:52] Yeah, no. I mean, it's a really interesting question, and I think that, you know, you know, in a way, there's a sort of broader question that maybe we can come back to about sort of specifically in questions around architecture and energy or sort of design and energy, how this sort of this and many other kind of histories of alternative methods, other forms of practice have sort of been hard to see, right? And even some of the figures that have recorded or sort of become chroniclers of environmental practices and architecture somehow sort of missed these same kind of 1940s experiments. I mean, I think on the one hand, there was a sense that I mean, you know, on the one hand, it's certainly. Say that many of the practices and even the sort of discussions and conferences I'm looking at can be seen to be somewhat marginal, even though I work really hard to sort of bring them towards the center. But I think that there's there was a sense that, you know, after I mean, effectively after Eisenhower was installed in the presidency and operating according to a different set of sort of laissez faire policies and foreign policies relative to questions of oil, there was kind of a sense that the problem had been solved, right? So I mean, there was almost this sort of triumphant notion that this period from right after the war to the early nineteen fifties was this sort of brief moment of some concern and anxiety around this. But then we solve that problem, right? And kind of a ready to move on and and, you know, so that kind of looking back at this sort of conundrum of this kind of intermediate, you know, five to 10 years in there doesn't really sort of connect in terms of the narratives in terms of the figures at play in terms of a number of the different discussions with what was happening immediately afterwards.

Speaker3: [00:22:32] So it sort of becomes this almost this kind of black hole, if you will, on the in the historical record and it's hard to it becomes more difficult to trace how some of these practices and activities and individuals sort of connected to other sorts of activities later on. You know, oil is just been, you know, there's even one of the one of the players, another sort of oil researcher that refers to the overwhelming flood of oil, right? That just sort of kind of overwhelmed this discourse, right? I mean, which is to say that there was no sort of question of cancel or compete or there were when wind energy experiments, there were geothermal experiments. Once one of the things one recognizes is the intensity of the broad economic organization around the petroleum economy. That was so again sort of overwhelming, right, that it was really hard to sort of poke any chinks into right so that these these issues, the extent to which the future from this sort of nineteen nineteen forties period comes to be formed around oil is so absolute in terms of our ways of life, in terms of the economic systems and sort of systems of material production that it becomes very hard to sort of recognize that other options were ever on the table, right? Mm hmm. Yeah, it's it's kind of discursive block, right? As much as a sort of material

Speaker2: [00:23:50] Material block if we ruminate on this problem often on this podcast.

Speaker1: [00:23:53] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure. Exactly. Well, and the kind of anxiety tied up with it as well, right? As as as you explained, there really is a question about scarcity and these worries about energy security and the solar house and solar energy takes a certain role and place in that dynamic because as much as we have a dependency on oil and a kind of fascination with it, at the same time, these carbon resources are always a point of anxious worry. Right. And the loss of it and what that might mean catastrophically. I have a kind of I think this is a more architectural question, actually, and that is throughout the book you. You explain that it really was important. Or I guess, you know, this is maybe just the way it unfolded that modern architecture in that particular aesthetic was was the dominant. And I, I believe the only form of, you know, sort of aesthetic form that was used for solar houses and that there was something implicit and explicit about modernism modernity as a particular aesthetic frame for solar houses. Can you tell us a little bit about why that is so?

Speaker3: [00:25:09] Sure. Sure. Yeah. And you know, there's again, a number of reasons that play out here. I mean, I think on the one hand, you know, part of what was was on the table here for me is this sort of I mean, to be a little schematic, right? I mean, the means by which the historiography of American architecture in particular has sort of seen the reception of European modernism. I mean, that already is problematic, that it was sort of European versus American on those terms, but nonetheless that that in this moment when when a number of modern architects are coming from Europe to the U.S. and and the sort of standard line has tended to be that the sort of social project that was embedded in a lot of the interwar developments of modern architecture in Europe sort of dissipated as it came to the U.S. and came to terms with corporate culture and suburban expansion and various things and. And so part of what part of the instigation to the project was to try to understand how this relationship to energy and sort of alternative forms of inhabiting the territory drew a different set of connections and sort of emphasized, you know, kind of intensified different trajectories and forms of influence relative to some of those questions of the sort of inheritance of European modernism, if you will, or the reception of it in the U.S.. So I mean, that's one piece of it is to say that. There was something still very vibrant about those ideas and the ways that they were translated and back and forth, frankly, across the Atlantic, that led to a sort of focus on questions of experimentation, right? And even sort of how can we begin to kind of harness architectural tools in different ways to address social concerns, to sort of expand possibilities for four different ways of living? So, you know, it's in part to say again that that prospect, if you will, of modernism being about kind of experimentation, with materials, with form, with space, right? And very and very elaborate ways that fed right into this question of how to almost kind of see the House see house design as itself is sort of experimental project relative to energy.

Speaker3: [00:27:17] So the kind of house as experiment, you know, there's even a sort of more precise version of that in which the house itself. These are the the office building or the kind of housing complex or institutional buildings. It still continues today, right, that the house is sort of the site for a lot of experiments as architects are going to try these things out. And so, you know, it's small scale. It's kind of relative kind of only affects kind of one family if you mess up sort of thing, right? It's not these sort of broader broader questions. So there's a lot of ways in which, again, that kind of experimental capacity allowed for kind of irrespective of this specific interventions that were on the table, just the sort of general premise of experimentation was an important issue.

Speaker3: [00:27:59] On the other hand, some of those specific issues the use of glass right to experimentation with glass as a as an important element on the facade, of course, was very important exploration of different materials. There was a lot of work around understanding the thermal capacity of materials and putting using brick and using different types of concrete and different aggregates to intensify their kind of thermal activity so they can absorb the heat during the day and release it at night. The general notion of the sort of open plan right and kind of designing according to a sort of broader, more flexible set of design principles, rather than the kind of traditional forms of kind of sequences of rooms that have returned in the suburban house, of course, since this period. And again, even this question of the flexible roofline, right? I mean, I've already mentioned this sort of importance of the eve right and sort of the precision of that roof extension that also sort of brought in through through the premise of modernism. So so there's both a sort of general sense around this kind of question of experimentation and then the kind of specific sense and that some of the specific tools that modern architects were sort of seeing as available to manipulate and sort of negotiate relative to their design intentions were especially appropriate to kind of rethinking the thermal relationships, if you will, between the interior of the house and the path of the Sun, basically.

Speaker2: [00:29:22] I like that you're emphasizing experimentation so much because it's not something people often associate with the 1950s as being the super experimental time. But, you know, actually and more broadly conceived, I mean, this is, you know, a time in which there are all these kind of atomic fantasies going on to atomic cars, atomic power lawnmowers, whatever. And you know, it's interesting for me to think about where we're solar falls within all of this in this idea of of kind of an experimental ethos, if you will, which had a lot to do with the fact that something really new is happening and you've addressed it a couple of times. I just wanted to invite you to expand, which is the suburban expansion. This idea that the new model for domestic American life is a single family home that is on what our colleague Albert Pope calls a ladder, you know, model with many other suburban family homes, perhaps in a cul de sac where you travel by a fossil fueled car to get to your work and back, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, to what extent was that suburbanization the engine of all of this experimentation, do you think?

Speaker3: [00:30:22] Yeah. To a large extent. And you know, as somebody who sort of grew up alienated in the suburbs of southern Colorado, I was quite surprised to kind of recognize that. I mean, even, you know, not just from my own experiences growing up, but the sort of discourse around suburbia that I had been sort of trained in was, you know, as a horrible place, right? And I was certainly willing to agree with that in both on kind of cultural and even socioeconomic and certainly environmental terms. And and, you know, Adam Rome's book of the bulldozer in the countryside was it was a great sort of concentration of some of those issues relative to the environmental questions. But I was really surprised to recognize that in this sort of immediate again sort of wartime and immediate post-war period, the suburbs were really seen to be a place for cultural expansion, right? Like this was going to be great. We were going to live amongst nature in different ways. There were going to be various forms of collectivity. I mean, one thinks back to the sort of general model of Frank Lloyd Wright's broadacre city that kind of imagined a very distributed, very dispersed form of sort of suburban or ex-urban. But that still had these kind of centers for gathering and other sort of cultural arenas that one could could experience. So, you know, to sort of see the suburbs as a kind of place of culture, right, is something, I mean, I still kind of have a hard time getting my head around it. But nonetheless, the evidence is is quite clear. And you know, there was a great there was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in nineteen forty five forty six, you know, right? As the war was ending, that was very explicitly sort of, you know, come and see the kind of suburban house that you can build, right? And was sort of experienced on those terms. And there were these tiny little houses, right? I mean, a number of them are documented in the book and they were referred to as and I'm quoting the curator, small but really adequate houses, great sales pitch.

Speaker1: [00:32:14] Not just adequate, but really adequate.

Speaker3: [00:32:16] Yeah, right. And also really small. I mean, literally like under a thousand square feet for a small family and, you know, with ideas that you could expand or you could contract them in a lot of kind of again, sort of not only on solar terms, although they were all explicitly trying to passively absorb solar energy, but but also other sort of technologies, prefabrication technologies, modular technologies that were like, you can if you have another kid, then you add a room later, right? I you don't have to sort of put all this investment up front and so on. So again, this notion that the suburban lot was an opportunity to orient towards the Sun in different ways to have a garden, to grow your own food, to sort of open up to other possibilities of living, you know, is certainly not been my experience relative to it or how it's been documented even since this period. And of course, you know, few of these houses were built. I mean, a handful were. But we know that the kind of story of suburbia gets kind of taken over by a different kind of developer approach that that offers other other ideas, other proposals, other sort of ways of life.

Speaker3: [00:33:17] But, you know, and but I think that certainly this, you know, this was the engine and it was even I mean, there's there's also a sort of relatively profound kind of what is the American form of growth, right? I'm going to kind of intense nationalism and exceptionalism that says that this way of living in the environment is that term, you know, living in the natural conditions would allow for for the individual to appreciate the American landscape right and sort of play out this sort of special relationship that the American citizen had with their media, with the sort of natural environment on their kind of in their own little kind of microcosm. So a lot of, yeah, a lot of sort of arguments around it wasn't quite the kind of, you know, be a good American and go build your solar house. I mean, it didn't kind of get to that level of of propaganda, but there was a sense in a lot of these writings that this was a sort of sensible approach that reflected American values and very specific ways as they were being articulated after the war.

Speaker1: [00:34:14] Right? Well, and so much of that is tied up to the questions of hygiene, right? Moral hygiene, bodily hygiene and and the kind of desire to move away from urban spaces that are quote unquote polluted with, you know, immigrants and densely populated and, you know, all these other sort of political questions that are involved. I mean, in the same way, as you mentioned earlier, that it's kind of hard for us in retrospect to think about the suburbs as a utopian cultural site, and that's a fascinating proposition. It's doubly counterintuitive, I think, to think of the suburbs as a space of nature or living in nature. And I think that's precisely what you've been explaining and what comes across in the book. And and that's that's an an exciting inversion of our expected logic. Mm hmm. I wanted to bring up another fascinating moment in the book where you suggest that actually architectural experimentation in this case around solar energy actually contributed to the conception of the environment as as a place of social and environmental ecological concern. And so you suggest that a decade or more before we had the modern environmentalist movement here in the United States, which was started with Silent Spring and Rachel Carson's work, at least, you know, largely that in fact, in the 1950s, we had this experimentation around energy and that that was we could think of that as actually the origin story or the origin point for environmentalist culture, rather than the kind of countercultural 1960s, which is our usual proposition. Right. So you ask the question, what is the significance of suggesting that environmental culture emerged amidst this technological and political aspirations of the Cold War, rather than as part of this countercultural movement that came later? So I wanted to I wanted to pose that question back to you. What what are the what is the significance? How how does it make a difference in how we think about environmentalist culture right now?

Speaker3: [00:36:24] That's a great question, and I think again, really central to the project here and. You know, just to sort of frame it a minute kind of on on the disciplinary terms of kind of architecture and architectural history, which is that there's been a lot of great work on the seventies over the past decade or so understanding how those countercultural practices sort of broadly considered both integrated a broad range of sort of socioeconomic political issues and sort of brought them to the table for architects in ways that were sort of heretofore not well understood. And you know, and I should say that my own kind of entry into this project, in fact, was looking through some of the documents from that period, in particular around the engineer, Steve Baer, who built a couple of interesting houses in New Mexico and was also a big kind of dome advocate, various forms and my dissertation advisor Felicity Scott has written a lot on there and his sort of world and looking at that work in the seventies. And Baer himself was looking back at the fifties and looking through some of these experiments and kind of understanding them on technological terms and how to apply them with some different, different technological tools. And so I was like, Oh, so what happened back in the 50s, you know, sort of sparked these questions and began to see what was on the table on different terms.

Speaker3: [00:37:38] So so it's in part to say that there are important continuities, right? And part of the history of kind of environmental questions and architecture since this period is really a story of sort of ebbs and flows and kind of moments when it seems like nobody's really paying attention to these issues and then suddenly attention returns and it becomes clear that there's all this work that's available to examine. There's this kind of almost kind of a shadow discipline playing along that has been exploring some of these issues. So when ten years ago or so, 15 years ago, maybe when sustainable issues really kind of got dialed up or in architectural discussions, you know, there's laboratories and scientists and architects and planners that have been thinking about these things, you know, since the 70s or 80s, right? Suddenly, like, well, here's all this great information we have to share with you, right? So the kind of the discursive memory is quite profound. But I think that the central question there around what how is it different to imagine to sort of understand that these issues emerge in a very different sort of cultural and economic context is in part to say and and I see sort of Lewis Mumford as an important figure here who tried to state it on these terms in the period that, you know, understanding that the sort of project of environmentalism is is about the relationship between economies and ecologies, right? And I mean, those are not Mumford's precise words, right? But just this sort of notion that what we're what we're interested in is understanding how economic systems or social systems more broadly.

Speaker3: [00:39:07] But as they sort of play out through resource use and kind of on economic terms are articulated in relationship to the sort of ecological conditions in which they are intricately embedded right and kind of understand it's not, you know, not around these sort of questions of balance or harmony that we've come to see, as, I don't know, somewhat misconstrued, but but that the project of environmentalism not not as not so called, but you know, as we're sort of reading, as I'm sort of reading back into this period is that of understanding how we can sort of see social practices involved in this negotiation between economic benefits and environmental sort of goods and bads, right, as they're sometimes called. Mm hmm. So, you know, as a poet and not as opposed to, but in addition to I mean, it's certainly a sort of both and kind of gesture right to the sort of, you know, the important work of Rachel Carson, of course, in the sort of movement that she initiated to many in many ways, certainly to the also sort of alongside the as as the seventies emerged in relationship to the oil crisis and other developments, the kind of a lot of interesting sort of cultural experiments right around sort of how to build in this in this different political and economic environment.

Speaker3: [00:40:17] But, you know, even it also sheds different light on them, right? So I mean, I spend a little time in the conclusion and I've been given a little bit of a hard time for this by some of my environmental historian colleagues and probably rightly so, but sort of mapping the kind of environmental movement that Carson initiates as a sort of profoundly managerial project, right, in a sort of regulatory project relative to the EPA that eventually comes around, right? I mean, many a couple of years later, but sort of thinking about how the sort of ways in which these houses were embedded as cultural objects as means of sort of encouraging a type of negotiation, relatively small scale, but encouraging a type of negotiation between the sort of desires of individuals as their realized in the designs that surround them and the kind of economic and ecological systems that are also being placed on the table as offering a different sort of set of gestures, a different set of means of thinking about how we intervene in discussions of environment.

Speaker1: [00:41:15] Now, I mean, I think one of the the other things for me, at least in rethinking that, that question of how and when and where environmental esque thinking began is to think about the object at work here. Has in the history of that, you tell the object, is the house, right? And so in a way, environmentalists thinking comes out of this project of house making that architects and others are involved with and in the sort of Rachel Carson narration of the environmentalist ethos, it comes out of concern with DDT and, you know, eggs that aren't, you know, forming correctly. And and it's very obviously about nature, right? With the capital. And whereas in the story that you're telling, it's it's really about human housing. I mean, it's a it's a major switch in terms of thinking about how these things began and how they continue.

Speaker3: [00:42:07] I think it's right. And I think on this, I mean, you know, I think that just teasing out what I think is implicit in what you're saying is that it's about sort of lifestyle. It's about sort of how I mean, lifestyle is a sort of profoundly political gesture, right? I mean, sort of how we want to live, how we want to with the decisions that we make about the ways that we sort of occupy space and relate to natural conditions or sort of biotic systems if we want to avoid their use of the term nature. So which is to say that it's, you know, beyond that, the house comes to sort of represent a broader prospect for sort of different collective forms of living in different possible futures. Right. And and we're very much proposed on those terms. I mean, these small but adequate houses again, for example, that kind of envisioned a very different set of possibilities.

Speaker1: [00:42:55] Yeah. And it really sort of puts the lie to the conceit that environmentalism is about the environment because I think what this shows is it's about it's about humans, it's about human habit and lifestyle and et cetera

Speaker2: [00:43:07] Often is the case. So, Daniel, I wanted to I mean it, maybe as a way of transitioning towards your current work. I also wanted to ask you maybe a bit about the afterlife of these solar homes. In other words, this is something that we in anthropology hear all the time, which is like, So what? You talked to 20 people about this, you know, understanding the world, you know, so so what that they did these experiments with solar homes back in the 1940s and 1950s? I actually think that it seems very relevant to me when I think about what people are talking about in terms of the future of the home now. But I wanted to see if you could help us connect the dots.

Speaker3: [00:43:40] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, I think there's a number of interesting sort of ways that the project resonates or that I hope to have sort of pointed it towards on these terms. And I mean, and again, one is is somewhat sort of, I mean, kind of disciplinary specific in the sense of sort of trying to craft new narratives about the past simply so that architects and training in particular can sort of see themselves along a different sort of trajectories, right? I mean. And maybe we can come back to this, but there's a sort of broader push around sort of disrupting some of these narratives of architecture as purely form focused or sort of emphasizing the artistic capacities of the architects project, but rather focusing more broadly on the social and environmental aspirations. And that's a huge set of issues that come into play. But but I think there's a very explicit attempt to integrate these these houses, these stories into familiar narratives of modern architecture. So that one sort of looks at this and says, Oh, OK, so there was kind of also something else going on other other pathways that can kind of connect from the past to possible futures. But I think there's another aspect of it. And again, this is kind of relative to what we were just talking about relative to the sort of Cold War counterculture question. That part of what I try to to describe is that really the stakes here are not only or not exclusively relative to sort of transformations in architectural design, right? And sort of specific conditions of the house.

Speaker3: [00:45:09] But as we get into the second half of the book right, and this is sort of later in the fifties and when oil has now overwhelmed right more or less and the sort of project for the solar suburbs is more or less fallen apart. And the shift the focus shifts to sort of development, aid and aid projects in the global south. So there becomes this question of how solar energy is part of a complex regime of assistance technologies, right? So-called appropriate technologies in some cases, right, supported by the U.N., by the Ford Foundation, by other sorts of entities to seemingly raise the quality of life in various parts of the global south and in these sort of neo colonial gestures that in fact often entail sort of we will give you solar energy technologies while we're also kind of taking your oil and oil and shipping it to the north, right? So so some complex issues there. But part of what the solar house again comes to is sort of solar technologies more generally come to serve as a sort of discursive means through which some of these desires for these where collective gestures for kind of how to live differently get articulated, right? So how can we imagine that some areas of the world would maybe not become oil dependent, but because there? Rich with sunlight can develop other sorts of energy regimes, right, and there's a number of conferences and discussions and sort of papers and documents that emerge that exhibitions that are focused on sort of what is the energy appropriate to this specific regional condition, how can that be something that comes under the microscope and comes sort of becomes a space for exploration and experimentation? And so that some areas can sort of live without oil or live without some of these other sorts of energy energy regimes and.

Speaker3: [00:46:59] And so there's, you know, there's a sense of removing those specifics, but a sense of sort of the ways in which the environment as we come to see it, are the sort of broad understanding of these ecological and economic connections that come to be seen as the result of the force of collective desire. So that so that we're sort of which is to say that I think one of the ways that the project resonates is that it begins to sort of trace some historical trajectories that are focused on how different collectives have attempted to articulate how they want to live. These are the these questions we now refer to as the environment, right? Energy production and use regimes in particular, right?

Speaker1: [00:47:40] Wait before. Are you going to ask a question? Well, it was, but go ahead. I just this is just a curiosity that came to me. Did you in your research, in the archives, did you find any materials about the use of solar energy for water heating?

Speaker3: [00:47:54] Yeah, no, certainly. And I mean, on the one hand, yeah, that was sort of almost a prequel, if you will, right? I mean, there's there's there's a lot of great stories. I mean, many of them focus on Florida for obvious reasons, right? But sort of solar water heating as just sort of a way. Why bother to heat your water with other means when you have so much sun, right? Just membranes that were being placed on top of houses in various forms? And I mean, you know, the kind of proliferation of technologies as they played out was solar water heating, using the sun to distill sorry to distill salt water into drinkable water and salt right? Solar ovens, solar solar stove tops. Right? A bunch of ways, even in which solar technologies were seen to be able to encourage the flow of oil and pipelines, right? Kind of designing pipelines with attention to their kind of capacity to absorb solar energy so as to make oil move more efficiently, right? Yeah, lots of kind of complicated intersections, but you know, a whole range of solar technologies. And you know, we see these again today. I mean, architects and others that are exploring growth of algae relatives as a sort of food source and how to sort of intensify that according to a specific kind of solar orientations, et cetera.

Speaker2: [00:49:07] Wasn't that actually am I remember correctly, one of the sketches in your book actually had kind of had a kind of algal reservoir, didn't it? Yes, that's incredibly like forward thinking

Speaker3: [00:49:16] In a way, algae on the roof thing. It's a hilarious story of a house, the sort of survival house in the nineteen fifties and written about by the guy who wrote the book that became Mr. Blanding builds his dream house. I don't know if you know this book, but this was a movie with Cary Grant, and I think in forty eight that came out, that was sort of this this sordid tale of this poor guy who tries to build a house in the suburbs and moved from New York. And just, you know, the architects and the construction crews are just taking so advantage of him and he just kind of falls into bankruptcy practically. But so it's to say that the solar house in this case, the kind of survival house came to sort of be a instead of these kind of proto McMansions that are being built across Westchester County.

Speaker2: [00:50:01] So let's talk about the book you're working on now. Climactic effects is the is the title architecture media and the great acceleration. And I feel like there's there's definitely some thematic kinship with your first book here, but you're really focusing on questions of climate. And so but but one thing that does seem a kind of a red thread through the two projects is in attentiveness to architects working together with scientists right to understand the specific environments in which a house might be situated. I mean, this is and again, I mean that only to draw the contrast between the kind of prefab one size fits all. I mean, we were driving around New Mexico last week. You know, you kept seeing these homes on the backs of trucks that were getting shipped, you know, around from place to place. It seemed to perfect civilization of kind of of something that began in the 1950s, right? Or that really, I guess, sediment it in the 1950s and 1960s, whereas the folks, both the folks who are working on the seller homes and it sounds like the projects you're talking about in your second book are really focusing much more closely on an understanding each home specific environment, its specific climate, right? Am I getting that?

Speaker3: [00:51:09] Yeah, certainly. Certainly, yeah. Yeah. And and you know, and kind of using a kit of parts, I mean, it's to say there's a set of tools and materials and methods that can be applied in any given situation. But that, yeah, that sort of what what happens on the ground, so to speak, will probably be quite distinct relative to its specific.

Speaker2: [00:51:28] Climatic conditions and that and that that informs the design process is also what I meant to say. That understanding the particular conditions informs

Speaker3: [00:51:35] Design and they are, you know, they are sort of parallel stories. And of course, one emerged very directly from the other. And in some ways, it's a sort of question of the solar house being about letting the sun in right and then these various climatic methods being about sort of keeping the sun out right, which is use of shading systems and louvres and other sorts of in effect attachments to the facade that would allow the inhabitant to sort of modulate their environment relative to reducing its heat. Right. And so of course, that implies different regional conditions, right? I mean, there's a sort of broad sense of this discussion around climate that the book the second book is much more sort of global in scope. I don't spend a lot of time on this one group of architects that's referred to as under this term of tropical architecture, which was the subject of a study program at the Architectural Association in London from the mid nineteen fifties. And it was really about British architects working in West Africa and all the kind of neo colonial complications that that engages. But but it's to say that there was a completely different set of challenges in terms of understanding what was taken on much more aggressively in this sort of realm of climatic design and climate methods was, as you suggest, the need to understand those climatic conditions, right? And of course, at a moment when your listeners are familiar with the history of climatology, we'll know, right, that this was the sort of field that was itself kind of growing, emerging, rapidly transforming in this in this same exact period.

Speaker3: [00:53:07] So a lot of really interesting interconnections between architects that were developing these different methods and trying to understand the kind of material conditions and the design conditions that would allow for design to be sort of appropriate to its climate and the meteorologists and climatologists and others that were trying to understand the sort of global circulation of climate patterns on different terms. And you know, in a lot of this, again, relative to what I was saying before about kind of we can now just do a couple of keystrokes to determine the extension of the eaves on the solar house. I mean, that's the sort of issue that's dramatically intensified relative to these questions of climate because of course, we now it's sort of taken for granted that you need a lot of computing power to model climate systems, right? And most of what I'm looking at the majority of the book, although the sort of last last section shifts focus a little is really a sort of, you know, just just barely pre computational moment, right? When, when, when, you know, kind of architects and others were kind of not quite able to access and to quite understand what the computer, how the computer is going to shift these discussions and allow for it to go off in different ways.

Speaker3: [00:54:17] So these almost kind of strained some of the methods that are drawn out are so complex and even sort of opaque, right? In terms of all the steps you had to go through to kind of understand the climatic conditions and adjust the building accordingly. You know, it really it really gets a little a little ridiculous. And that now again is through the computer when is able to really do that a bit more efficiently? So, so part of what I'm trying to understand again is how these sort of different pasts and sort of revealing the kind of struggles and the conditions that played out pre-digital moments reflect upon the sort of capacities that we have today in different ways and sort of open up our understanding of them

Speaker1: [00:54:58] In different ways. Yeah. And as I understand it, the second book is the objects that you're sort of pursuing and analyzing are actually diagrams and charts and graphs and and other what you call architectural environmental media, which is which is a wonderful term. And it really reminds me of the parallel to with how we sort of visualize and talk about and analyze climate in the present right. As as you've mentioned, these climate models and how they're sort of statistically resonant and the depiction of climate in its in its numeric forms and in different graphs and charts. So there's some really interesting parallels, though. So one of the things that we wanted to ask you about Daniel was the archaeology.

Speaker2: [00:55:45] Oh yeah, because I came up over

Speaker3: [00:55:46] Dinner, we were talking about the water noise.

Speaker1: [00:55:48] Yeah, yeah. We had a quick conversation about the water knife, which was great. I just taught the water knife in my class this semester, and I was thrilled to hear that you had read it and I'd love to hear your review of it. But also, let's talk a little bit more about our colleges.

Speaker2: [00:56:04] Yeah, that this actually is like a real thought if somebody had come up with this idea.

Speaker3: [00:56:08] That's right.

Speaker1: [00:56:09] Yeah, yeah. Paulo did not invent it.

Speaker2: [00:56:11] I know he does a lot of research for his project, so it doesn't surprise me at all.

Speaker3: [00:56:14] But yeah, well, and actually, you know, sort of different Pablo invented it, right? I mean, Pablo Solari.

Speaker1: [00:56:18] Oh, OK, nice.

Speaker3: [00:56:21] And it's funny because again, I mean, not to belabor this too much, but there's a one at the end of. Solar House book, there's a discussion of a competition in nineteen fifty eight for a solar house that was run by this association, and one of the entrants that ended up being published was by this Italian American named Paolo Solari. A bit of a strange house, but he was kind of known for doing some of these strange objects. But one of his earlier houses was this great sort of glass domed desert house that I'd be happy to send you a photograph of it. But so Paolo Solari was again a kind of Italian emigre architect, so it actually works very closely with Frank Lloyd. Wright had had helped to build Italian West Bank, the sort of winter home of Frank Lloyd Wright and his entourage outside of Phoenix. That was, in effect, an experiment in sort of solar and climatic techniques, as has come to be pretty well, pretty well understood. And so Larry went on to develop what he referred to as as archaeology, right, which is a sort of mash up of architecture and ecology, and which is this kind of notion that the kind of mega structural scale, right, which is the kind of not just the kind of scale of a building as we tend to understand it, familial early, but kind of a building at the scale of a city right in the sort of notion that one can construct an edifice that that takes kind of takes care of itself and kind of manages its own water systems and generates its own electricity and sort of operates as a sort of standalone entity and really in the support, right? I mean, in the sort of production of an effective living environment for humans, right? These were mostly on paper projects, right? Sort of speculative projects, if you will, but really well regarded in the sixties and seventies.

Speaker3: [00:58:10] I mean, he was he was teaching at a lot of the better institutions. He was funded by the Ford Foundation, sort of doing all the sorts of things that one would imagine showing at MoMA, et cetera. And these kind of, you know, these kind of crazy projects. I mean this. The Ford Foundation ran a competition for the design of what we what is now Newark Airport, right? And Celerity with kind of focused on a lot of the concern at the time for the kind of persistence of the Pine Barrens is a sort of valuable ecological space. Propose this sort of mega building and said, you know, let's just move all of New Jersey into this building that also kind of happens to have an airport, right? But so as to preserve the, you know, the Pine Barrens and the sort of environmental areas around Newark, which of course, are very different than they are today. So to kind of use the megastructure as a means to sort of depopulated the hinterlands, if you will, and allow them to thrive on their own terms and sort of concentrate and kind of hyper densify forms of human life. Obviously, that didn't get very far. But but he did build.

Speaker2: [00:59:10] But you're not saying it wouldn't have been a better idea. I mean, let's just

Speaker1: [00:59:13] That's

Speaker3: [00:59:14] Not, you know, and it's not only that it wouldn't have been a better idea, but it's also that these were I mean, these were certainly one tends to not dismiss, but sort of kind of place a lot of these kind of sort of fantastical or sometimes we refer to them as utopian ideas, right? Kind of in a certain category and put them off to the side. But what's interesting about people like celerity is he was looking at the technical means by which this could happen, right? I mean, he was, I mean, maybe not so much that airport, I mean, that was a bit of a stretch. But but he was actually building in the Arizona desert, right? Mean, not too far from from Taliesin West building what is known as Arco S.A. a linear city, right? I mean, it's not that's that's being too generous, right? I mean, it's just sort of a connected group of buildings at this stage, but has been started in the seventies and was conceived of to be sort of an ongoing project that would build a sort of different way of living in the environment that was naturally cooled and ventilated right, largely by virtue of very thick walls poured sort of cast on site. Right. And he developed this system of basically and develop straight out of Frank Lloyd Wright's work. Basically, you sort of do some excavation on the site that you're in and then use all the sort of dirt and aggregate and silt that you dig up to build the walls, right? And so you're sort of literally using the Earth on the site to sort of construct the building that will that will sit on it and usually very thick walls that it can absorb in a desert condition can absorb a lot of the daytime heat. So right, he's been building this thing for for, well, he's since he's recently passed away, but he and his followers have been building this this project for a couple of decades now.

Speaker2: [01:00:55] So it's kind of halfway between a normal architecture project and a cult. It sounds like

Speaker3: [01:01:01] A little bit more towards the cult. And, you know, I mean, it's also, you know, there's all sorts of issues here. I mean, I certainly don't want to kind of come off as pollyannaish around it. But most of the money, the way that the Arco Asante Foundation has survived is that they also have a foundry where they cast bells, right? And there's this whole sort of industry of bell production that are sold and their gift shop that are sold around the world, right? And that's sort of the economic engine that allows them to. Live, right? So it certainly hasn't succeeded, even on its own terms, but it's been, I think, a sort of important symbol. I mean, when I teach or when I give lectures about some of this stuff, and so there it comes up. There's always like one or two people in the audience who've been there, right? And they kind of get this kind of beatific look on their face and kind of stare up into the sky. And there's a real sense of it's it's an experience that has kind of infiltrated the architectural discourse in some ways of kind of design, build run amuck, right? I mean, sort of how to really build with your own hands and a new way of living, right? I mean, it has that sort of attractive potential to it. But yeah, as a as a sort of built project doesn't doesn't quite play out on the terms it's looking for. Oh, go ahead. I was just going to return to the water knife then, right? And the sort of importance of these kind of archeologists in science fiction. But if you wanted to.

Speaker1: [01:02:19] Oh, it's just, you know, as you've been talking about salary and and thinking more about the archaeology, it strikes me that the archaeology is in itself a kind of creationist project, isn't it? It's it's it's a God project, right? Because you actually are. You're creating a home that is an ecosystem fully functional. It's almost like a kind of tiny little earth, right that that the home is composed of. So it's it's it's got some other cult aspects to, I guess, is what I'm saying.

Speaker3: [01:02:48] Yeah, there was and that was, you know, there's aspects of that that were relatively explicit. I mean, so there was a big sort of follower of Taliad Desjardin and these sorts of collectivist forms of kind of religious sort of performing religion in these kind of collective ways and at the same time was also very much part of the kind of spaceship Earth question or the sort of the building as spaceship in terms of kind of taking care of all of its own, its own issues and kind of sitting lightly on the Earth, theoretically on those on those terms. But but I think it has been really interesting. I mean, not only in the water knife, but also in some of the writings that have been this new TV series called The Expanse, right? And kind of the set of I think there's five or six novels that are now sort of forming behind that. But you know, this sort of also has a lot of archaeology in it, right? And uses that term. And this sort of notion that this imagining of a threatened future that one of the ways that people will secure themselves right on kind of in terms of the kind of necessities for life, I mean, water and food and breathable air, right? But also sort of security in the sort of more military sense, right, in terms of keeping other people out would be by forming these colleges that are sort of self-sustaining and able to almost kind of doesn't matter what's going on around them, right? They can continue to survive in the midst of water shortages or other types of kind of ecological destruction, right?

Speaker1: [01:04:18] Yeah. And it's a very class project, too, of course.

Speaker3: [01:04:21] Yeah, no, precisely.

Speaker2: [01:04:23] So, Daniel, maybe it's a way of of gracefully exiting our discussion of of energy, environment and architecture. I'd be really curious, and I know this is not, you know, directly your area of research, but I'm sure it's something you keep tabs on. Do you see, you know, kind of in contemporary trends at the juncture of architecture and ecology? Do you see because of climate change, because of concerns about energy transition, because of, again, the allure of smart homes and Internet of Things, et cetera? Do you see interesting trends that you think are the sorts of things that maybe 30 or 50 years from now, a historian such as yourself might look back on it and say, Hey, this was a really interesting moment.

Speaker3: [01:05:05] Yeah, no. I mean, you know, I think that what's interesting today is there's really I mean, there's beginning to be a shift just recently. And I mean, I'm sort of trying to facilitate it in many ways as our as our many others, but beginning to be a shift that's recognizing that part of what architects can do is sort of take on and create which integrate into their sort of creative process, right? Some of these aspects of energy and environment more more thoroughly, which is to say that the sort of general MOE has tended to be sort of I mean, this is much too general, but kind of build a building and then hire a consultant to figure out where to where to snap on the source solar panels and how to kind of reconfigure the water recycling system or something like that, right? And of course, some of the better projects are much more sophisticated than that. I don't want to play them down. But but the frustration has been a lack of sort of integration of environmental ideas into the design process earlier on and sort of more fully. And and I think that there's now a sort of broader sense that part of what architects do and the sort of tools that one has to sort of creatively engage with social and and kind of social and environmental systems, Right, operates on these terms that one can begin to sort of tease out things in different ways.

Speaker3: [01:06:20] And and that might be, I mean, a sort of larger scale example is. Not remembering exactly where it is, but Calatrava, the sort of well-known architect engineer who did the World Trade Center subway hub has done a sort of torch tower. I think it's in Sweden. I'm afraid it might be in Denmark. That part of it sort of talking is a means to sort of encourage the sort of cycle of water as it sort of flushes through. And the sort of gray water comes to be used in different ways as it sort of filters through the building, so to speak. And so there's a lot of ways in which thinking about how the design can encourage the design of a building can encourage certain environmental effects from from the get go, so to speak, rather than have them sort of pasted on afterwards. I mean, one of the things that I'm often sort of drum I'm often beating is that there's an extent to which the architectural discussion has yet to have the kind of types of reflections that science and technology studies has brought to our understanding of scientific practices, which is to say to recognize the kind of socially constructed nature of architectural relationships to technology, right? And and so there's a way in which and again being way too general that there's still this kind of sense that, you know, technology is good.

Speaker3: [01:07:39] Technology will provide us with solutions. We can we can sort of engage with technological tools to kind of get us out of some of the problems that we face today. And I think that part of what I've been trying to argue in the sort of catch phrase I'm often using is that technology doesn't only the promise of technology is not only in it producing solutions, but also in producing new subjects, right? Sort of changing the way people experience the world and changing the sorts of desires that they want to see realised in their lifetimes. And that sort of cultural project of environment in the sort of cultural project at the intersection of architecture, environment and environment and technology, I think is is part of what is starting to be really exciting. So there's a firm called The Living, for example, run by a friend of mine named David Benjamin. And one of their projects was and this is not a building project, right? But just a sort of experimental project in which they sort of set up these bullies on the East River and off of Manhattan as a means to sort of assess the toxicity of the of the water and the sort of capacity for that kind of aqueous region to support marine life and then also allowed individuals to kind of text the fish kind of sort of communicate, you know, when it gets too toxic, you get an alert on your phone and you can sort of text back your movements that you're sorry, that you're sort of making their lives more miserable and so on.

Speaker3: [01:09:00] And you know, I mean, of course, it's it's somewhat tongue in cheek, right? It's it's somewhat sort of itself, kind of. There's a certain kind of sadness that surrounds it in a way, but there's other aspects of their same sorts of projects that are about buildings talking to each other relative to experiencing elevated levels of pollution and how to sort of filter the air in different ways, right? So mean, there's a lot of these kind of means to render the built environment more dynamic on these terms. But again, what often gets lost in those discussions is the sort of role of the cultural life and sort of which is to say, I think that the kind of notion that that somehow environmental problems will be solved by technological concerns is technological innovation is not only a bit optimistic, but is also kind of misses the point that these sort of environmental challenges are sort of presented to our culture as opportunities to really kind of reconfigure, reconsider what it means to be human, right? I mean, sort of how we want to live together collectively, and those are much more sort of profound sociocultural questions or again, alongside the sort of important technological innovations.

Speaker2: [01:10:11] Absolutely. It's very, very elegantly put in. It's in fact a drum that we beat on this podcast fairly frequently,

Speaker1: [01:10:17] And it really coincides with, for example, our Ayoola and subjects, right? The subjects that are constituted by wind. Yeah. So it's fascinating stuff, and I think that is important to remember that these are opportunities in a way as dire as they feel, as pressured as they feel. Well as a final. Thank you so much, Daniel. It's been a wonderful conversation, really stimulating. And I see here I just was looking at your bio and I see that you're at the Rachel Carson Center during the summers from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty. Well, I just put in an application to be a fellow there, so maybe we'll actually see you there in Munich.

Speaker3: [01:10:56] Fabulous. That would be fabulous. It's a wonderful place.

Speaker1: [01:10:59] Yeah, I've heard, I've heard.

Speaker2: [01:11:01] But until until then, thanks again so much. And the name of the book is a house in the Sun, and I hope everyone will. We'll check it out. And meanwhile, you know, just keep us posted. You're in the middle of all sorts of great projects, and we're always really excited to talk to to people who know about architecture and design because it's so cool and important part of this assemblage of sustainable future that we're all working at one way or another.

Speaker3: [01:11:23] All right. Well, thanks a lot for the opportunity. It's really been a nice. To have these discussions and really love the work that you guys are doing on this, this podcast is amazing. I've been really enjoying listening to it, so thank you.

Speaker1: [01:11:34] That's great.

Speaker3: [01:11:35] Great. All right.