Insulating modernism: isolated and non-isolated thermodynamics in architecture

320 Pages·2014·19.24 MB·English

by  Moe, Kiel

Insulating Modernism
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Kiel Moe
Insulating
Modernism
Isolated and
Non-isolated
Thermodynamics
in Architecture
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Glyptodont Exhibit, Harvard Museum of Natural History
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“It seems that architects build in an isolated, self-contained, ahistorical way.
They never seem to allow for any kind of relationships outside of their grand plan.”1
Robert Smithson, 1973 “Entropy Made Visible”
“… the only rooms that can still be locked from the inside are reserved for isolates,
fetishists, lost stumblers-in out of the occupation who need loneliness like the
dopefiend needs his dope …”2
Thomas Pynchon, 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow
“… the ideology of consumption, far from constituting an isolated or successive
moment of the organization of production, must be offered to the public as the
ideology of the correct use of the city.”3
Manfredo Tafuri, 1973 Progetto e Utopia
“If we now consider instead of an isolated system, a system in contact with an
energy reservoir … we necessarily are confronted with open systems in which the
exchanges with the external world play a capital role…
In all these phenomena, an ordering mechanism not reducible to the equilibrium
principle appears. For reasons to be explained later, we shall refer to this
principle as order through fluctuations. One has structures which are created by
the continuous flow of energy and matter from the outside world. Their maintenance
requires a critical distance from equilibrium, i.e. a minimum level of dissipation.
For all these reasons we have called them ‘dissipative structures.’”4
Ilya Prigogine & René Lefever, 1973 “Theory of Dissipative Structures”
“Instead of the confusion that comes from the western civilization’s characteristic
educational approach of isolating variables in tunnel-vision thinking, let us here seek
common sense overview which comes from overall energetics.”5
Howard T. Odum, 1973 “Energy, Ecology, and Economics”
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Notes
1 Robert Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” (1973) in Jack Flam, ed., Robert
Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996. p. 309. Originally published in Alison Sky, ed., On Site #4, 1973.
2 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, New York: Penguin Classics, 1973.
p. 686.
3 From the English translation of Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e Utopia: Architet-
tura e Sviluppo Capitalistico, Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1973. p. 78.
4 Ilya Prigogine and René Lefever, “Theory of Dissipative Structures,” Synerget-
ics, 1973. pp. 124–125.
5 Howard T. Odum, “Energy, Ecology, and Economics,” Ambio, vol. 2(6), 1973.
p. 220.
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Contents
Foreword
Iñaki Abalos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Buildings are Non-isolated, Transient Structures of Dissipation:
A Reckoning in the Form of an Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
A History of Heat Transfer in Buildings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
A Material History of Insulation in Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Physiology, Insulation, Climate, and Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
The Architecture of Dissipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
A Dissipative Epilogue: Breathing Walls, by Salmaan Craig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
Conclusion:
The Metabolic Rift, Gift & Shift of
Architecture’s Necessary Excess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
Illustration Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312
About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
Index of Persons, Firms, and Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
Index of Buildings and Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
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8 Insulating Modernism
Foreword
Iñaki Abalos
There is, apparently, nothing more irrelevant in a building than the layers of
insulating material that, only over the past few decades, has been filling chambers
and sheathing façades all over the world with supposedly beneficial universal ef-
fects . This book presents a surprisingly ambitious proof that the assumption that
these insulating hidden materials are innocent and irrelevant is one of the biggest
mistakes that have been made by architects, educators, and historians over the past
fifty years . Not only does it debunk the innocence of these few interior centimeters
with irrefutable technical reasoning — in a way that shows the pedagogic and
communicational skills of the author — but this technical discussion is just the
starting point in the construction of an architectural agenda for the coming de-
cades whose theoretical and critical precision, historic timeliness, and futuristic
vision — aspects that are progressively unveiled as one reads the book — are simply
astonishing . With his new book, Kiel Moe manages to make a qualitative leap for-
ward in the ambitions already expressed in previous books such as Convergence or
Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture by proposing a politically critical vision of
the material culture of our time, highlighting the impossibility for architects to
construct a consistent discourse because of their inability to understand the mate-
rial, tectonic, and thermodynamic facets of which buildings are made . He thus
proposes a new design culture that reclaims an integrated — “convergent,“ in his
own terms — knowledge which will allow the architect to not only address form,
matter, and energy with new tools but also to address the increasingly dramatic
requirements of society through ascertaining precisely the appropriateness and
creativity of these instruments . The different thermodynamic scales of the build-
ing, from millimeters to decameters, give way to comprehensive views of the city
and the territory, delimiting the systemic character of a thermodynamic concep-
tion of architecture that does not dwell upon the technical deception of minimiz-
ing consumption through maximizing the building’s insulation; an activity which
conceals both a dark business and a voluntary short-sightedness in trying to ad-
dress the energy problem in our buildings and cities with physiocratic attitudes . By
doing this, Moe shows us the importance of welcoming, in a holistic way, a new
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Foreword 9
form of understanding between architecture and thermodynamics . Insulating
Modernism is a decisive step in the theoretical and critical establishment of what is
known as thermodynamic materialism, a step that aims at recovering the knowl-
edge — and therefore the authority — from the more general thermodynamic prin-
ciples, avoiding the dominant technocratic fascination and bringing back the his-
toric dimension of the discipline, which holds the promise of a radical revision of
modernism . In this trend of thought one can identify the presence of a bloodline
of authors amongst which Reyner Banham and Howard T . Odum become indis-
pensable references . Insulating Modernism unifies different cultural, historical, and
technological approaches to architecture from a deep understanding of the scales
at which the laws of thermodynamics operate, exposing them in a concise and
pedagogical way that will certainly have an important effect on the way in which
the future generations will design . This book definitively insulates modernism and
its long and underground influence in order to celebrate the coming of a new ar-
chitecture that will be anchored both to historical time and to the entropic time of
thermodynamic processes .
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10 Insulating Modernism
1973 Petro-Pentecostalism: Calvinist Thermodynamics, Born Again
Amid the oil embargo fervor, this vacant Potlatch, Washington gas station was readily converted
to a religious meeting hall.
Saving energy, saving money, saving the planet, and saving souls share a deeply rooted form
of rhetoric. “The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism” of the crude energy efficiency/
conservation discourse overlays linear cultural and economic concepts on the non-linear
behavior of thermodynamics. Calling, frugality, and atonement are routinely the impetus of
these practices. However, you cannot make energy more or less efficient as all energy is always
and only conserved; as unambiguously stated in the first law of thermodynamics. The energy
efficiency discourse of consuming less and minimizing dissipation ultimately discloses little about
the role of people, buildings, and design in the thermodynamic evolution of urbanization but
does finally amplify many neoliberal dynamics. To address the non-isolated, non-equilibrium,
and non-linear thermodynamics that float the operations of buildings and of life itself, architects
by now need a radically different epistemology — a different ethic of work in these systems —
for energy and the exergy designs that will engender maximal entropy production futures for
civilization.
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