The building is served and manifestly seen to be served. The act of the servicing is seen to be within the architect’s control, even if the details of the servicing are not completely of his design.
Peter Reyner Banham, describing Marco Zanusi’s 1959-1964 Olivetti factory in Argentina, in The Architecture of the Well – Tempered Environment, 1969.
Since the industrial age began in 1830, buildings have changed from hulking monolithic structures with marginally controlled passive environments to glass-covered space frames with intelligent robotic servicing. The proliferation of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems since 1940 had a great deal to do with this change, and the underlying technical evolution is evident in every aspect of building. Structure, envelope, interior, and site systems are all equally affected by the sweeping advances in building technology.
First, the most obvious influence of industrialization is the progression of advanced materials that performed better and lasted longer. There were also more choices between alternate materials. Second, building components were standardized into parts that could be efficiently produced by machines. Then the meta-technology began: the technology of the technology. Advances in industrial production affected what industry could produce, and progress in engineering influenced what industry should supply. Efficiency, economy, and quality were all enhanced in a spiraling cycle of production.
Modern technical solutions now come as well-ordered or totally preconfigured systems designed by other professionals. A curtain wall system, for example, can be used only within the limitations of its matched components; a steel building kit is preengineered and packaged for delivery. Particulars of these solutions are not open to the architect’s design manipulations. The designer must instead assume the role of field marshal to coordinate and integrate the decisions made, along with input from engineers and other consulting specialists on the design team.
From time to time through modern history, especially since the advent of air-conditioning, various movements of architectural practice have alternately embraced or rejected an inclusive and formative attitude toward technical systems as an organizing idea. Bauhaus, High-Tech, and Sustainable Design are different modes of utilizing an overt systems approach to the broad framework of conceptualizing and realizing works of architecture. The International Style and Postmodernism illustrate design approaches that tend to reduce technology to a necessary means of achieving a higher end. Both frameworks of design-and-technology have, of course, created noteworthy architecture in their time; certainly both employ technical systems in constructing and servicing. The difference lies in whether systems are seen as ennobled participants in the conception of building form or rather as liberating machines whose workings are separate from the significance of the buildings they enable. These approaches also differ as to whether the image of technology is allowed to express its inherent logic or whether its workings are subjugated to other design ideals. The common grounds on which both approaches must stand are the ever increasingly technical complexity of building programs and the sophistication of the finished building product.
Later sections of this chapter explore several shifts in architectural practice from formal and structure-dominated thinking toward more performance – and systems – based concerns. Before progressing, though, it is useful to elaborate on some various meanings of systems design as they pertain to architecture.
Levels of System Organization in Architecture
Several questions about the idea of integration were posed at the beginning of Chapter 1, and most of them have been subsequently discussed as an overview of integrated buildings. The first sections of the discussion in the present chapter concern the question of connections between systems thinking and building systems. In summary, the term system has evolved into twin descriptions, concerning both the complexity of the design task and the complexity of building components. These two concerns, part method and part product, constantly antagonize and inspire each other in the architect’s quest to resolve design. They are also, of course, connected by the sophistication and technical expectations of modern society and enlightened clients.
What follows next is an exploration of different levels of system organization that can be achieved in architecture through design and technical integration. In these examples, the last two questions posed at the beginning of Chapter 1 are addressed: “What benefits does integration provide?” and “How do we recognize or measure relative levels of integration?”
Sir Joseph Paxton transformed his experience with railroad and greenhouse construction into a radical solution for London’s Crystal Palace. Faced with a challenge that 233 architects had failed to meet during a design competition for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the self-taught railroad engineer Paxton set out to satisfy the requirements of a project that had been put in motion by Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria. The Palace was needed to house more than 13,000 exhibits and serve 6 million visitors. It would cover about 700,000 ft2, the biggest building in the world at that time. Most critically, it was to be produced for £230,000, completed in ten months over the winter, and would outshine any of the 11 previous large exhibitions sponsored by England’s rivals in France.
Paxton, with the firm of Fox, Henderson & Company, completed the design and construction drawings in ten days. The Crystal Palace was erected in 17 weeks between September 1850 and January 1851 and opened on time, May 1, 1851. Based on a module of 49 in. glass and bay sizes of 24 ft, the building was framed in 3500 tons of cast iron members and 202 miles of wood glazing bars. It measured an enormous 1848 by 408 ft and reached 108 ft high at its transept. Including its upper level mezzanine, the palace provided more than a million square feet of space and 33 million cubic feet of volume. It was four times bigger than St Peter’s in Rome and six times larger than London’s own St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The Crystal Palace was the first kit-of-parts systems building. Rapid construction was followed by a successful exhibition. Dismantled shortly afterward, Paxton’s huge invention was moved to south London and rebuilt to its original form with the same pieces. It was part of a Victorian theme park until a fire destroyed it in 1936. As a nuts-and-bolts or system-as-hardware assembly, the Crystal Palace proved the worthiness of industrial application of prefabricated components to architectural design. Utilizing standard parts, modular bays, mass production, and lightweight construction allowed the grand structure to be realized quickly, inexpensively, and with impressive results.
All of the strategies and construction components of the Crystal Palace were interrelated in such a way that each made the others possible and successful. These relationships were intentional and planned. Not only did Paxton’s design of the Palace embrace these new ideas, they were the essence of the idea and of the building. This dynamic between program, creativity, method, and technology is precisely what defines the Crystal Palace a systems building. Its innovations have inspired every generation of architects since the birth of the industrial age.
William Le Baron Jenny is credited with the invention of the high-rise building in his 1884 Home Insurance Building in Chicago. By bringing together the fireproofed and riveted steel frame, the elevator, and the curtain wall, Jenny composed a method of systems that together constituted a new building type. Jenny’s high-rise surpasses the Crystal Palace kit-of-parts or systems-as-hardware definition. Not only did the nine-story steel frame manage to free the skin of the building from carrying loads, it also avoided the problem of constructing thick load-bearing masonry walls on Chicago’s unstable soils. Jenny’s window wall in an open lattice of structure was followed by the projecting Chicago bay window in Burnham and Root’s 1894 Reliance Building. The Chicago school of architecture emerged, and high-rise construction as we know it today gave birth to the commercial high-rise style or “capitalist vernacular.”
The term high-rise may suggest a building defined by its structural system, but the Home Insurance Building was not much of a structural invention inasmuch as steel framing had already been devised. What is defined by Jenny’s high-rise is the building as a particular combination of systems or, in other words, an ordered collection of systems combining to make a prototypical description of a building type. High-rise is just one of the prototypical approaches to design that deal with appropriate sets of systems that are matched to make a whole: steel frame and elevator, plus window wall, equals a generic or standard solution set. This is perhaps what Christian Norberg – Schultz (1965) was referring to in defining architectural systems as “a characteristic way of organizing architectural totalities.” Other system-as-prototype buildings included as case studies in Part II of this text include laboratories, offices, airports, and pavilions.
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Figure 2.1 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. (Architects Piano + Rogers.) |
A significant shortcoming of early modernist architecture is identified with the failure of the postwar generation of architects to incorporate the advances in material and environmental technology to match the capabilities of mechanized society. Instead of accommodating the new vocabulary to meet new challenges, industrial materials and techniques were disappointingly used to create a visu
al style of formal expression. The great increase in architectural activity and the number of its practitioners after World War II simply overwhelmed the ability of technically unprepared architects to cope with the shift from formalist composition of building-as-object to the already emerging unity of industry and craft.
In hindsight, it is clear that the modern movement missed the opportunity to continue the sophistication of innovations in architecture to which more technically advanced architects have since returned. Postwar design, despite its rationalist origins in movements like the Bauhaus, aimed at expressing the visual glamour of industrial civilization. The suggestive forms of trains and ocean – liners were widely imitated. Contemporary practice has turned decidedly more toward translating those same technical possibilities into performance benefits that are simultaneously desirable architectural features.
Seeking and expressing technical relationships in building systems required a level of technical and scientific interest more reminiscent of Renaissance architects than of Beaux-Arts and Victorian designers. It also required a period of design freedom when buildings could shed their historical significance and representational value. This period reached public consciousness with Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers and their 1972-1975 design for Centre Georges Pompidou in central Paris, a building that Piano’s on-site architect Bernard Plattner still calls “ a provocation” (see case study #22). The High Tech Style follows in this genre of exploration. Its characteristics are discussed in Chapter 10, but it can be described briefly here as the quest for an architecture that expresses its dedication to technical servicing.
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Figure 2.2 Example flow diagram for proposed Allen Parkway Village redevelopment. (From a study by the author for the International Center for the Solution of Environmental Problems, with The Studio of Robert Morris, Architect, and James Burnett and Associates, Houston, July 1996.) |
This system-as-grammar approach is predominantly concerned with coordinated interactions among the components and criteria of a building. It reflects the general term now in use that refers to functional categories of buildings as individual systems: site, structure, envelope, services, and interior. Through fundamental scientific insight, the designer manages and configures these workings and interworkings of building elements and then brings them into the architectural vocabulary. The expanded palette of High Tech design does this explicitly by incorporating exposed elements of structure and mechanical systems to functionally define and visually
express the building. The architectural systems grammar of High Tech’s best practitioners surpasses the glamorized machine aesthetic of the early modernist by including the complex dynamic of the machine into the essence of the building.
In the anatomical and biological sense, buildings can be considered as organisms that function as interrelated systems. A sectional slice of a building becomes the anatomical “vivisection” of a complex organism. As an equivalent sectional diagram of an animal can tell us about the relationships between skeletal, respiratory, muscular, nervous, and digestive systems, the anatomical section of a building explores how structure, cladding, HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning), wiring, and plumbing systems combine in cooperative ways to produce an organism we may call architecture. Interestingly, there is even some anatomical correspondence: skeletal system to structural, respiratory to ventilation, epidermal to envelope, nervous system to electrical, and so forth.
How do buildings acquire a living, organic quality beyond diagrammatic complexity? A dominant characteristic of the biological model of architecture is evident in the tracing of interactive processes, as exemplified by the energy and waste flows in sustainable design. These processes are concerned with cycles of flow within a system of designed interactions. Process interaction is manifested in buildings as “filters, barriers and switches,” as Christian Norberg-Schultz first put it. Steven Groak (1992) said it another way, describing a building as a series of “conduits, reservoirs, and capacitors of flow.” Throughput diagrams illustrating flows of energy, information, and material frequently accompany the plans and sections of biological buildings. Usually the flow diagrams contain much more information about the system dynamics of the building than do the typical architectural depictions.
John Tillman Lyle was the project director of an interdisciplinary team of designers responsible for the Center for Regenerative Studies at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. In his book, Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development, Lyle distinguishes the “pale- otechnic” mechanistic views of design in the industrial age from the “neotechnic” post-fossil-fuel era we are entering by relating the work of Scottish biologist, urban planner, and ecologist Patrick Geddes (1854-1932). Geddes coined those terms in his 1915 publication of Cities in Evolution to distinguish between industrial society and what he envisioned as its more organic successor. He saw the existing urban patterns as a linear mechanistic mode of industry and consumerism that continually converts natural resources to waste and proposed in its place a cyclical and biological model of city and regional planning. Lewis Mumford (1926) saw Geddes as a father figure, compared him to Frank Lloyd Wright, and described his work: “It is not as a bold innovator in urban planning, but as an ecologist, the patient investigator of historic filiations and dynamic biological and social relationships that Geddes’s most important work in cities was done."
Geddes’s neotechnic ideals are gaining recognition in the wake of postindustrial evolutions and popular disenchantment with the same industrial schemes of production that he denounced almost a hundred years ago. Anatomical and biological approaches to architecture capture neotechnic ideals by using design knowledge to harness and manage cyclical flows in building systems.