The Ecologies of the Building Envelope, a Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces

Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Jeffrey S. Anderson

https://urbannext.net/the-envelope-as-a-framework/

BOOK REVIEW, Daniel Lopez-Perez

In the theorization of technology, and reformulation of a material history of the discipline, The Ecologies of the Building Envelope joins a century’s long bibliography of debates on the material and theoretical dimensions of architectural surfaces. Competing arguments that contend with questions of form and structure, phenomenology and tectonics, composition and materiality, form and technique. In these, qualitative and quantitative discourses vie for control of the narrative in the vast space between architecture and building. The Ecologies of the Building Envelope proposes a “unitary theory of the building envelope” in the search for patterns that can synthesize representation and construction technologies. Historically, the authors tell us this search has included partial theories like: Semper’s analysis of cladding materials; Durand’s typological treatises; Loos’ “whitewash”; Rowe and Slutzsky’s “Literal and Phenomenal Transparency” and the environmental and structural experiments of Buckminster Fuller, Robert Le Ricolais, Banham et al. (Zaera-Polo, “The Politics of the Envelope,” The Sniper’s Log, p.480-81). In this discourse, The Ecologies of the Building Envelope upends an emphasis on representation and rather looks towards construction, proposing a “micro-sectional” analysis focused on “quantitative performances” of the building envelope, prioritizing material science and engineering. Here, materials are not representations of cultural and political concepts, but rather “literal embodiments” of these “ecologies, politics and cultures.” Envelope assemblages that emerge at a “cosmopolitical scale of performance” and “micropolitical scale of management.” Building rather than architecture. 

These “cosmopolitical” and “micropolitical” scales are seen as functions of a larger “Design Space,” a concept borrowed from the evolutionary philosopher Daniel Dennet, which points to a collection of intrinsic qualities that are at once material and environmental. Envelope assemblages evolve “by design,” as species in search of innovation and survival (rather than a genetic code or genetic inheritance). With an organicist logic, George Cuvier’s “Principle of Correlation” becomes the key from which to decipher the part-to-whole relationships across these envelope assemblages, but also their “evolutionary potential” where “the analysis of a single part can reveal the nature of the species [and] where it belongs.”  In the present, The Ecologies of the Building Envelope also challenges contemporary discourse “plagued by relativism, interpretation and contingency.” “Nowhere” argue the authors, has the “postmodern assault on truth and evidence” has been “more virulent than on the facades of buildings.” In the space between post-truth politics, on the one hand, and ecological, social and political survival measured by our collective capacity to agree on data on the other (global temperature, carbon-footprint, COVID cases, minimum wage…); the empirical impulse is clear: Against interpretation and for evidence.  

And yet, as Dennet also asks in his formulation of “Design Space” in response to “the most potent source of skepticism about Darwinism”:

“Is Design something that can be measured, even indirectly and imperfectly?”

The Ecologies of the Building Envelope offers a “non-comprehensive” ontology from four different perspectives: the performative, the elementary, the compositional, and the typological. Four sections that trace lines of development that span from: Environmental Performance (transparency, watertightness, airtightness, insulation and economics); Components (mullions, joints, and membranes); Assembly Logics (panelized and layered); and Assemblages (curtain walls, double facades, all-glass envelopes, precast concrete, screens, tensile enclosures, media facades, vegetated envelopes, and kinetic assemblages). Here, environmental performance pressures lead to advancements in material components; which in turn inform their assembly line and manufacture and thus result in new and more advanced systems of enclosure. Rather than a chronological survey, each of the sections takes the form of independent episodes. Well-know and obscure protagonists (“heroes and villains”) emerge alongside glimpses of emblematic projects (canonical and generic) to illustrate the different phase-transitions across each of these four parallel narratives of evolution. The two sections in “Assembly” stand out as the most original, concisely illustrating how supply lines and labor, coupled with industrialized systems of panelization, result in the systematization of a synthetic and hidden “geology” of the wall’s surface as a “literal embodiment” of the technical, cultural and political processes at play. This notion of embodying labor is novel (both as it relates materials and manufacturing processes) precisely because it challenges the division seen in the contemporary research on this subject, either focused on environmental control (Daniel Barber), or material development (Kiel Moe). Embodying labor synthesizes material development, manufacturing processes and environmental performance into a single, “unitary” search for a systematic logic. Early twentieth century panelized processes give way to fully prefabricated systems, and more recently, robotic labor. A search for a consistent logic that can reduce the space between these different dimensions ties all of these periods together; and reveals how the search for novel ways to systematize supply lines and assembly processes has had a profound impact on the resulting geology of new materials, transforming the architectural project and pointing to prefabrication as the future. One akin to the Just-in-Time (JIT) Toyota Production System (TPS) based on exacting standards, through incremental “kaizen” (continuous improvement). (https://global.toyota/en/company/vision-and-philosophy/production-system/) Here, embodying labor is pivotal, and the often overlooked link between the envelope’s environmental performance and its components.

The book’s extraordinary collection of over 50 sectional details point to an ambition to integrate the macro and micro scales into a generative logic that can transform the whole, starting with the part. Amongst these, a thread of patents run through all of the sections, perhaps offering a conceptual and practical framework from which to make operable the concept of “literal embodiment” of labor, material production and assembly, in the search for architecture’s agency into the future. The voice of historians and theorists join the conversation in each episode alongside a brief bibliography of resources from which to advance the research into any of these areas of focus. Each of the episodes is described with brief and concise language, following the format of a dictionary entry, or building-trade catalog. One that is corroborated by the authors’ acknowledgement to Rem Koolhaas (and James Westcott) for giving them the idea that “a building trade show is an ideal opportunity to think about the discipline,” building up from their original contribution to Koolhaas’ “Fundamentals” for the 14th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2014.

Three diagrams guide the reader in entering the content, emphasizing the autonomy of the narratives in each section and suggesting multiple entryways for the reader. The first, a chart of a century of mullions drawn to scale whose increasing number of components are diagramed in similar colors for comparative purposes (p.4-5). An increasing progression of internalization and miniaturization of the components as they grow in number and decrease in size (illustrating the “micropolitical” scale). The second, a chronological diagram representing “the evolution of various envelopes species over the last two centuries,” shows time moving vertically in the space of the page spread (p.286-287). Parallel graphs of the development of the different envelope typologies appear growing, contextualized by a timeline of global events in different colors, the social and political backdrop that enabled these advancements to progress (illustrating the “cosmopolitical” scale). The third, in the form of “a network diagram of the interrelations between agents” illustrates a constellation of words that represent the themes of the four chapters, a textual field whose font increases in each instance as they gain more connections (p.454-455). Here, the space between the “micropolitical” and “cosmopolitical” scales intertwine in non-linear ways.

With environmental performance as the impetus for material innovation, The Ecologies of the Building Envelope joins a series of recent contributions to the field. Amongst these, Daniel Barber’s Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning offers a survey of modernism’s climate adaptability; and Kiel Moe’s Insulating Modernism: Isolated and Non-Isolated Thermodynamics in Architecture, a material history of insulation. With respect to material innovation, Bill Addis’ 3000 Years of Design Engineering and Construction outlines a comprehensive chronological survey centered on both the macro and micro scales of building construction. While, Kenneth Frampton’s Studies in Tectonic Culture, the Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture traces a close reading of a series of modern case studies from which to argue for their constructional form and material character as the basis of their architectural expression.

In Frampton’s epilogue, outlining the future beyond the modern canon, he describes a shift in priorities in contemporary practice. Whereas 80% of a project’s budgets was dedicated to structure in modernism, this figure has now been reduced to 20%. Inversely, the amount allocated to lightweight partitioning has risen from 3% to 20%, leaving 12% to the building envelope and 35% to mechanical services, almost half of the total:

“This dematerialization of building has since been taken further by the development of gypsum, dry-wall construction, the introduction of glass-reinforced fiber products, and the advent of high-strength glues and sealants that facilitate the application of a wide variety of veneers, ranging from plywood to thin layers of machine-cut stone. […] while the cost of the earth-work-podium has remained relatively stable at about 12.5% of the budget of a building, mechanical services have risen to consume some 35% since the late 19th century. At the same time with the transition of load-bearing wall to skeleton frame construction, the amount devoted to the basic structure has dropped from around 80% in former times to some 20% today. Conversely, the amount allocated to lightweight partitioning has risen from 3% to 20%, thereby leaving around 12.5% to be devoted to the building envelope. That we spend more today on building services than on any other single item is surely indicative of the importance we now attach to environmental control.” (Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, p.381)

Frampton’s claim as it was first written in 1995 is even more exacerbated today where the costs of the envelope have risen to 30% of the total cost of construction.

The trend is clear, an emphasis on heroic structure has now been replaced by a growing universe of synthetic materials, and environmental systems, of which increasingly, the discipline of architecture must come to come to understand in order to prevent a loss of agency. In part the urgency in this book’s contribution, and its focus on new opportunities for scholarship and practice. Advancing this trend, The Ecologies of the Building Envelope serves to update the development of architectural surfaces in a novel way, not understood as a top-down function of structure, but rather a bottom-up survey of its material development that can then serve to reimagine a relationship to a whole (and even transform it). This focus exclusively on the systems that make up the building envelope, without wholes, can conversely raise questions and reveal the contradictions of a shifting contemporary landscape where these systems have increasingly become more and more autonomous from the rest of the building. And whether these envelope assemblages can be considered in isolation without the other systems at play, particularly structure.

The historian Caroline van Eck, in her book Organicism in Nineteenth-century Architecture, has described how Cuvier’s “Principle of Correlation” was originally polemical, leading to a well-known debate with his contemporary Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilarie. At stake was “Whether the forms of organicism are determined by their function – the position defended by Cuvier – or whether all organic forms can be deduced from one basic type, regardless of their function – view held by Geoffroy.” Van Eck summarizes this as a “confrontation between a teleological view of organic nature, strongly empirical in orientation, which takes functional integrity as a guiding principle [versus] a more speculative morphological approach.” (van Eck, “ The Cuvier-Geoffroy debate,” Organicism, p.216) A century later, D’Arcy Thomson’s On Growth and Form would also challenge Cuvier’s empirical and functional approach, with his theory of “Related Forms”. One that shifted the focus from environmental conditions back to part-to-whole relationships in the organism:

“For the morphologist, when comparing one organism with another, describes the differences between them point by point, and “character” by “character”. If he is from time to time constrained to admit the existence of “correlation” between characters (as a hundred years ago Cuvier first showed the way), yet all the while he recognizes this fact of correlation somewhat vaguely, as a phenomenon due to causes which, except in rare instances, he can hardly hope to trace; and he falls readily into the habit of thinking and talking evolution as though it had proceeded on the lines of his own descriptions […] The coordinate diagram [of Related Forms] throws into relief the integral solidarity of the organism, and enables us to see how simple a certain kind of correlation in which had been apt to seem a subtle and complex thing.” (D’Arcy Thompson, “Related Forms”, On Growth and Form, p.275)

Curiously, it would be D’Arcy Thompson’s study on the skeleton’s “Mechanical Efficiency” (in response to the forces of tension and compression), and his “Principle of Similitude,” (the way natural forms conform to responding to the forces that run through them), more than comparative anatomy, that would ultimately spark the most interest in modern architecture. As an example of Thompson’s migration of concepts and images, a diagram of a femur appeared in a spread of the avant-garde magazine “Merz” edited by Mies alongside a model of his Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper, crystallizing his concept of “Skin and Bones.” Years later in Chicago, Mies would ask Myron Goldsmith to transcribe passages of these sections of On Growth and Form for study in the office, in his lifelong pursuit to reconcile the space between façade and structure. Ultimately, there is no skin without bones and yet the disproportionate development of envelope and environmental systems in contemporary practice, as demonstrated by this book, draws a sharp contrast to how primitive the systems of structure continue to be, effectively unchanged since modernism.

Returning to Dennet’s response to his original question, “Is Design something that can be measured?”

The answer is yes! But not entirely:

“No analysis of the genomes in isolation of the organisms they create could yield the dimension we are looking for. It would be like trying to define the difference between a good novel and a great novel in terms of the relative frequencies of the alphabetical characters in them. We have to look at the whole organism, in its environment, to get any purchase on the issue.” (Dennet, “Threads of Actuality in Design Space, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p.127)

In the space between architecture and building, or interpretation and evidence, Dennet raises a follow up question: “What could be the relationship between amounts of complexity and amounts of design?” (Data versus Design?) And returns to architecture by quoting Mies’ “Less is more” as a way to suggest that the more these two dimensions are integrated, the interpretation of evidence, the more the discipline of architecture can mobilize the “cranes” that elevate its progress.

Daniel Lopez-Perez

7-29-2021