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Indoor Climate, Technological Tools and Design Awareness: An Introduction

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Addressing the Climate in Modern Age's Construction History

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Abstract

This contribution explores the mutations and adaptations provided by the appearance of building services engineering on the architectural scene, since the end of eighteenth century. It try to open new perspectives on construction history by depicting the state-of-the-art information of recent studies and researches in the field of environmental approach to the architectural history, particularly in health and comfort technologies. It shows how mechanisms that connect (ancient and new) buildings and the environment should be well-mastered, and steer our behaviour in future choices, especially rethinking new uses of built heritage. As well as in structural interventions, new arrangements shouldn’t obliterate the past lives, material tracks and marks on the architectural legacy.

This contribution was translated by Pierfrancesco Sacerdoti.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    P. 1.

  2. 2.

    Although, according to Brimblecombe, those who “have handled the less polite aspects of the human society” are “irreverent few”, p. 1; furthermore, see: Schott et al. (2005), Guillerme (2007) and Sori (2001).

  3. 3.

    Indeed, this concept was focused on by the Ecole of the «Annales d’histoire économique et sociale», the magazine founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in 1929.

  4. 4.

    The French word dispositif, as used by Michel Foucault, has been translated with apparatus, as defined by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben: “[…] I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, judicial measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and–why not–language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses–one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face” (Agamben 2009, p. 14).

  5. 5.

    P. 26.

  6. 6.

    The Builder, August 16th 1884, p. 215; cited at p. 29.

  7. 7.

    P. 42.

  8. 8.

    P. 49.

  9. 9.

    P. 38.

  10. 10.

    Pp. 423–424.

  11. 11.

    P. 9.

  12. 12.

    P. 46.

  13. 13.

    P. 46.

  14. 14.

    P. 184.

  15. 15.

    P. 150.

  16. 16.

    P. 179.

  17. 17.

    P. 187 and ff.

  18. 18.

    P. 47.

  19. 19.

    P. 47.

  20. 20.

    P. 49.

  21. 21.

    P. 49.

  22. 22.

    P. 50.

  23. 23.

    P. 52.

  24. 24.

    P. 54. H. R. Bentham visited London in the second half of the seventeenth century.

  25. 25.

    P. 54.

  26. 26.

    P. 228.

  27. 27.

    P. 83 and ff.

  28. 28.

    P. 188; taken from P. Ariès, Essai sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Age à nos jours, Paris, 1975.

  29. 29.

    P. 108.

  30. 30.

    P. 485.

  31. 31.

    Perkins’s systems were widely disseminated beginning from the 1830s, not only in Great Britain.

  32. 32.

    P. 118.

  33. 33.

    P. 489.

  34. 34.

    P. 18.

  35. 35.

    P. 26.

  36. 36.

    P. 36.

  37. 37.

    P. 38.

  38. 38.

    P. 38.

  39. 39.

    P. 66.

  40. 40.

    P. 66.

  41. 41.

    P. 66.

  42. 42.

    P. 85.

  43. 43.

    P. 26.

  44. 44.

    P. 85.

  45. 45.

    P. 85.

  46. 46.

    P. 26.

  47. 47.

    P. 26.

  48. 48.

    P. 101.

  49. 49.

    P. 101.

  50. 50.

    P. 101.

  51. 51.

    P. 19.

  52. 52.

    P. 23. Mackintosh showed a great sensitivity to indoor environmental issues also in private buildings: the Hill House in Helensburgh is described in Hawkes (2012, pp. 180–182).

  53. 53.

    P. 26.

  54. 54.

    P. 28.

  55. 55.

    P. 28.

  56. 56.

    P. 29.

  57. 57.

    The distance between the two windows could span thirty centimetres. These windows are better known in technical literature with the German name of Kastenfenster, cfr. Huber (2012).

  58. 58.

    P. 32.

  59. 59.

    P. 51.

  60. 60.

    Pp. 186, 244.

  61. 61.

    P. 154. The water systems were proposed at the beginning also by Labrouste for the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève exactly for this reason. They were discarded because of the fear of fires, which could cause their explosion, as in the case of Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris in 1858.

  62. 62.

    P. 89.

  63. 63.

    P. 101.

  64. 64.

    Particularly p. 212 and ff., which tries to describe the Italian situation, regarding the fact that there was a great lack of homogeneity between the avantgarde of capital cities and a delay in the applications. The situation in Rome, which evolved significantly only after 1870, when it became the capital of unified Italy, has yet to be studied.

  65. 65.

    P. 566.

  66. 66.

    P. 75 and ff.

  67. 67.

    P. 123.

  68. 68.

    P. 83.

  69. 69.

    P. 270 and ff. The dispute lasted until the 1870s, without revealing a clear supremacy of one system over the other.

  70. 70.

    Pp. 61–62.

  71. 71.

    P. 120.

  72. 72.

    P. 207.

  73. 73.

    P. 271. Charles Lucas, the inspector general of the French prisons, wrote as follows: “one must never allow a level of material comfort which exceeds that which the inferior classes may obtain, because one would create, so to speak, a prize encouraging crime”. Cited by Dubbini (1986, p. 63).

  74. 74.

    P. 565.

  75. 75.

    Pp. 179–180.

  76. 76.

    A new reading of the interaction with the environment has been launched, among others, by Camuffo (1998). The reading of the environmental parameters for museums in Luciani (2013) points out the role of the historical climate for preservation.

  77. 77.

    P. 16. A selection of classic French writers of treatises can be found in Gallo (2006, p. 107 and ff.).

  78. 78.

    P. 16.

  79. 79.

    P. 16.

  80. 80.

    P. 16.

  81. 81.

    P. 2.

  82. 82.

    P. 72.

  83. 83.

    P. 75.

  84. 84.

    P. 97.

  85. 85.

    From the Presentazione of Francesco Gurrieri to Balocco et al. (2009, p. 5).

  86. 86.

    This system is described with suprise by Palladio in his Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, 1570, Chapter XXVII.

  87. 87.

    P. 157.

  88. 88.

    P. 158.

  89. 89.

    P. 172.

  90. 90.

    Chapter 2, Comfort.

  91. 91.

    Willmert has also surveyed, by using instruments, the environmental conditions in summer and winter.

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  1. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Carlo Manfredi

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    Carlo Manfredi

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Manfredi, C. (2019). Indoor Climate, Technological Tools and Design Awareness: An Introduction. In: Manfredi, C. (eds) Addressing the Climate in Modern Age's Construction History. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04465-7_1

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