Salutogenese – Das Jahrbuch der KIT-Fakultät für Architektur 2021

Environmental History
of Architecture
The growing critical awareness of the responsibility
of architects in today's environmental crisis has
also raised questions about the cultural foundation
of their discipline. This also affects the history
of architecture. Today's students – who give the
questions of climate-friendly building or energetic
and material sustainability a central role in their
designs – are rightly surprised when environmental
issues are given a rather subordinate role in
the historical subjects. We look back on a long historiographical
tradition, which since its Vitruvian
origins has always tried to provide answers to
questions about the climatic, biological or energetic
conditions of architecture. In the tradition of
operative historiography and criticism, we are devoting
a six-part series of seminars to the approaches
of an environmental history of architecture,
in which the interlocking of functional, constructive
and symbolic issues is addressed.
Oikos: Most of the legends of the origins of architecture
agree in identifying the hearth as the social
and energy center of the first house. In fact, until
today the kitchen has remained the place where
the elements (fire, air, water, earth) are domesticated
and thus socialized. A look into the past shows
that this function of the kitchen has changed over
time, mainly driven by technological innovation,
assuming different forms and meanings.
Helios: Buildings and settlements have always
been designed on the basis of their relationship
to the sun. The examples range from mysterious
Stone Age structures and explicit solar
utopias of Antiquity to the energy-producing artifacts
of the so-called bio-climatic architecture of
our time. Their conception combines the transcendence
of cosmic connections with the pragmatism
of ecological imperatives.
Gaia: The history of architecture can also
be told in terms of the changing relationship between
buildings and the ground as well as the architectural
representations of the Earth. This includes
symbolically charged archetypes of
building such as artificial mountains conceived
as sanctuaries or the earth architecture of artificial
grottos and rocks. But there are also buildings
that have constructed entire worldviews in
their aim to represent our planet.
Techne: Understood as technical engineering
structures, infrastructure buildings are traditionally
not considered as architecture due to their predominantly
operational purposes. At best, their condition
as architectural enclosures of machines have
been conceded. They rarely appear as self-sufficient
structures. Rather, they are connected system
components. Their overriding civilizational and cultural
goals as infrastructural total artifacts (Reyner
Banham) become the object of architectural representation
on a symbolic level.
(Bio)Mimesis: The history of natural analogies
and the imitation of nature in architecture
did not just begin in the middle of the 19th century
with the famous biological catchphrase form
follows function. They can be traced back to Antiquity,
for example to Vitruvius's Ten Books or to
the Poetics of Aristotle. In this long cultural tradition,
natural analogies have been used by designers
who strive for an ethical foundation of their
practice to this day.
(U) Topos: Since Antiquity, the careful selection
of a good place has been considered to
be one of the keys to a better community. This
was the case for domestic communities as it was
with the foundation of new cities or alternative living
environments. The understanding the human
environment as a social construct was crucial:
the architecture of the good place implied
the design of forms of social life.
↪ 326–327
A Die Entdeckung des Feuers nach
Vitruv, Nürnberg 1547
B Die vier Elemente der
Architektur in Sempers karibischer
Hütte, München 1860/1863
C Küchenentwurf aus Otl Aichers
Die Küche zum Kochen. Das Ende
einer Architekturdoktrin, München
1982
D Entwurf einer Sonnenstadt in
Bernhard Christoph Fausts
Sonnenbaulehre, um 1824
E Besonnungsverhältnisse am 22.
Juli um 5 Uhr morgens, Leipzig 1927
(IKB)
325