The Architecture of Art History by Crinson Mark;Williams Richard J.;

Author:Crinson, Mark;Williams, Richard J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2019-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4.3 Cutaway section of ventilation system, Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast from Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, 1969. Courtesy: Mary Banham.

is one of the most monumental in the history of environmental engineering; a brick tunnel with a concrete floor over five hundred feet long and nine feet wide, twenty feet deep at the input end … from the giant duct, the air was fed into distributor channels … thus the whole medical work space of the hospital was packed into a densely occupied single-story block, divided into rooms all top lit that received tempered air from registers above head level and disposed of foul ai r through slots in the skirting around the perimeter of the rooms.49

This account invoked what could be described as an engineering sublime, focused on the scale of the ducting, and the great volumes of air transported through the building; the aesthetic object in other words is transferred from what can be seen, to what can be sensed with the body. That is certainly the view communicated by the chapter’s conclusions. Banham was disappointed with the outward form of the building, which he thought ‘already thoroughly discounted and out of fashion’ by 1900.50 The magnificence of the engineering, in other words, was nowhere communicated by the exterior form of the building, which in its brick and neo-gothic detailing resembled a form of school building popularized in London in the 1860s. The RVH fails, therefore, in familiar Modernist ways because its outward form did not communicate its essence. Well-Tempered Environment ended with a contradiction, an architecture of bodily ease that fails to translate that into a representative outer envelope. (A contradiction of a similar order would be faced in Banham’s complex response to the Leicester and Cambridge university buildings of James Stirling, buildings wracked by problems with their environmental control.)51 But it is not really a contradiction; Banham’s disappointment is only partial, and one senses that his fascination for the RVH’s ducting overrides any doubts about the building envelope.

Los Angeles: The architecture of four ecologies

Well-Tempered Environment prefigured a more complete move into environmental and ecological studies, now shifting the focus from the servicing of individual buildings to the servicing of an entire city. Banham’s career might have been riven with contradictions, but the trend in relation to the environment can be seen as towards larger and larger objects – from buildings, to building services, to cities, and latterly, to deserts, in all of which the subjectivity of the (art historian) observer is at issue as much as questions of aesthetic judgment and taste.52 Those questions were all explored in much greater depth in Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, published in 1971.53 Los Angeles is the book in which the peculiarities of Banham’s position are most apparent. In taking on a whole city, from its engineering, to its provision of water and power, to the anthropology of its beaches and highways, it stretched to breaking point both the definition of architecture, and what an art historian might be able to do with it.

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