Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America

By Avigail Sachs

Much of twentieth-century design was animated by the creative tension of its essential duality: is design an art or a science? In the postwar era, American architects sought to calibrate architectural practice to evolving scientific knowledge about humans and environments, thus elevating the discipline’s stature and enmeshing their work in a progressive restructuring of society. This political and scientific effort was called "environmental design," a term expanded in the 1960s to include ecological and liberal ideas. In her expansive new study, Avigail Sachs examines the theoretical scaffolding and practical legacy of this professional effort.

Inspired by Lewis Mumford’s 1932 challenge enjoining architects to go beyond visual experimentation and create complete human environments, Environmental Design details the rise of modernist ideas in the architectural disciplines within the novel context of sociopolitical rather than aesthetic responsibilities. Unlike today’s "starchitects," environmental designers saw themselves as orchestrators of decision making more than auteurs of form and style. Viewing architectural practice as rooted in Progressive Era politics and the democratic process rather than the European avant-garde, Sachs plots how these social concepts spread via influential architecture schools. This rich examination of pedagogy and practice is a map to both the history of environmental design and the contemporary consequences of architecture understood as a pressing social concern.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813941288

Book preview

Midcentury: Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, and Design

Richard Longstreth, Editor

ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN

Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America

Avigail Sachs

University of Virginia Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

© 2018 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2018

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sachs, Avigail, author.

Title: Environmental design : architecture, politics, and science in postwar America / Avigail Sachs.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2018. | Series: Midcentury : architecture, landscape, urbanism, and design | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018002823| ISBN 9780813941271 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813941288 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH Architecture and society—United States—History—20th century. | Architecture—Human factors—United States—History—20th century. | Democracy and architecture—United States—History—20th century. | Architecture—Study and teaching—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC NA2543.S6 S225 2018 | DDC 720.1/03—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002823

Illustrations in this book were funded in part or in whole by a grant from the SAH/Mellon Author Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Cover illustrations: Detail of drawing based on community participation for a project that received the Progressive Architecture award in 1971 (top; courtesy of Troy West); A&M Consolidated High School in College Station, Texas (bottom; courtesy of CRS Center, Texas A&M University)

For my mother, Laura W. Sachs, and in loving memory of my father, Tsvi Sachs

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.A Social Art

2.Man as Measure

3.With People in Mind

4.The Expanded Field

5.The Divided Field

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

N. John Habraken has likened researchers to travelers, people who go out on a journey and return to their tribe to share their new knowledge. In going out on this adventure I was lucky to have many people waiting for my stories, who all made the journey worthwhile. My doctoral adviser, Jean-Pierre Protzen, not only introduced me to environmental design as an expansion of architectural practice but also set a standard for academic and personal excellence for which I will always be grateful. In many ways, this book is an answer to a question JP posed to me more than a decade ago: "What did happen to the scientific approach? The answer, I think, is that science" was caught up (unsurprisingly) in both national and professional politics.

Faculty, administrators, staff, and students at the College of Architecture and Design and the Humanities Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville all generously provided both the support and challenges that a project such as this requires. I am lucky to share the joys of academic life with this diverse tribe. Special thanks to John McRae, Scott Wall, and Ken McCown, who took a chance on a neophyte architectural historian, and to Jason Young and Gale Fulton, who made good on the promise of support.

Andrew Shanken, C. Greig Crysler, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Ariel Novolplansky, Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, David Hollinger, Kerwin Klein, Ritu Bhatt, George Dodds, Gregor Kalas, Joan Ockman, Mary McLeod, and William L. Porter will, I hope, recognize ideas we discussed and know this project is indebted to their generosity. Robert L. Geddes, Henry Sanoff, John Zeisel, John Eberhard, Robert Sommer, Clare Cooper Marcus, Sara Ishikawa, and Denise Scott Brown all shared their insight and recollections. I reached out to them by email, and it was wonderful to find how effective the Internet can be as a tool in our quest for knowledge and collaboration. Ronald Foresta, Kiel Moe, and two insightful anonymous readers very kindly looked at earlier, and much messier, versions of this manuscript. It was Clare Wolfowitz who cleaned it up, with infinite patience.

This study would have been impossible without the libraries and archives I consulted, and these would not exist without the dedication of those responsible for them. Staff at the University of Tennessee Library helped me locate material, including delivering entire collections of Architectural Forum and Progressive Architecture to my office. The excellent collection of the Environmental Design Library at the University of California, Berkeley served as the basis for this project. I also visited the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) collection at Andrews University. Special thanks to the staff at the following archives: The Environmental Design Archives and The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, the Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Archives of the American Institute of Architects, the CRS Center at Texas A&M University, Avery Library Department of Drawings & Archives, Columbia University, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, the Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice Univeristy, and Special Collections and the Institute Archives, Hayden Library, MIT. Additional research was completed with the help of the staff at the archives at the Universities of Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Utah as well as North Carolina State, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Princeton and Harvard Universities.

The financial support to visit these archives came from varied entities at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville: The School of Architecture, The School of Landscape Architecture, the Graduate School Professional Development Award, and the Chancellors Grants for Faculty Research. The College of Architecture and Design and the University of Tennessee Humanities Center allowed me a year’s leave from teaching, which was invaluable in framing the scope and content of the project. The Society of Architectural Historians generously supported the illustrations in this book with an SAH/Mellon Author Award. Thank you also to everyone at the University of Virginia Press, especially Boyd Zenner, Mark Mones, and Jane Curran for their careful attention to detail.

This story could not have been told without telling other stories as well, and many friends watched this process from near and far. Several also shared in the details of book writing: Jane Crudden Carson, Miri Lavi, Elisheva Baumgarten, Noam Austerlitz, Einat Lev, Yael Perez, Tina Shepardson, Dan Magilow, Marcia Goldenstein, Thomas Reising, Erica Leak, Maria Moreno, Lavina Liburd, Piper Mullins, Cheri Eliott, Valerie Friedman, and Jacob Stanley. Many colleagues are also friends and help me balance the academic and the personal—Tricia Stuth, Ted Shelton, Liz Teston, Lisa Mulliken, Merita Soini, James Rose, Lisa Hoskins, Vanessa Arthur, Diane Fox, and Micah Rutenberg—thank you!

To my entire family and especially my siblings, Rachel and Nir, Natan and Avril, and my wonderful niece Shai and nephews Itamar and Uri Tsvi—where would I be without you all? Your love and support means more to me than I can describe. This book, however, is dedicated to the two people who first encouraged me to go out on adventures and who were always there to listen when I came back. To my mother, Laura W. Sachs, and in loving memory of my father, Tsvi Sachs, who showed me how to see the complexity of the world.

INTRODUCTION

In 1932 Lewis Mumford issued a challenge to architects in the United States, calling on them to use architecture to create complete environments for humans. It is in connecting buildings to the sky, the earth, the human form, and the play of children, he argued, that beauty is to be found, because then and then only does the whole live; the aesthetic arises out of the actual.¹ Mumford’s challenge was part of a larger vision of modern civilization, one in which housing (both houses and communities) was of primary importance. Good housing, Mumford explains, should reflect modern virtues, in which he includes the following: the knowledge gleaned from scientific investigation; disciplined thinking and coherent organization; the benefits of collective—rather than commercial—enterprise; and impersonality, that is, the move away from obsolete and sentimental inhibitions. Houses are not merely commodities, or symbols of their owners: they must be conceived as places for life. As such they must be made available to everyone, using modern planning and production methods as well as government regulation and subvention.

Mumford’s vision of housing overlapped with the vision of architecture outlined by European Modernists. His essay, simply titled Housing, was part of the catalog that accompanied the seminal 1932 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which introduced this architectural doctrine to an American audience. The main section of the exhibit, curated by historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and connoisseur (later architect) Phillip Johnson, was composed of drawings, models, and photographs of outstanding examples of Modernist architecture. Hitchcock and Johnson used these exemplars to argue that a coherent and universally applicable style had been developed, an argument captured in the term International Style. Mumford, together with colleagues Catherine Bauer, Henry Wright, and Clarence Stein (all members of the Regional Planning Association of America [RPAA]) curated the second section of the exhibit, also titled Housing. Here visitors encountered images of problems—particularly aerial photographs of slums, which were intended to galvanize them into social and political action. Mumford was careful to warn his audience that while buildings in the new style could answer these problems, they did not necessarily do so. Instead, he explained, every situation must be evaluated separately and supplied with its own particular solution.

Mumford’s argument was more than an aesthetic challenge. First, in seeing aesthetics as arising from the everyday (rather than the ideal), Mumford was betraying a deep pragmatist philosophy and drawing on John Dewey’s concept of the experience. Dewey describes the experience as the environment-human interaction in its entirety, understood through emotional, aesthetic, and rational investigations. This interpretation was in contrast to Enlightenment ideas, including Kant’s, which placed aesthetics outside a rational and moral understanding of the world.

Second, Mumford’s vision was part of a progressive rather than revolutionary approach. After enumerating the actions needed to bring about a national housing program, he comments that all these methods have been attempted in the United States, but not systematically enough. His worry, then, is not that modernity has not been achieved, but that it has not been forcefully deployed. Mumford also expressed his allegiance to democracy, based on individuals, in comments such as: The individual no longer builds his house; but the house is still building the individual.²

Finally, Mumford directly questions one of the axioms of European Modernism, the notion that the house is a machine for living, replacing it with the notion of a biological environment. A machine, he argues, is not enough. A house must be at least as good as a machine, but a good house is much more:

The modern house is a biological institution. It is a shelter devoted primarily to the functions of reproduction, nutrition and recreation. . . . None of these functions, needless to say, is restricted to the house; but the house is peculiarly adapted to facilitate all of them together. Add to these primarily physiological requirements, the provisions of space for social companionship and play and study and the definition of the house is complete.³

The fate of the International Style in American architectural discourse has been well documented. In the first decades after World War II, it is often observed, American architects began to incorporate European Modernist aesthetics into their work; and only later, in the 1960s, did the social and political dimensions of modern architecture enter into American practice. Following this social revolution, the common narrative continues, architects repudiated both the aesthetics and the ideals, replacing Modernism with postmodern discourse and a narrow interest in form and aesthetics.

Environmental design—the architectural response to Mumford’s challenge and its derivatives—plays only a small role in this history. This is not surprising. From the end of war to the early 1960s, many advocates of architecture as environmental design found themselves (as had Mumford in 1932) in opposition to mainstream architectural practice—even if the buildings they designed did not look substantially different. In the late 1960s, even as the pragmatist approach was gaining popularity in some circles, the attitude that sustained it fell out of favor and was castigated as too narrowly scientific and representing an inhuman approach to architecture. The emerging bifurcation between theory and practice increasingly obscured the complexity of the original approach. The central goal of this study, then, is to recoup a holistic understanding of architecture as environmental design.

It is impossible to tie the history of architecture as environmental design to just one or even several figures. The central question—how to ensure that architects would embed their work in the social and biological reality—was approached by many people from various points of view, resulting in a wide range of ideas and practices, all identified with the term environmental design. Bauer most clearly established the connection between a progressive democratic society and the fields of housing and planning, bringing the RPAA ideas to professional audiences and students. For several deans of architecture (Joseph Hudnut, William W. Wurster, and G. Holmes Perkins), the key was to expand architecture education through collaboration with departments of planning and landscape architecture. Wurster and Perkins also advocated a broadening of the base of architecture to include knowledge from the natural and social sciences. Their ideas and work are the topic of the first chapter, A Social Art.

Richard Neutra and James Marston Fitch developed early descriptions of architecture as environments, setting a standard for holistic design. Victor and Aladar Olgyay, focusing on climatic variables, began to codify the growing field of environmental control. Christopher Alexander, among others, applied rational and mathematical techniques to the design process, with the goal of ensuring the collaborative and science-based approach, and helped develop the new field of Design Theories and Methods (DTM). Focusing on analysis and synthesis, these approaches put programming (problem seeking) on a par with design (problem solving). William W. Caudill and his colleagues at Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS) brought all of these ideas into their own practice, testing and modifying them in the process. The connection between these different practices is the topic of the second chapter, Man as Measure.

Chapter 3, With People in Mind, follows yet another dimension of environmental design, the efforts to connect architecture with knowledge from the social sciences. Constance Perin most clearly outlined a popular idea—the design of buildings based on behavior. Amos Rapoport worked to widen the scope of inquiry to include meaning. Roger Bailey was among the first to organize joint conferences for designers and social scientists, an effort that was institutionalized by Henry Sanoff with the founding of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). The interest in design and behavior soon grew to include the notion of user needs and to encompass a wide range of techniques. Clare Cooper Marcus, as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted one of the first post-occupancy evaluations, and psychologist Robert Sommer and sociologist John Zeisel most clearly summed up these techniques in published volumes.

Even as the concept of environmental design was being codified, it was also challenged and expanded by changing philosophical and political ideas. Chapter 4, The Expanded Field, examines two of these challenges. Landscape architect Ian McHarg most clearly articulated an ecological imperative that evolved with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s. Similarly, Henry Sanoff and Paul Davidoff recognized the implications of liberal (rather than progressive) politics for environmental design—advocating participatory and advocacy design, respectively. These expansions were also registered in the reconceptualization of the design process. Alexander replaced the analysis-synthesis model with a pattern language. Horst J. Rittel, on the other hand, emphasized the political and social dimensions of design problems, coining the term wicked problems.

Figure 1. Diagram of the relationship of architecture to other disciplines through the study of environmental control. This diagram was included in a 1948 issue of Progressive Architecture, which was devoted to the concepts of performance and measure. The premise that architecture needed expansion to other disciplines was key to the notion of architecture as environmental design. (Progressive Architecture, November 1948)

Schools of architecture played a central role in the development and dissemination of the idea of architecture as environmental design. Faculty and students debated and published, promoted particular practices, and valorized some designs over others. The core ideas became etched in the institutions themselves, as institutional and curricular changes favored specific approaches. Thus the sources of this study include (beside published works) much archival material from schools of architecture, including departmental policies, memos, program descriptions, course assignments, and other records. The nature and availability of this material has biased this history toward a particular subset of architecture schools and a particular sector of the profession. But this bias has its advantages: the educators at the schools surveyed were talented and forceful individuals, with the resources to implement new ideas. Their efforts provide valuable case studies in the distillation of broad ideas. These documents were supplemented by the excellent archive of the firm Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS) at Texas A&M University. In the 1950s, CRS became known as designers of school buildings, and many of their built projects are excellent examples of the practical (if limited) application of the concept of architecture as environmental design.

The chapters of this study follow a chronological order, spanning the years in which housing captured architects’ imagination and informed their theories of architecture. The study is thus bookmarked by the Housing Act of 1937 and the moratorium on public housing enacted in 1973. Within this time span, the study focuses on the shifting interpretations of the sociobiological imperative. These shifts arose from tensions inherent in the original idea, which were further shaped by changing political and philosophical contexts. The first tension was the difference between the physical and social environments. Following Mumford, environmental designers saw these two realms as inherently similar, but the differences between the natural and social sciences challenged this conception. Similarly, the rise of environmentalism and discourses of identity in the late 1960s dramatically changed the understanding of these realms, straining the comparisons between them.

A second tension was environmental design’s dual allegiance, born of its progressive roots, to political and public action, on the one hand, and to scientific inquiry and knowledge, on the other. The post–World War II culture of expertise, in which these two realms were resolutely kept separate, strained the integrity of the original idea, pulling environmental design practices toward social and biological determinism. Similarly, the counterculture espoused by many architecture students in the late 1960s often overlapped with environmental politics while discarding the systematic knowledge building of the scientific world, to the detriment of the field.

The third, and perhaps most persistent, tension arose from the professional and disciplinary context in which architects advocated for environmental design. Mumford, following Dewey, refused to endorse a particular aesthetic or style as the ultimate resolution of modern dilemmas. Environmental designers followed his lead, and their ideas were (for the most part) couched in philosophical terms such as fit, flexibility, and ecological. In architectural circles, however, form has traditionally been the yardstick by which new architecture, and new architectural theory, are evaluated and recognized. The professional preference for order and artistic unity, which was often at odds with lay opinions and public opinion, only exacerbated this tendency. Thus, though many of the ideas developed as part of environmental design are still important in architectural practice, their role as architectural theory has continuously fluctuated.

This last tension is at the heart of the fifth chapter, The Divided Field. Focusing on the schools of architecture in the late 1960s, the chapter follows the dissemination of environmental design ideas into new institutions, specifically the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Princeton University under Dean Robert L. Geddes, and its counterpart at Yale University, where Charles W. Moore was first chairman and later dean. In these schools (among others) environmental-social-scientific ideas became intertwined with changing aesthetic and professional mores. Several elements of the environmental design approach, for example, shaped the well-known design studio Learning from Las Vegas. At the same time, these were also the contexts in which the notion was forcefully repudiated, a topic touched upon briefly in the chapter.

The fate of architecture as environmental design is not unique. It illustrates what Magali Sarfatti Larson describes as the constant renegotiation of the architect’s role with self, profession and society.⁴ In the mid-twentieth century, the field of architecture, like other professions, experienced significant changes that challenged its professional definition and necessitated new ideas and approaches. The history of environmental design does, however, raise questions about the nature of theory in architectural discourse. Many current discussions in architecture share important elements with the idea of environmental design: an emphasis on environments rather than buildings, on collaboration with other professions, and on close