If you listened to the last episode of Citations Needed, you heard that the CIA funneled money into into cultural institutions like the Iowa Writers Workshop and the Paris Review to win the cultural war against communism. Much of this led to the emphasis on first-person writing and a focus on individual experience.
I don't know about you comrades, but I got Ds throughout secondary (high school) in English. I fucking hated 20th century lit. Are there any pretentious and overly individualistic writers that you blame on the CIA?
Sure, I’ll look up some links for you later but a really straightforward answer is the use/overuse of glass that modernist architecture is often characterized by. Glass sucks for several reasons because it ramps up the energy consumption used by buildings and prevents passive cooling/ventilation through wind. A glass building is pretty much required to use artificial cooling whereas louver’d windows for example will allow air and a really efficient, well designed building might not even any sort of electrical or HVAC apparatus to cool the insides of a building.
It’s also a pretty bad insulator (at least compared to non metals).
Cradle to Cradle is a pretty good introductory book on a materialist approach to ‘green design’, although it has its problems and is getting kind of date. It talks a lot about the reuse of materials, and the necessity of locally sourced, inexpensive materials.
I think good, eco friendly architects, at least by today’s low standards, are skilled at using passive cooling and natural lighting in their designs to create the most energy efficient buildings possible. A good book for learning how to use these tools in your designs is ‘Sun, Wind, and Light’.
There’s other aspects of energy consumption that are determined by design such as building envelope(ie the geometry of the building can have an effect, complex shapes can be more inefficient that just squarish or round buildings, low ceilings are infinitely less energy consuming, individual homes are more wasteful than housing complexes). Less total square footage of a building is better. Materials, as mentioned earlier, can make a big difference.
Designs that really change our working relationship to homes and climates hold the key. Let me rephrase that, rather than ‘change’, I think it’s necessary to return to the vernacular architecutre of history and of indigenous peoples. Just that term ‘vernacular architecture’ is a great rabbit hole to go down.
examples include these saddleback roofed houses of Indonesia (Tongkonan): https://factsofindonesia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Tana_Toraja_20180621_021-e1570021063162-1280x720.jpg
Very cool and based, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
These are perfectly built for their environments in the tropics of Indonesia
The granaries in Scandinavia have a unique construction of stone and wood in high altitude that keeps perfect interior temperature for food holdings.
Yurts used in the steppes of Central Asia provided perfect heating and a place for ceremonial activities
https://simplydifferently.org/Present/Pics/nativeyurt-karakalpak-yurt11.jpg
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