3.0 | Context

My project will highlight three aspects of climate-sensitive architectural design which characterize this post-war, pre-environmentalism period. The first, engineered by scientists are a series of solar design initiatives at MIT during the late 1930s-early 1940s which were inspired by war-time energy crises. The second, the Sarasota School of Architecture, was a modern design initiative driven by a new-found accessibility to construction technology and approached the notion of modernism from a regionalist-minimalist stance. The third aspect on which I will dwell most extensively is the House Beautiful Climate Control Project of 1949-1952, a collaboration of this popular journal, the AIA, and climatologists.



Climate balance diagrams from Victor Olgyay's 1963 book, Design with Climate.