The House Beautiful/AIA Climate Control Project
1949-1952
From the end of the second world war until the beginning of the environmental movement in the mid 1960s, a stern debate brought the American single family home to the attention of the public and numerous discussions with the single family home at the center of this debate ensued. During World War II, America experienced a fuel shortage, and while the challenge didn't mature into a long term reality, the threat was evident at the beginning of the 1940s. This threat coupled with the prospect of providing housing for a returning GI population called architects and scientists (specifically climatologists) into action. While architects and scientists looked for more efficient means of heating and cooling the home as the housing supply boomed, developers looked for more effective m means of building cheaply and often the aims of the two groups were at odds.
As researchers researched and developers developed after World War II, Americans were looking for new ways of expressing national identity. America was experiencing an unprecedented abundance of wealth and technological innovation which both excited and frightened the post-war nation. Architects looked for ways of utilizing new technologies and researchers became worried about how long the abundance of building materials and fuel could be sustained. Furthermore, the National Weather Service had been collecting climate data for years for use by the government and there now existed enough reliable data for it to be interpreted and used in other disciplines. Scientists began to perceive climate as a natural resource rather than an oppositional force; as something to be collected or tamed. Applying the principles of climate to the American home provided the potential to improve the standard stock of housing available to the average consumer and offered the possibility of potentially reducing fuel usage in the fastest growing sector of the country; suburban housing. Furthermore, climatizing the home came to signify greater issues of class, American identity, American superiority on the international front, and popular culture. For architects, climate-sensitive design not only offered guidelines for responsible construction but also often offered a justification for a more modern aesthetic. These efforts did not solely seek to create the the ultimate low-energy use zone of comfort, although that was certainly a huge motivation and desired outcome. These efforts also sought to combine regionalism with a newly American examination of housing to create a new and established American style of architecture, land use, which in turn most assuredly would drive the urban form. The regionalism evident in this series of articles represents more than efforts to match and wrangle climate. They are a conscious effort to distinguish unique regional, yet American identities.2
From the 1930s-the 1950s, the population of the suburbs swelled, and the zone of urban interest can arguably be expanded from the immediate city to one that includes its surrounding related territories. In 1957, Max Lerner wrote that '[i]n the two decades, between 1934 and 1954, the suburbs grew by 75 per cent while the total population grew by 25 per cent. Between 1950 and 1954 people living in 168 'standard metropolitan' central cities increased by 14 per cent, those in the suburban rings around the cities increased by 35 per cent, and those living in the semi-urban rings around the suburbs increased by 41 per cent.'3