Form Follows Fuel

14 Buildings from Antiquity to the Oil Age
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-63988-8
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 210 mm x 280 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Modernists believed that “form follows function”. Form Follows Fuel shows that in fact energy has been the biggest influence on the world’s architecture throughout the history of our species. The availability of energy under different fuel regimes — including human labour, firewood, coal, oil, gas and renewables shapes architecture at all scales, from what gets built to how its doors hinge.

The book is the first to quantify energy inputs for a range of buildings worldwide and across the historical record. In the process it throws up both detailed challenges and practical solutions to today’s ecological crises, highlighting the aspects of today’s buildings that make architecture responsible for 37% of human climate-changing emissions, and revealing the enormously lower impacts of historical alternatives to today’s default building practices.

The book shows that the shift to fossil fuel, which started in the seventeenth century, came to be the most consequential move in the history of architecture as well as in human history in general. This brought about remarkable wealth for the built environment and at the same time unprecedented dangers for our planet, as evidenced by the exacerbating climate emergency.

The book consists of 14 accessibly-written case studies, illustrated with beautiful and revealing new measured drawings of each project by John Joseph Burns. Each chapter focuses on a single structure in a particular historical context, sometimes contrasted to similar buildings, from subsistence farming to advanced global capitalism. The chapters analyse the consumption of embodied and operational energy in these buildings, and also discuss questions of recycling and adaptive reuse. They complement precise descriptions with hard numbers on materials and construction, using robustly-sourced approximations where exact figures are not available. The case studies rely on both published research and the authors’ own calculations and allow systematic comparison across different global regions and historical periods.

Cases include architectural icons such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Baths of Caracalla, the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the Seagram Building, and Terminal 1 of Kuala Lumpur International Airport, as well as common types such as a pre-modern stone house, a late-nineteenth-century tenement, and a modernist panel block. Examples are taken from different regions of the world, including ancient China, pre-Columbine Mexico, and modern Europe. The book is an important contribution to architectural historical research, written for academics and building professionals as well as for a general audience.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, Undergraduate Advanced, and Undergraduate Core

Autoren/Hrsg.

Calder, Barnabas

Urban, Florian

Fachgebiete

• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Technik: Berufe & Ausbildung
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Gebäudetypen
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Enzyklopädien, Nachschlagewerke, Wörterbücher
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architekten & Architekturbüros
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Geschichte der Architektur, Baugeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Gestaltung, Darstellung, Bautechnik
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Ökologische Aspekte in der Architektur
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architektur: Allgemeines

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction - Form Follows Fuel  Methodology  1-2. You may be a Pharaoh: The Great Pyramid in Giza and the Seagram Building in New York  3. A Dwelling in a Low-Energy Society: Blackhouse in Arnol, Scotland  4. A Rammed-Earth Dwelling: Teleuk in Mourla, Cameroon  5. A Mausoleum in an Agrarian Empire: The Burial Mound of the First Chinese Emperor near Xi'an  6. Monumental Architecture without Wheels, Iron or Draft Animals: The Great Temple in Tenochtitlan/ Mexico City  7. Leisure from the Emperor: The Baths of Caracalla, Rome  8. Fossil Coal and Capitalist Growth: a Georgian House at 36 Great James Street, London  9. The Transport Revolution: Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, Mumbai  10. Early mass housing in an industrial city: Tenement at Rostocker Straße 44, Berlin  11. Early mass housing in a colonial context: Jianyeli Lilong ensemble, Shanghai  12. The Modern Factory: Original Assembly Building at the Ford Plant in Highland Park near Detroit  13. Mass housing at its peak: Panel Block at Ulitsa Grimau 14, Moscow  14. The Contemporary Airport: Kuala Lumpur International  15. Conclusion: Architecture for the Post-Oil Era?  Annex 1: Basic Energy Figures  Annex 2: Human Labour, an Elusive Quantity

Über Autor(innen)

Florian Urban is an architectural historian, professor and Head of History of Architecture and Urban Studies (HAUS) at the Glasgow School of Art. He was born and raised in Germany, and holds an MA in Urban Planning from UCLA and a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from MIT. He is the author, among others, of the books Neo-historical East Berlin – Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic 1970-1990 (2009), Tower and Slab – Histories of Global Mass Housing (2012), The New Tenement – Architecture in the Inner City since 1970 (2018), and Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland - Transformation, Symbolic Form and National Identity (2021).

@florianurban.bsky.social

Barnabas Calder is a historian of architecture and head of the History of Architecture Research Cluster at the University of Liverpool. He specializes in the relationship between architecture and energy throughout human history. He also works on British architecture since 1945, and on the intersections between energy systems and human culture. He is the author of Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism (2016) and Architecture: From Pre-history to Climate Emergency (2021).

@barnabascalder.bsky.social, Insta: @BarnabasCalder,  #ArchitectureAndEnergy