Greenhouse Effect
Ralph Rapson’s Case Study House #4 was the only Case Study House that promoted a different, less glamorous kind of lifestyle. It was also the only one that didn’t get built. A large skylight covers an indoor garden cultivated for what looks like food. It’s a good idea even if it’s not clear what’s supposed to be growing. It’s certainly not potatoes, corn, rice or any food of substance. I don’t think the architect knew. Some varieties of cacti can be eaten, but it’s not wise to let children play around them, and it’s also wise to watch what you’re doing when hoeing around seedlings. I don’t think this house is a quasi-glasshouse for climatic reasons. It was never built so we’ll never know, but we think of it as a proposal for an indoor California at a time when California was supposed to have the ideal outdoor climate for making movies and oranges. Like the other Case Study Houses and a lot of other architecture, maybe this house is nothing more than the fetishization of property because, if you have land, two important ways you can show you possess it is by enclosing it and cultivating it. Case Study House was called “The Greenbelt Home”.
Despite being proposed for what appears to be a large suburban block (with laundry drying and a fence in the distance in the image on the left, above), Case Study House #4 was internal, all about the inside. It didn’t even make a show of how much property one had. Greenhouses are all about saving energy and, because oil had been discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938, Ralph Rapson’s proposal came a little too late anyway.
By 1977 however, the price of that Saudi oil had led to two oil crises and there was a growing perception that oil might not always be plentiful and cheaply available. Oops. Reducing the amount of energy required to heat building became a field of research.
“The First Oil Crisis was felt around the world and architects in Denmark were also devising responses. In conjunction with his teaching at the Technical University of Denmark, architect Knud Peter Harboe developed this prototype for a zero energy house. It’s a genuine attempt to derive a house not from ideas of visual beauty but from the fundamentals of energy gain and loss. The house was designed to integrate all energy systems within the building and its analysis covered all factors now routinely included in energy audits, including the heat given off by people. The aim of the house was to achieve zero energy use. It achieved a 60% reduction, which wasn’t bad. This is an important house in the history of performance beauty for, like vernacular architecture, it shows us what an unselfconscious architecture based on a non-visual aesthetic would happen to look like. I like to think that someday in the future when we value energy more, we will come to appreciate the inner beauty of this house.”
Me. OfHouses. 2018. [link]
This next house I came across last week. [link, Photographs by Richard Powers/Inside Living] It’s in Norway, where solar gain is appreciated by humans and plants alike. In the article, the architect says she wanted all habitable rooms to have a window opening directly to outside. This must mean the “inner” house is wrapped on two sides by an L-shaped greenhouse. It also means the greenhouse is a large enclosed patio – a sunroom, even though it’s a greenhouse in terms of look and construction. Heating costs are vastly reduced but whether that warm space is used to grow roses or tomatoes is up to the occupant. Whether they be indoors or outdoors, productive gardens, decorative gardens and decadent gardens are all appreciated in different ways. It’s easy to find many other photographs of this house online but the narrative is more one of ameliorating the effects of the seasons. In that sense, this greenhouse house is a Lapatie House but with more plants, and in an environment where its benefits are more appreciated.
Here’s one I found on a site called Drivadan. This greenhouse house is for people who think greenhouse-shaped buildings are insufficiently exciting. Given the dismal indoor environment and the dismal outdoor environment, it looks like it’s about reducing fuel bills rather than for growing anything inside or appreciating things growing outside. The neatly parked cars and the rows of rocks delineating flower beds mark territory. The gravel dump speaks of dumping gravel. It’s difficult to understand what drew people to want to live in this location. I guess you have to take your excitement wherever you can get it.
Taking greenhouses even closer to architecture ais Yō Shimada and his house “inspired by greenhouses”. Maybe it is, even though it’s unclear why. The rooftop structures will bring added daylight to the lower level – as would any skylight. These acrylic walls will create solar gain but the warm air will stay upstairs in winter. Bathroom looks nice and hopefully, is slip resistant. You can see a few more images here, which is where these are from. Shimada stairs are often challenging.
And of course there’s this 1989 house by Shinichi Ogawa. The actual living bits are in the white box. I did see a plan once – it’s compact. There doesn’t seem to be any openable glazing so perhaps those air conditioning vents are for cooling? This house almost certainly doesn’t exist anymore but it continues to disturb. Is it even a greenhouse if it has nothing to do with the benefits of climate control? It’s more like a (barely) habitable double skin. 1989 being 1989, it was probably intended as a comment on inside and/or outside in response to something Peter Eisenman either said of left unsaid in 1988.
All this architecture is a long way from Shangri-la, otherwise known as 香格里拉 if you are Chinese, Xiangglilia (so we can read how Chinese people say it), or སེམས་ཀྱི་ཉི་ཟླ། if you are Tibetan. The non-mythical town of Shangri-la is in the northwest of China’s Yunnan Province, close to the Tibetan border. It’s not warm there. Daily average temperature ranges from -10°C (14°F) in winter to 15°C (59°F) in summer. The average daily temperature is below freezing for more than half the year. Shangri-la it may be, but it could do with some greenhouse effect.
And it does. John Lin and Sony Devabhaktuni’s book As Found Houses contains examples of the vernacular intelligence of Chinese rural self-builders. This particular typology is the result of rural families becoming less nomadic at a time when there is increasing availability of inexpensive materials to enclose courtyards, porches and, eventually, entire houses. The houses and their new outside spaces are used much as they were before, apart from the absence of livestock in the front yard.
There’s something extremely pure and refreshing about these buildings doing what they do, untroubled by architecture. It’s testament to the dumbness of search engines that it’s very difficult to find images of a hotel in Shangri-la that isn’t a Shangri-la hotel somewhere else. (Remembering my post of a few weeks back, searching Baidu in Chinese gives marginally better results than searching Google in English. It’s an unfair comparison but the speed is much much faster.)
I was searching in order to find more images such as these next two. Glass enclosures are very common in Shagri-la and I expect they were first introduced by upmarket hotels for all the obvious reasons, and then the idea spread to houses, at first those of wealthy households and then to progressively less wealthy households as the cost of glasshouses dropped. If all that’s needed is an artificial greenhouse effect, then aluminum and acrylic is going to be more cost effective than steel and glass. If the climate is such that lemons are happy, then we probably will be too. Greenhouse enclosures probably aren’t architecture because people didn’t shun them once the idea went downmarket. Although, as we saw with the exciting greenhouse, they’re still vulnerable to attempts to add value to them in the name of aesthetics. Sooner or later I expect to see a “parametric” (i.e. curvy) greenhouse with Shigeru Ban-meets-Sketchup geometry.
Finally, the header image is of some greenhouse enclosures for bayberry trees in the town of Lin’an. [Thanks VpD!] Bayberries [杨梅] are delicious eaten as fruit, drunk as juice or added to baijiu to make the popular autumn drink yangmeijiu in a process similar to how Japanese plum wine is made. Greenhouses are a natural home for bayberry trees because bayberries are very seasonal and everyone wants to enjoy them for as far into autumn as possible.
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