Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970, documents how architects made environmental technologies into resources that helped shape their spatial and formal aesthetic. In doing so, it sheds important new light on the ways in which mechanical engineering has been assimilated into the culture of architecture as one facet of its broader modernist project. Tracing the development and architectural integration of air-conditioning from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the advent of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, Joseph M. Siry shows how the incorporation of mechanical systems into modernism’s discourse of functionality profoundly shaped the work of some of the movement’s leading architects, such as Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gordon Bunshaft, and Louis Kahn. For them, the modernist ideal of functionality was incompletely realized if it did not wholly assimilate heating, cooling, ventilating, and artificial lighting. Bridging the history of technology and the history of architecture, Siry discusses air-conditioning’s technical and social history and provides case studies of buildings by the master architects who brought this technology into the conceptual and formal project of modernism. A monumental work by a renowned expert in American modernist architecture, this book asks us to see canonical modernist buildings through a mechanical engineering–oriented lens. It will be especially valuable to scholars and students of architecture, modernism, the history of technology, and American history.

Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890–1970, documents how architects made environmental technologies into resources that helped shape their spatial and formal aesthetic. In doing so, it sheds important new light on the ways in which mechanical engineering has been assimilated into the culture of architecture as one facet of its broader modernist project. Tracing the development and architectural integration of air-conditioning from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the advent of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, Joseph M. Siry shows how the incorporation of mechanical systems into modernism’s discourse of functionality profoundly shaped the work of some of the movement’s leading architects, such as Dankmar Adler, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gordon Bunshaft, and Louis Kahn. For them, the modernist ideal of functionality was incompletely realized if it did not wholly assimilate heating, cooling, ventilating, and artificial lighting. Bridging the history of technology and the history of architecture, Siry discusses air-conditioning’s technical and social history and provides case studies of buildings by the master architects who brought this technology into the conceptual and formal project of modernism. A monumental work by a renowned expert in American modernist architecture, this book asks us to see canonical modernist buildings through a mechanical engineering–oriented lens. It will be especially valuable to scholars and students of architecture, modernism, the history of technology, and American history.

Long recognized as a Chicago landmark, the Carson Pirie Scott Building also represents a milestone in the development of architecture. The last large commercial structure designed by Louis Sullivan, the Carson building reflected the culmination of the famed architect's career as a creator of tall steel buildings. In this study, Joseph M. Siry traces the origins of the building's design and analyzes its role in commercial, urban, and architectural history. Originally constructed to house the Schlesinger and Mayer Store, Sullivan's building was one of a number of large department stores built at the turn of the century along State Street in Chicago's burgeoning retail district. Replacing a generation of commercial architecture that had grown out of the Great Fire of 1871, these new buildings were tall and steel-framed, a construction that posed new aesthetic problems for designers. Handsomely illustrated with more than one hundred photographs and drawings, Carson Pirie Scott provides an illuminating history of a pivotal architectural work and offers an original, revealing assessment of how Sullivan, responding to the commercial culture of his time, created a fresh, distinctive American building.

The first in-depth study of one of the seminal works of America's most renowned twentieth-century architect, first published in 1996, is now available in paperback. In this study, Joseph Siry examines the building in the light of Wright's earlier religious architecture, his methods of design, and his innovative construction techniques, particularly the use of reinforced concrete which was here exploited and expressively deployed for the first time. He also sets Unity Temple against the tradition of the liberal Unitarian and Universalist religious culture, the institutional history of the affluent Oak Park congregation that commissioned the building, as well as the social context in which structure was conceived and built. Throughout, Unity Temple is treated as a work of art that embodies both Wright's theory of architecture and his liberal religious ideals.