Robert Bruegmann

Central Heating and Forced Ventilation: Origins and Effects on Architectural Design

The three major methods of heating buildings, based on hot air, hot water, and steam, were all developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, largely in Great Britain. At the same time, forced ventilation, based either on the drawing power of heat or on the use of mechanical means like the fan, was also established. The greatest application of the new equipment was made by the engineer David Boswell Reid at the Houses of Parliament starting in 1834. Many problems had to be overcome. Medical doubts about ventilation, the rivalry between architects and engineers, and difficulties in reconciling design with equipment were all attacked, and by the last quarter of the 19th century largely solved. Publications of the last two decades of the century standardized the technology and made it readily available to the architect, engineer, and general public. Use of the new technology made possible many new architectural developments. Prison, theater, greenhouse, and hospital were all largely dependent on central heating and forced ventilation. In other building types new levels of comfort and increased standards of safety were made possible. Perhaps the most profound change was in the conception of the building itself. Buildings could be seen literally in terms of living organisms or machines. Reid even defined architecture as the act of enclosing and servicing an interior atmosphere, a notion not developed until the 20th century.

News from the field: 13th International Planning History Society conference (10–13 July 2008)

The 13th biennial conference of the International Planning History Society took place in Chicago, Illinois, USA, from 10 to 13 July 2008. The conference theme was Public versus Private Planning: Themes, Trends and Tensions , and the co-convenors were Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois, Chicago, and Christopher Silver, FAICP, University of Florida. Altogether, 260 papers were presented, in 72 sessions, many of which directly addressed the conference theme. The conference also included four plenary sessions. The opening session focused on the landmark ‘Plan of Chicago’ prepared by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett in 1909. Carl Smith, author of the recent award-winning book, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (2006), headlined a plenary session on ‘The Plan of Chicago: New Perspectives’. The session was chaired by Neil Harris, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago and one of the foremost scholars of American culture, and also included Kristen Schaffer (North Carolina State University), author of a groundbreaking analysis of the Burnham Plan in the reprint of the Burnham plan, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 1993. This session coincided with the final hours of the Joint Congress of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning which were held in the same Marriott Chicago Downtown location as the IPHS conference, and the plenary drew an impressively large audience comprising contingents from these concurrent events. The opening plenary on Friday 11 July featured a presentation by Alexander Garvin, entitled ‘Planning in the Public Interest: The Relevance of Haussmann, Burnham, Moses, Bacon’. Garvin has authored the highly acclaimed book, The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995). He heads a planning and design firm in New York City, Alex Garvin and Associates, has taught for 40 years at Yale University and led the effort that culminated in the competition for Ground Zero after 9/11. Garvin’s presentation underscored the power of public authority, exercised by all four of his protagonists over the course of more than one century, to undertake significant planning efforts. A great number of cases presented in papers in subsequent sessions reinforced similar notions of the potency of public authority in realizing the objectives of planning. The essential message of the presidential address by Laura Kolbe of the University of Helsinki and current president of the IPHS, was to acknowledge the importance of the diffusion of planning models not only in the Baltic region, but also across the globe. Within the conference sessions, the theme of explicit transnational exchanges of planning concepts, stretching