ABSTRACT
Analysing recurring attitudes to the environment, the second half of this book, which
includes this chapter and the following three, considers the picturesque and
romantic thread that was revived in the mid-twentieth century as a means to
reassess and revise modernism. As before, creative architects looked to the past
to imagine the future, using the weather as their principal means to recognise and
represent time. This chapter is organised into three interconnecting sections, each
with a specific theme, which together consider Mies’s attitudes to the weather and
the weather’s reactions to his architecture. The first, ‘The Genius Loci in German’,
analyses Mies’s relationship to modernism and acknowledges his debt to Romano
Guardini and Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The second, ‘Reflections on Nature’, considers
the relations between architecture and weather in the Barcelona Pavilion,
1929-1930, and Farnsworth House, 1951. As a contrast to these designs, the
concluding section, ‘Owning the Weather’, analyses the technological bombast of
mid-twentieth-century America, when computation aimed to transform meteorology
into an exact science, the military funded research into climate modification and
attention was drawn to anthropogenic climate change.
