ABSTRACT
Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment is often understood as one of the inspirations for British High-Tech and certain aspects of ‘green’ architectural discourse, and is frequently referenced as historical material in technical courses on building systems. 1 It is far less frequently placed in relation to the genealogies of theories of material practices and responsive environments, which is where it belongs, for what is at stake in the book is not simply a supplementary history but a projective theory of architecture that treats its technical aspects not as supporting representations of abstract concepts (such as Giedion’s space-time or Rowe’s phenomenal transparency) but as the conceptual material itself.
