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.
