In
The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Reyner Banham argues that architecture is not just about beautiful building facades - it's also about the mechanical systems that make those buildings function. Frustrated by the lack of attention paid to mechanical systems by architectural histories (in the late 1960s, when Banham was writing, there were apparently none), Banham pored through trade catalogues, lectures to professional societies, specialist periodicals, building plans and patent-office records, and other primary sources in pursuit not of
firsts, but of
mosts - of the point at which
most buildings had incorporated a new technology and thus the point at which that technology had begun to shape architectural design. His descriptions of particular buildings are thus discussions of the "typical" rather than the iconic. With this approach, he takes architecture out of art and subsumes it into a larger category of "environmental management," an interdisciplinary, problem-based profession that treats architecture as context-dependent technological systems or "habitable volumes."
