Chapter 2 of 24
The Red Fort, Agra: View & Section
In this slide, we see the emperor, the Mughal emperor Akbar's magnificent fort at Agra. It's a real tour de force in the classic sense, you know, scale, structure, silhouette, materials. Beyond that and before that, it's set out to be at least ten degrees cooler than the surrounding landscape. This is why we have this pattern of open pavilions placed in this immaculate garden inlaid with fountains and running water. The section below shows how the complex was actually used. In the summer months, a velvet curtain was stretched across the courtyard and if you look carefully at the slide, you can see the points, the rings to which the curtain was tied and this trapped the cool overnight air in the courtyard and fed it into the surrounding rooms. The emperor and his court stayed there during the day and came out only at sunset in the evenings to move around in these glorious pavilions. In the winter, the pattern was reversed. They used the pavilions during the day when the weather was sunny and then at night when it became cold, they retreated into the rooms around the courtyard. So we can see that to deal with climate, you've got to be inventive in the deepest sense about your pattern of living. This has always been true of all really new architecture from Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House to the work of Le Corbusier. It's not just an idle manipulating of form. It is really a generation, a postulating of possible new lifestyles triggered off by this response to climate. These Mughal emperors in coming to India invented a new pattern of living different from but equally elegant and imperial as the one they knew in Central Asia and that's the same with the plantation owners in New Orleans when they crossed over the Atlantic. They built a kind of house, a pattern of rooms different from what they had left behind in Europe. In short, the energy crisis we are facing today is going to involve much more than just fiddling around with a thermostat. It's really a kind of en laissant opportunity for architects to turn again to that eternal progenitor of architectural form, climate.