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Triangular blocks and wind tunnels: AugustinRey's logic of air resistanceEnrique Ramireza

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Triangular blocks and wind tunnels:Augustin Rey’s logic of air resistance

Enrique Ramirez Princeton University School of Architecture,

Architecture Building, Princeton, New Jersey, USA

(Author’s e-mail address: eramirez@princeton.edu)

How does air shape our cities? How does air become a factor in urban design? In a sessionbefore the 1906 International Congress for Sanitary Dwellings, Adolphe Augustin Reyfamously compared cities to vast bodies ‘furrowed by canals of air’. Rey (1864–1934), aBeaux-Arts-trained architect who would count Le Corbusier among his devotees, was thenhighlightinging his best-known project: the winning entry for the Fondation Rothschild’sworkers’ housing competition in Paris. Conceived between 1905 and 1909, Rey’s entry wasa redesign of a triangular block formed by the Rue de Prague, Rue Charles Baudelaire, andRue Theophile Roussel. Rey’s design featured innovative open-air courtyards and perforatedfaçades that would not only filter and cleanse the air inside the building, but would alsocontribute to healthier air in the city.This paper examines Rey’s winning design from a different context: the burgeoning aero-

nautical culture in turn-of-the-century France. The focus will be on his drawings, with theirdepiction of buildings as white solids and of the dominant winds as dark lines of movingair with variable pressures: in short, architecture placed inside a wind tunnel. I argue thatRey’s designs for the Rothschild competition provided an aerodynamic solution to urbanblock design. Rey’s name is not usually associated with aeronautics, and yet the fact thathis drawings look like wind tunnel visualisations is no mere coincidence. Here, the operativelogic is that of resistance. Much like the French physiologist Xavier Bichat understood life as aproduct of ‘resistance’ against pathogens, Rey’s designs show architecture as a product of airresistance. In the end, this paper proposes how one of the most fundamental aspects oftwentieth-century urbanism, the design of the city block, can be viewed in the light ofadvances in aeronautics at the turn of the century.

Introduction: pressure, resistance and theaerodynamic turnAs that most elusive and fleeting of substances, air

plays a particularly bedevilling role in the history of

architecture and urbanism. Buildings and cities

were, in one sense, reactive solutions to air’s vagaries,

the products of a very limited spectrum of solutions

available to architects. Calibrating intersections and

siting buildings to accommodate dominant winds;

articulating and puncturing façades in order to

encourage air circulation: these very general and

common approaches conceived of buildings as

static things, with the surrounding environmental

contexts as being dynamic and mutable, yet

somehow predictable. And yet a kind of developing

expertise concerning matters of air—and of air as

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matter—can be mapped to the history of architec-

ture. Coming into fruition in the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, and reaching full bloom in the

nineteenth, questioning the nature and behaviour

of air inaugurated or explicated a kind of modernity,

one that investigated the social ramifications of air’s

new-found materialities.1

When considering these contradictory develop-

ments in the light of architecture and urbanism in

late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Paris, it

is not air, but rather pressurised air that offers new

traction for further historical and theoretical work.

A good place to begin to investigate the role of

pressure is not with a history of architecture, but

rather a novel: the second installment of Les

hommes de bonne volonté (1932–1946), the

27-book cycle by the French novelist Jules

Romains. As an author known for deploying aerial

views in his portrayals of the city, Romains used

one of these to depict how the fortifications of

Paris ‘communicated pressure’ to the city inside the

walls.2 The effect of the pressure was also expressed

architecturally. Describing a building, Romains

wrote, ‘The narrow front gave an impression of

having been squeezed between the flanking build-

ings, of having had to submit to lateral pressure as

a result of the ever-increasing growth of Paris all

around thrusting in upon its centre.’3 In each of

these literary descriptions, pressure exerts historical

and physical forces on the urban fabric.4 However,

is there a counteracting, resisting force to be ident-

ified here? What role does air play in identifying

this force?

An answer to such questions builds on a norma-

tive approach regarding the relationship between

air and the history of architecture. Broadly put, archi-

tecture became ‘modern’ by giving rise not only to

mechanised ventilation systems but also to innova-

tive theories articulating the relationship between

the design of buildings and cities and the prevention

of airborne diseases such as tuberculosis.5 This well-

travelled historiographic stance continues to yield

important scholarship, especially in those instances

when it recognises how architects became conver-

sant in scientific and technical considerations under-

lying the field of public hygiene.6 The burgeoning

science of aeronautics provides an important

additional frame of reference: like public hygiene

or meteorology, it too contributed to a modernised

conception of air. However, the air that was

theorised, altered and produced inside aeronautical

laboratories and other similar testing facilities

hinged on a different conception of modernity,

one that privileged air as a dynamic, elastic and pres-

surised substance that was constantly in motion and

carried heavier-than-air machines aloft. This was

because modern, human flight was aerodynamic

flight: an action and institution born of overcoming

air resistance.

This notion of overcoming air resistance has had

some important architectural pedigrees. Le Corbu-

sier and Norman Bel Geddes come immediately to

mind as figures that wove their own understanding

of aerodynamics, human flight and air resistance

into their design polemics.7 An active engagement

with more or less scientific bases for human flight

came much earlier. For example, in his introduction

to his treatise on ballistics and fortifications, L’art

de jetter les bombes (1683), Nicolas-François

Blondel used the example of a cannonball

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encountering resistance as it travelled in the air as an

opportunity to discuss the inability of theory fully to

encompass the behaviour of material objects.8 For

Blondel, air was resistant and obstinate, and over-

coming it relied as much on theorising it as experien-

cing it.9 However, other architects did not so much

engage the science of human flight as imagine the

architectural ramifications of air resistance in provo-

cative ways, perhaps even inaugurating an aerody-

namic turn of sorts.

Augustin Rey, the triangular block and thewind tunnelAdolphe-Augustin Rey (1864–1934) does not come

to mind immediately as an exemplar of this aerody-

namic turn. As a Beaux-Arts-trained architect whose

first known commission was the 1895 design of a

small, Lutheran church in the Faubourg-Saint-

Antoine in Paris, Rey garnered acclaim for beating

better-known architects such as Tony Garnier and

Henry Provensal with his winning entry to the Fonda-

tion Rothschild’s 1904–1905 workers’ housing com-

petition (Fig. 1). Although the Fondation Rothschild

had already supported similar projects in Paris

throughout the nineteenth century, the 1904–

1905 competition was different because of its oper-

ative scale.10 Conceived and executed between

1905 and 1909, Rey’s entry was not so much a pro-

posed building as it was the complete redesign of a

triangular block, also in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine,

formed by Rue de Prague, Rue Charles Baudelaire

and Rue Theophile Roussel. Its most important fea-

tures included a ground floor extending to the

boundaries of the triangular block, aerated stair-

wells, upper floors with three sides exposed to the

wind, open roof terraces and regular openings at

ground level providing access to a large, open

central courtyard that Rey would later characterise

as something akin to a turbine that would cleanse

and replenish air.11

The site plan gives a better sense of Rey’s inno-

vations. Here, the emphasis was on creating an

urban space within an urban space, so to speak.

This was because of the perforations in the building

at ground level, designed to increase the movement

of air while breaking up the block into a combination

of housing and service programmes. When built in

1909, however, the Fondation jettisoned many of

Rey’s innovations in air circulation in order to maxi-

mise available space: the large openings at ground

level, for example, became smaller, resulting in

three larger, discrete parts that maintained the build-

ing plot’s triangular shape. Rey’s own method of

‘transverse ventilation’ shows a passing familiarity

with previous examples, most notably those by

Eugène Hénard. In the second volume of his influen-

tial Études sur les transformations de Paris, Hénard

introduced his system for replacing the outdated

system of fortifications around Paris with a ring of

aerated, stepped boulevards (‘boulevards à redans

triangulaires’). And for his own contribution to the

1906 International Congress of Architecture in

London, Hénard also emphasised large, open

courtyards. Together, Rey’s and Hénard’s own

approaches suggest a normative solution to issues

of hygiene by manipulating and reorienting urban

forms in such a way as to maximise exposure to

the wind: a strategy that the architects hoped

would cleanse and replenish air at the urban block

level.

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Triangular blocks and windtunnels: Augustin Rey’s logic of

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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 19Number 2

Figure 1. Adolphe-

Augustin Rey, winning

entry for Fondation

Rothschild competition,

1905, from the 1906

supplement to Rey,

‘Concours de la

Fondation Rothschild:

études preliminaries des

plans.—determination

du partí adopté par la

question de ventilation

générale’,

L’Architecture: journal

hebdomadaire de la

société centrale des

architectes français, Vol.

18, No. 36 (9th

September, 1905),

p. 336.

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Although Rey did follow the Fondation Roths-

child’s competition requirements by addressing salu-

brity, he eschewed issues of hygiene in favour of a

decided emphasis on investigating the physical

effects of moving air. This calls to mind the wind

tunnel, an architectural instrument that used vari-

able pressures and velocities to investigate the

effects of air resistance on stationary objects.12 In

her analysis of Rey’s winning scheme, the historian

Marie-JeanneDumont notes that the site plans ‘simu-

late’wind tunnel tests, inviting an evaluation of how

that most fundamental of aspects of twentieth-

century urbanism—the design of the urban block—

can be viewed not just in terms of public hygiene,

but also in the light of advances in aeronautics at

the turn of the century.13 Rey was no aerodynamicist

and would not reference current developments in

aviation until much later in his career. However, the

Fondation Rothschild scheme is captivating because

it shows how Rey was imagining and visualising air

as a complicated, dynamic milieu.

Again, nothing about Rey’s drawing ostensibly

tells us of his possible exposure to trends in aeronau-

tics. Yet the best-known image from his winning

entry tells a different story. Here, a series of drawings

show incoming and dominant winds as concentric,

emanating lines that collide with the proposed build-

ing’s triangular form (Fig. 2). He drew the building

four times, each drawing showing the building inter-

rupting the action of the wind as it approaches from

a different direction. In his description of his project

for the professional journal L’Architecture, Rey

framed his decision to produce these ‘wind studies’

not only as a way to answer the Fondation

Rothschild’s requirements, but also as a means to

276

Triangular blocks and windtunnels: Augustin Rey’s logic of

air resistanceEnrique Ramirez

Figure 2. Rey,

Fondation Rothschild

Housing, site plans with

air currents acting upon

building façades, from

Rey, ‘Concours de la

Fondation Rothschild:

études preliminaries des

plans.—determination

du partí adopté par la

question de ventilation

générale’,

L’Architecture: journal

hebdomadaire de la

société centrale des

architectes français, Vol.

18, No. 36 (9th

September, 1905),

p. 336.

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incorporate considerations of air into the existing

urban context. He noted how the wind would

create different ‘veins’ of air depending on their

orientation, and asked whether siting the building

in a particular way could ‘provide the maximum

volume of air for the ventilation of the façades

inside the block’ as well as ‘the maximummovement

of this volume of air when the winds blow in differ-

ent directions’.14

Rey’s emphasis on moving air, and of its effects on

the urban fabric, suggests an aerodynamic

approach. And though much of this may be attribu-

ted to his imagination, labelling his approach as

aerodynamic amounts to comparing the skein of

lines in Rey’s drawing with what Hubert Damisch

would call a ‘theoretical object’; that is, an object

‘called on to function according to terms that are

not historical’ but that nevertheless forces us to con-

front it on those terms.15 In other words, these lines

may not be part of a history of aerodynamics—they

are theoretical, not historical objects—but they

require us to address that history. They force us to

theorise this relation between architecture and

aerodynamics by enabling us to produce this

relation.

This is not to say, however, that Rey’s studies were

devoid of any efficacy. The wind studies resulted in a

four-tiered conclusion regarding the force of air on

his project. He described the four results: northeast

winds would blow through the central courtyard

and in the direction of Rue Charles Baudelaire;

north and northwest winds ‘bifurcate’ at the

corner of Rue de Prague and Rue Théophile-

Roussel; southern winds coming from the opposite

direction cross at Rue de Prague and deviate at

Rue Charles Baudelaire; and southeastern winds

follow Rue Théophile-Roussel and split at Rue

Emilio-Castelar.16 In one sense, this method recalls

earlier studies such as Léon Lalanne’s windrose

diagram from 1830 showing the prevailing winds

in Paris, as well as Pierre Miquel’s study of dispersion

patterns for microbes released from the Parc Mon-

tsouris from 1879 to 1882— projects that relied

on diagrams showing wind speed in relation to a

specific place in Paris (Figure 3a, b).17

As an aerodynamical solution, however, Rey’s site

drawing conceived of an air-pressurised urban

environment. With their depictions of buildings as

white, empty solids, the site drawings portray the

darkly rendered dominant winds as isobars, as

demarcations of differences in pressure.18 In short,

air was a solid-like substance, a Panofskian

‘spatial continuum’ that exerted pressure in all

directions.19

A field of theoretical objectsDamisch’s implicit distinction between historical and

theoretical objects provides another framework for

understanding Rey’s site drawing as part of a

larger aerodynamical visual language. It should be

said that the following examples do not necessarily

comprise their own discrete realm, nor do they

reveal evidence of any systematic organisation: in

short, they are not part of a discursive ‘visual

economy’.20 The warp and woof here is only that,

a loose scaffold that can begin to support these

relationships. At first glance, then, the concentric,

pressurised lines in Rey’s site drawing are reminis-

cent of contour lines found on maps. The intention

here is not to argue for Rey’s site drawing as a

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kind of cartographical representation. Yet their

visual similarity allows for a connection to be

made: by the time of Rey’s winning entry, the

establishment of contour lines as a standardised

cartographical convention in France was slightly

over one hundred years old. In 1802, the recently

self-appointed First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte

enacted the Commission for the Perfection

of Cartography, a major initiative that helped intro-

duce a new dimension of scientific accuracy to

maps.21

Contour lines were part of a dual system for

representing cartographic relief, each carrying the

full weight of the institutions that brought it to

278

Triangular blocks and windtunnels: Augustin Rey’s logic of

air resistanceEnrique Ramirez

Figure 3a. Léon

Lalanne’s ‘Appendix

Plate 1’, showing his

‘windrose’ diagram

(rosa ventorum); from

the English edition of

Ludwig Friedrich

Kämntz, A Complete

Course of Meteorology,

trsl., C. V. Walker

(London, Hippolyte

Baillière, 1845).

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prominence. Whereas cartographers affiliated with

the École d’Application de l’Artillerie favoured

using equidistant parallel lines to show changes in

altitude along a vertical plane, those from the

École Polytechnique used contours to represent

changes in elevation parallel to the ground plane

while giving a sense of the form of a particular

topographical feature.22 Contour lines eventually

won out over the wholly artificial convention of

hachures, which used changes in line thickness

and orientation to describe changes in altitude and

topography. As the historian Anne Godlewska

would describe it, contour lines embodied a middle

ground between ‘excessive empiricism’ and

‘neglect of the facts’.23 Yet the contour line was a

convention whose power and efficacy could

translate across disciplines. The Prussian polymath

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was a

champion of this approach. In ‘Des lignes isothermes

et de la distribution de la chaleur sur le globe’, his

1817 essay about the drawing of isothermic lines

on maps, von Humboldt viewed atmospheric

phenomena like air temperature as geographical

phenomena that required a precise coordination of

longitude, latitude and altitude.24 Although Rey’s

lines waver more towards a ‘neglect of the facts’,

and although their visual similarity to contour lines

perhaps invites too much speculation, this forced

connection creates further opportunities to theorise

their significance.

Other examples appear as possible visual bench-

marks for Rey’s diagram because they invoke

issues of pressurised and moving fluids. In 1886,

Vice-Admiral Georges Cloué, the former French

Minister of the Navy and the Colonies, compiled

accounts and data of a tropical monsoon cyclone

that formed near the Laccadive Islands in June,

1885, and whorled westward, leaving a wake of

devastation that claimed five vessels and 427

sailors. He published his results in two articles,

both featuring diagrams and maps showing the

shape and form of the storm in relation to the trajec-

tories of vessels (Fig. 4). Cloué invoked the language

of hydrodynamics, in one instance describing the

tropical monsoon cyclone’s trajectory through the

Gulf of Aden as ‘following a line of least resist-

ance’.25 Yet this focus on lines and resistance finds

a crucial analogue in a diagram describing the

formation of the storm as a collision between south-

easterly winds and the easterly monsoon winds.

Cloué used this drawing to illustrate how this col-

lision could generate the counter-clockwise motion

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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 19Number 2

Figure 3b. Pierre

Miquel’s windrose-like

diagram showing

dispersal of microbes

from Parc Montsouris in

Paris; from Miquel, Les

organismes vivants de

l’atmosphère (Paris,

Gauthier-Villars, 1883),

p. 220.

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normally associated with the Coriolis effect in north-

ern latitudes (Fig. 5). Here, the lines are equidistant

and parallel, again suggesting a familiarity with car-

tographic conventions. Yet this image, with its

emphasis on winds travelling and crashing at

oblique angles, also summons up Rey’s site drawings

and the way they imagine air emanating and

crashing into the city. And though it may be too

much a stretch to suggest his familiarity with tropical

monsoon diagrams, it is Cloué’s use of the

word ‘resistance’ that points to some additional con-

nections.

Earlier cartographic depictions offer a way to

conflate visual references with a more textual

understanding of resistance. Edmond Halley’s map

of the trade winds from 1686 used dashed lines

and comet-like tracings to help explain how

thermal convection contributed to the movement

of air across oceans and continents. Trade winds

and monsoons were, according to Halley, that

most biological and fundamental of units: the ‘cell’

of atmospheric life.26 This notion, in turn, invokes

Miquel’s diagram showing microbial dispersion,

which recalls the French physiologist Xavier

Bichat’s idea that ‘Life consists in the sum of the

functions, by which death is resisted’.27 If life can

be thought of as a product of resisting the dominant

winds carrying harmful pathogens,28 then is it

possible to think of architecture in a similar

fashion, as something that is borne out of the resist-

ance to air?

In short, like the lines describing the formation of

the 1885 tropical monsoon cyclone, Rey’s isobar-

like lines representing the force of air are a kind

of invention necessary to present a particular point

of view. Put another way, these lines give a two-

dimensional presence not just to ‘invisible forces’,

but also to ‘undefined space’, as the historian

Katharine Anderson has shown.29 An important

frame of reference here is the English physicist

Michael Faraday’s concept of ‘lines of force’.

280

Triangular blocks and windtunnels: Augustin Rey’s logic of

air resistanceEnrique Ramirez

Figure 4. Diagrams

showing the steamer

Rouen in relation to the

Aden Cyclone, from

Vice-Amiral Georges

Cloué, ‘L’Ouragan de

juin 1885, dans le Golfe

d’Aden’, in Service

Hydrographique de la

Marine, Annales

hydrographiques:

Recueil d’avis,

instructions, documents

et mémoires relatifs à

l’hydrographie et la

navigation, Vol. 2, No. 8

(Paris, Imprimerie

Nationale, 1886).

Figure 5. Diagram

showing the Aden

cyclone being formed

by the collision of

southeasterly winds and

the easterly monsoon

winds, from Georges

Cloué, ‘L’Ouragan de

juin 1885, dans le Golfe

d’Aden’, in Service

Hydrographique de la

Marine, Annales

hydrographiques:

Recueil d’avis,

instructions, documents

et mémoires relatifs à

l’hydrographie et la

navigation, Vol. 2, No. 8

(Paris, Imprimerie

Nationale, 1886).

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These tell-tale lines, which proved the existence of

magnetism, could not be observed. Yet when

metal shavings were placed near a magnet, they

formed ‘representative’ lines that seemed to oscil-

late outwards (Fig. 6a, b).30 The literary scholar

Laura Otis has articulated another importance for

these ‘representative’ lines, arguing that such

devices were instances of depicting ‘the world ima-

ginatively’ so that anyone—scientist, Admiral or

architect—could ‘draw inferences about invisible

phenomena based on observable effects… inviting

readers to imagine hidden worlds’.31 To cite a

more aviation-related example, a pamphlet describ-

ing the patent for Auguste Debayeux’s windmill-

driven balloon included a diagram showing the

various devices that would suck air and create nega-

tive pressures allowing the machine to move

forward.32 In this drawing, both parallel and

contour lines show the force and movement and

air. And more importantly, the images point to

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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 19Number 2

Figure 6a. James Clerk

Maxwell’s models of

Michael Faraday’s ‘Lines

of Force’, from James

Clerk Maxwell, A

Treatise on Electricity

and Magnetism

(Oxford, Clarendon

Press, 1904).

Figure 6b. James Clerk

Maxwell’s models of

Michael Faraday’s ‘Lines

of Force’, from James

Clerk Maxwell, A

Treatise on Electricity

and Magnetism

(Oxford, Clarendon

Press, 1904).

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how air resistance forms ‘a kind of sheet’ whose

imagined existence was yet to be proved (Fig. 7).33

Imagining urban airAs in Debayeux’s drawing, Rey’s unusual site draw-

ings reveal the architect manipulating or imagining

air pressure and movement in the service of a larger

narrative that eclipsed the original innovations latent

in his winning design. The original competition guide-

lines required entrants to adhere to issues of hygiene

and salubrity, and yet the Fondation Rothschild chose

Rey’s design over entries by the likes of Garnier and

Provensal even though both of their entries appear

very similar to Rey’s: all incorporated a large, central

square within the urban block in order to adhere to

the requirements of salubrity. Rey’s proposal has

almost no setback—the block’s first floor is almost

flush against the limits of the building plot—as well

as an elevation with a fairly legible subdivision of ser-

vices. Henry Provensal’s design also featured a

massing that ran against the boundaries of the build-

ing plot, yet added two small service facilities inside

the open courtyards: a strategy already visible in the

various Cités ouvrières in Paris. Yet these aspects

that make Rey’s scheme very similar to those of

other competition entrants seem largely forgotten;

the winning entry is not known because of its presen-

tation drawings and elevations, but rather because of

the curious site drawing depicting the force of air.

Others have given the site drawing a kind of his-

torical weight without exploring the possible aerody-

namical nature of Rey’s work. Historians like

Wolfgang Sonne and Laurent Stalder have discussed

the Fondation Rothschild project within more norma-

tive realms like histories of the urban block and

workers’ housing, yet do not offer more than just a

passing mention of the role that air played in the

winning scheme.34 The project appears as another

instance where issues of hygiene and salubrity were

primary engines behind the design solution. This, of

course, is true, and yet the aerial and aerodynamic

contexts continue to vex: although in provocative

and compelling ways. Consider, for example, how

Rey’s drawing abandons the standard figure-

ground approach: the site plans, with their depictions

of buildings as white, empty solids in a field of dark

air currents, resulted in a figure-air drawing. In

short, Rey made no distinction between his project’s

urban context and surrounding air.

He would say as much in 1906 in a session before

the International Congress of Sanitary Dwellings,

presenting a narrative, so to speak, a vision of

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Figure 7. Debayeux’s

aerial navigation

system, from Gaston

Tissandier, La

navigation aérienne:

l’aviation et la direction

des aérostats dans les

temps anciens et

modernes (Paris,

Hachette, 1886),

p. 321.

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architecture, city and air functioning together in a

machine-like manner:

We can compare a city to a vast body furrowed by

canals where the air, circulating constantly, carries

away the unhealthy germs produced by the life of

the city that purify themselves when upon contact

with the plains outside. Here nature takes care of

all cleansing, all regeneration. Do we not see how

the inner courtyard, as understood by our regu-

lations, as created by our architects, does not par-

ticipate in the refreshing movement of the

atmosphere? The court constitutes a reservoir of

air that is enclosed, confined, stagnant, so that

its renewal can only be done with a slowness

that excludes any serious idea of hygiene.35

This is an unusual, almost counterintuitive state-

ment: for Rey it is not the air but rather the germs

in the air that are ‘purified’. Yet the air inside the

courtyard performed the same role as the air

outside the city. Air was a medium that circulated,

moved, from city to country, and back again, and

did so quickly: a cycle of regeneration, movement

and velocity that recalled of all things, the way air

was produced, inhaled and exhaled inside a wind

tunnel, or soufflerie.36

Reverting once again to the aerodynamical nature

of Rey’s site drawing allows the previous cartographic

and scientific examples to be woven into something

more coherent, something more like a field of

relationships. The theoretical ‘object’ becomes

folded into a ‘theoretical object’; that is, a theoretical

goal or purpose. Consider how streamlines—a visual

convention suggested by Rey’s isobar lines—were the

aerodynamical analogues to contours. The English

physicist Sir Horace Lamb declared in 1895 that ‘A

“line of motion” or “stream-line” is defined to be a

line drawn from point to point, so that its direction

is everywhere that of the motion of the fluid.’37 Like

contour lines, streamlines therefore represented a

kind of continuity: whereas the former used a line

to connect ‘point to point’ instances of measurable

data like temperature or elevation in cartographic

space; in the latter, lines become indicators of

motion in a specific direction (Fig. 8).38 In Rey’s site

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Figure 8. Diagram

showing flow of ideal,

viscous fluid, from Sir

Horace Lamb,

Hydrodynamics

(Cambridge,

Cambridge University

Press, 1895), p. 532.

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Figure 9. César Daly,

‘De la locomotion

aérienne’, Revue

générale de

l’architecture et des

travaux publics, Vol. 4

(1843), p. 15, et seq.

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drawing the lines are ‘lines of motion’ that appear

strangely as hachures and not as contours when they

encounter the open courtyards. That is, much like

hachures rely on variable thicknesses to delineate

changes in relief, here, the ways the lines concentrate,

collect and thicken around architectural objects

suggest more about density and pressure than

motion and velocity of air.

If Rey’s theoretical objective, purpose or goalwas to

incorporate ideas of dynamic, pressurised air into his

work, one would not have to look very far beyond

the history of architecture to find a possible expla-

nation for his approach to site drawing. In 1843,

that most indefatigable and redoubtable of critics,

César Daly, wrote a brief article containing the first

description of an aeroplane ever printed in an archi-

tectural publication. Daly’s article, entitled ‘De la loco-

motion aérienne’, was the first ever to coin the term

‘aerial locomotion’ as a way of describing the over-

coming of air resistance to produce flight (Fig. 9).

More importantly, Daly implored his readers to

embrace current developments in aeronautics and

ignore ‘anti-Icarian’ doubters using these words: ‘Is

it any wonder that these short-sighted intellectuals

who believe only facts on the ground, who are power-

less to direct their gaze into the future, is it any

wonder that these minds who can only crawl when

in the field of science, are frightened when we talk

about leaving the earth? These people, undoubtedly,

would prefer to travel in a tunnel than in the air.’39 As

it turned out, the first article about mechanised,

modern flight in a professional architectural journal

not only invoked aerodynamics, but, strangely and

wonderfully, also summoned that most unlikely of

architectural objects: the wind tunnel.

Conclusion: logic(s) of air resistanceIn considering Rey’s Fondation Rothschild entry, an

ordering of ideas and actions emerge that look to

air pressure and movement in cities as vital to a

determination of urban form. It is in this sense

that Rey’s method can be identified as an aerodyna-

mical logic, or rather, a logic of air resistance. To

refer to an approach as a logic, and to do so

while rooted firmly in the design and making of

buildings: this does not stray far from the realm

of architectural history. In fact, resistance was

embedded in the very idea of an architectural

logic. Something in this vein can be found in

English architectural critic Henry Heathcote Sta-

tham’s The Logic of Architectural Design, a lecture

given in 1879. Statham, a Victorian polymath

who, besides being a proficient musician, was also

editor for The Builder, observed how fan vaulting

at King’s College Chapel was ‘a peculiarly signifi-

cant illustration of the predominance of logic in

architectural design’ because it was born of ‘a

struggle with a practical difficulty, carried on

through many generations’.40 Logics are pro-

ductive, and if ‘[r]apidity of motion against the

resistance of the air produced flight’,41 an architec-

tural logic of air resistance can produce on its own

terms an historical and theoretical approach that

considers air as a modernising phenomenon

which gives form to buildings whilst shaping archi-

tectural discourse. A logic of air resistance therefore

elides distinctions between historical and theoretical

objects by allowing a history of architecture that

momentarily suspends an analysis of physical build-

ings and looks instead at the air flowing over coun-

trysides, above cities, in and through buildings, and

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across borders and oceans—throughout different

moments, producing different histories.

Notes and references1. The historian Gérard Jorland has described hygienism

in the nineteenth century in terms of a shift from the

material ontology to the social ontology of hygiene.

While the swamp (‘marais’) became a metaphor for

understanding social ontology, he traces the beginning

of hygienist thinking to Antonie-Laurent Lavoisier’s

experiments in decomposing air into constitutive

elements, which resulted in a material ontology of

air. Gérard Jorland, Une société à soigner: Hygiène et

salubrité publiques en France au XIXe siècle (Paris, Gal-

limard, 2010), pp. 69–73. For more general histories on

air, see, for example: Gabrielle Walker, An Ocean of

Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the

Atmosphere (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2008);

Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A Story of

Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America

(New York, Riverhead Books, 2008); Steven Connor,

The Matter of Air: Science and the Art of the Ethereal

(London, Reaktion Books, 2010).

2. The entire passage reads: ‘Ainsi l’enceinte de 1846,

après lui avoir servi de protection avancée, était

devenue la forme même de la ville. Et voilà qu’à son

tour elle pesait sur Paris, l’empêchait de se développer

naturellement. Une fois de plus il devait renoncer à

trouver sa forme par lui-même. Le rempart émoussait

l’élan des quartiers neufs, arrêtait les avenues, les

coupait de leurs prolongements, maintenant beaucoup

de rues de l’extrême périphérie à l’état de culs-de-sacs

ou de coupe-gorge, y laissait fermenter les voyous et les

ordures. De proche en proche, la pression se communi-

quait jusqu’au centre. Les rues des vieux quartiers

renonçaient à s’élargir. Les anciennes maisons

bourgeoisies ou marchandes qu’on n’abattait plus

dégénéraient sur place en taudis purulents. Les loge-

ments noircissaient dans un air mal remué qui finissait

par vieillir comme eux. C’était l’enceinte qui, de loin,

y comprimai les familles, couchait les gens les uns

contre les autres sur des lits pliants, sur des matelas à

même le sol, dans des salles à manger au plafond

bas, dans des cuisines, des couloirs, des réduits sans

fenêtre. C’était elle qui obligeait les bâtisseurs à

dresser des maisons étroites sur des boutes de terrains

taillés de travers: elle qui, peu à peu, par écrasement,

éliminait les jardins intérieurs, les cours plantées d’ar-

bustes; qui augmentait l’épaisseur de la circulation et

commençait à la ralentir; qui, jusque sur les grandes

boulevards, serrait les fils de voitures, rapprochait les

moyeux..’ Jules Romains, Crime de Quinette (Les

hommes de bonne volonté tome 2) (Paris, 1933).

3. J. Romains, The Depths and the Heights (Men of Good

Will, Volume 10) (New York, Knopf, 1933), p. 3.

4. Such expressions will depend invariably on the role of

the boundary in separating the city extra muros from

the city intra muros. For examples of this, see: Jean-

Louis Cohen, Andre Lortie, Des fortifs au perif: Paris,

les seuils de la ville (Paris, Picard, 1991); Marie

Charvet, Les fortifications de Paris: de l’hygiénisme à

l’urbanisme, 1880–1919 (Rennes, Presses Universi-

taires de Rennes, 2005); Éric Hazan, ‘Psychogeography

of the Boundary’, in The Invention of Paris: A History in

Footsteps, David Fernbach, trsl. (New York, Verso,

2010), pp. 3–16: translation of L’Invention de Paris: il

n’y a pas de perdus (Paris, Seuil, 2004).

5. The literature concerning hygiene and mechanical

systems is vast. See, eg, Reyner Banham, The Architec-

ture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago, Illi-

nois, University of Chicago Press, 1984; 1969); Robert

Bruegmann, ‘Central Heating and Forced Ventilation:

Origins and Effects on Architectural Design’, The

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,

Vol. 37, No. 3 (October, 1978), pp. 143–160; Cecil

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D. Elliot, Technics and Architecture: The Development of

Materials and Systems for Architecture (Cambridge,

Mass., The MIT Press, 1992); Gail Cooper, Air-Con-

ditioning America: Engineers and the Controlled

Environment, 1900–1960 (Baltimore, Maryland, The

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). See also Michel

Foucault, ed., Les machines à guérir (aux origins de l’hô-

pital moderne) (Paris, Institut de l‘environnement, 1976).

6. Examples of this rich literature include work on Hein-

rich Tessenow’s permeable wall at his ‘Patenthaus’ in

Helleau. For more on the ‘Tessenow Wall’, see Marco

De Michelis, Heinrich Tessenow (Milan, Electa, 1991);

Didem Ekici, ‘From Rikli’s Light-and-Air Hut to Tesse-

now’s Patenthaus: Körperkultur and the Modern

Dwelling in Germany, 1900–1914’, The Journal of

Architecture, Vol. 13, No. 4 (August, 2008), pp. 379–

406. The best survey of technical and architectural con-

siderations of salubrity comes by way of Paul Overy,

Light, Air and Openness: Modern Architecture

Between the Wars (London, Thames and Hudson,

2007).

7. Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London, The Studio, Ltd., 1935);

Norman Bel Geddes, Horizons (Boston, Little, Brown

and Company, 1932) and ‘Streamlining: Science

Wars Against the Wind’, The Atlantic Monthly, Vol.

154, No. 5 (November, 1934), pp. 553–563.

8. See Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and

Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Chicago, Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 2010; 1997), pp. 13–14.

Alder relies on Blondel’s observation to describe the

objects of scientific inquiry as ‘thick things’ whose

interpretations and representations encounter social

and cultural resistance in their own respective historical

trajectories. Alder gives the idea of ‘thick things’ a par-

ticularly analytical significance: ‘The phrase “thick

things” is meant to invoke two interrelated aspects of

the artifactual life. The first is the brute challenge of

shaping the material world by overcoming what one

early modern engineer called the “resistance and obsti-

nacy of matter”. The second is the challenge of repre-

senting things in ways that at least partially and

temporarily coordinate the diverse sets of human

agents who design, make, and use them. The

meaning I have in mind is analogous to Clifford

Geertz’s contrast between the capacity of “thick” eth-

nographic description to represent multiple (and diver-

gent) human points of view and the reductive “thin”

descriptions with which scientific anthropologists

once collapsed actions into a simplified matrix of func-

tional behavior. In this respect the thickness of both

artifacts and their representations can be contrasted

with the “thinning” process described by Gaston

Bachelard, in which the synthesizing explanatory

power of the physical sciences—and the physical

instruments that embody those theories—create

those tractable objects that constitute legitimate

objects of inquiry.’ Alder, ‘Introduction’, Isis, Vol. 98,

No. 1 (March, 2007), p. 82. For more about ‘thick

things’ in their French early-modern context, see

Alder, ‘Making Things the Same: Representation, Tol-

erance and the End of the Ancien Régime in France’,

Social Studies of Science, Vol. 28, No. 4 (August,

1998), pp. 499–545.

9. François Blondel, L’art de jetter les bombes (Paris,

L’auteur et Langois, 1683), preface, quoted in Ken

Alder, Engineering the Revolution, op. cit., p.13. Blon-

del’s contemporaries attacked him for his inadequate

treatment of mathematical principles. Pierre Varignon,

for example, criticised Blondel’s L’art de jetter les

bombes for its avoidance of calculus and its cursory

analysis of issues of air resistance: Pierre Varignon,

‘Manière de discerner les vitesses des corps mus en

lignes courbes ...’, Mémoires de l’Academie des

sciences de l’Institut de France (Paris, Boudot, 1706),

p. 286. See also Gerbino, François Blondel: Architec-

ture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution

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(New York, Oxford, Routledge, 2010), p. 197, n.21.

Here, I use Blondel’s quotation to make a larger claim

about the role of resistance in historical analyses.

10. For more on the Fondation Rothschild’s innovative building

programmes, see Klaus Weber, ‘One Hundred Years of the

“Bluff Rothschildien”: Housing the Urban Poor’, The Roths-

child Archive, http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ib/articles/

AR2004Bluff.pdf (2004), pp. 12–17.

11. In July, 1906, for a paper before the Seventh Inter-

national Congress of Architects in London, Rey

claimed, ‘The closed courtyard is a stagnant reservoir,

where stale air, discharged from all the openings of

the rooms that flow into it, cannot run out. This air is

all the more unhealthy as it was not subjected to the

regenerating action of sun rays.’ Adolphe-Augustin

Rey, ‘Les constructions en acier et en ciment armé’, in,

the Royal Institute of British Architects, International

Congress of Architects, Seventh Session Held in

London 16–21 July 1906 (London, RIBA, 1908),

p. 192. An early advocate of using open courtyards as

a reservoir of air was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who

saw them as a means to accommodate the elasticity

of air inside prisons: ‘Rapport fiat à l’académie Royale

des sciences, le 17 mars 1780, par M.M. Duhamel, De

Montigny, Le Roy, Tenon, Tillet et Lavoisier’, in

Oeuvres de Lavoisier, Tome III: Mémoires et

rapports sur divers sujets de chimie et de physique

pures ou appliquées à l’histoire naturelle générale et à

l’hygiène publique (Paris, Imprimerie Impériale, 1865),

p. 172.

12. Here, I would like to distinguish the ideologically-

loaded concept of ‘architectural equipment’ from the

more historically conscious idea of an ‘architectural

instrument’. Whereas a piece of ‘architectural equip-

ment’ can be thought of as a kind of architectural

feature (ie, an aperture or chimney) that orders and

classifies subjects and environments, an ‘architectural

instrument’ is more of a device with architectural qual-

ities that performs a kind of extra-architectural role. For

more on ‘architectural equipment’, see Georges

Teyssot, A Topology of Everyday Constellations (Cam-

bridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2013), pp. 2–6. An inter-

esting discussion of ‘architectural instruments’ appears

in Hentie Louw, ‘The “Mechanick Artist” in Late Seven-

teenth-Century English and French Architecture: The

Work of Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren and

Claude Perrault Compared as Products of an Interac-

tive Science/Architecture Relationship’, in, Michael

Cooper, ed., Robert Hooke: Tercentennial Studies

(Aldershot, England; Burlington, Vermont, Ashgate

Publishing, 2006), pp. 181–199.

13. Marie-Jeanne Dumont, Le Logement social à Paris

1850–1930: les habitations à bon marché (Paris,

Mardaga, 1991), p. 47.

14. A-A. Rey, ‘Concours de la Fondation Rothschild: études

preliminaries des plans.—determination du partí

adopté par la question de ventilation générale’, L’Arch-

itecture: journal hebdomadaire de la société centrale

des architectes français, Vol. 18, No. 36 (9th Septem-

ber, 1905), p. 336: ‘Nous avons supposé le vent

venant dans les conditions les plus favorables aérer le

terrain; un grand square existant sur la rue Théo-

phile-Roussel et formant, avec les rues latérales

Antoine-Vallon et Charles-Beaudelaire, une largeur

totale de 56 mètres. Pour rendre notre démonstration

plus frappante, le vent est suppose venir du nord-est

et arriver, par une sorte de veine de 56 mètres de

large, balayer d’air le terrain et les constructions qui y

seraient édifiées. [...] Comment disposer des bâtiments

sur ces terrains pour donner à l’aération des façades

intérieures le maximum de cube d’air et le maximum

de mouvement à ce cube d’air lorsque les différents

vents soufflent?’

15. Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Hubert

Damisch, ‘A Conversation with Hubert Damisch’,

October, Vol. 85 (Summer, 1998), p. 8.

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16. Ibid., p. 337: ‘De plus, nous avons étudié la circulation

de l’air dans chacun d’eux, de la manière suivante:

1° Par vent nord-est soufflant par le square et dans la

direction de la rue Charles-Beaudelaire [sic.];

2° Par vent du nord ou nord-ouest soufflant à l’angle

du terrain, rue de Prague-rue Théophile-Roussel, et

suivant par bifurcation ces deux rues;3° Par vent sud soufflant à l’autre angle du terrain et

traversant la rue de Prague dans l’autre sens, et,

par bifurcation, la rue Charles-Baudelaire;4° Enfin, par vent est et sud-est soufflant à l’angle haut

du terrain, et suivant Ia rue Théophile-Rousselet, par

bifurcation, la rue Emilio-Castelar.’

-A. Rey, ‘Concours de la Fondation Rothschild: études

preliminaries des plans.—determination du partí

adopté par la question de ventilation générale.’,

op. cit.

17. For an explanation of Lalanne’s windrose, see Howard

Wainer, Visual Revelations: Graphical Tales of Fate and

Deception from Napoleon Bonaparte to Ross Perot

(Mahwah, New Jersey, Psychological Press, 1997),

p. 109. The most authoritative accounts of Lalanne’s

innovations in graphism appear in H. Gray Funkhouser,

‘Historical Development of the Graphical Representation

of Statistical Data’, Osiris, Vol. 3 (1937), pp. 269–404

and Thomas L. Hankins, ‘Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms:

A Particular History of Graphs’, Isis, Vol. 90, No. 1

(March, 1999), pp. 50–80. Miquel’s diagram appears

in Pierre Miquel, Les organismes vivants de l’atmosphere

(Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1883), p. 220.

18. For more about the drawing of isobars as a cultural

practice, see Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent: How

Meteorologists Learned toMap, Predict, and Dramatize

Weather (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000).

19. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, Christo-

pher S. Wood, trsl. (New York, New York: Zone Books,

1997), p. 27.

20. Here, I borrow the term from Deborah Poole, Vision,

Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the

Andean ImageWorld (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton

University Press, 1997), pp. 8–9.

21. Anne Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geo-

graphic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago,

University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 45.

22. C.W. Larned, ‘History of Mapmaking and Topography’,

Scientific American Supplement, No. 1651 (24thAu-

gust, 1907), p. 118.

23. A. Godlewska, Geography Unbound, op. cit., p. 223.

24. Alexander von Humboldt, ‘Des lignes isothermes et de

la distribution de la chaleur sur le globe’, Mémoires de

Physique et de Chimie, de la Société d’Arcueil, Vol. 3

(Paris, Perroneau, 1817), p. 463.

25. Vice-Admiral Georges Charles Cloué, ‘L’Ouragan de

juin 1885 dans le Golfe d’Aden (second mémoire)’,

Revue maritime et coloniale, Vol. 93 (Paris, Librarie

Militaire de L. Badouin et cie, 1887), p. 199: ‘A priori,

nous pensons que lorsqu’un cyclone s’engage dans

un bras de mer relativement étroit, il tend à suivre la

ligne de moindre résistance, aussi, il ne nous parait

pas possible d’admettre que ce grand tourbillon ait

pu changer quatre fois de direction, dans un espace

relativement peu étendu, et ce soit promené ainsi

d’un côté à l’autre du golfe.’

26. Although the trade wind map was made in 1686, a

version appears in Edmond Halley, ‘An Historical

Account of the TradeWinds, andMonsoons, Observable

in the Seas Between and Near the Tropicks, with an

Attempt to Assign the Physical Cause of the Said

Winds’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,

16 (1stJanuary, 1753), pp. 153–168. For more on the sig-

nificance of this map, see Charles Napier Shaw, ed., ‘The

First Chapter in the Story of the Winds: The Halley

Lecture in the University of Oxford, 28 May, 1918’, in

The Air and Its Ways: The Rede Lecture (1921) in the Uni-

versity of Cambridge (Cambridge, Cambridge University

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Press, 1923), p. 43; Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent:

How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and

Dramatize the Weather (Chicago, University of Chicago

Press, 2000), pp. 26–28.

27. Xavier Bichat, Psychological Researches on Life and

Death (Boston, Richardson and Lord, 1827), p. 10.

28. See Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in

Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics

(Baltimore, London, The Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1999), p. 12.

29. Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victor-

ians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago, Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 191.

30. Michael Faraday, ’On the Physical Lines of Magnetic

Force (Royal Institution Proceedings, June 11, 1852)’,

Experimental Researches in Electricity (London, Taylor,

1839), pp. 438–439.

31. Laura Otis, Introduction, Literature and Science in the

Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Oxford, Oxford

University Press, 2002), np.

32. For more on Debayeux’s system, see Gaston Tissandier,

La navigation aérienne: l’aviation et la direction des

aérostats dans les temps anciens et modernes (Paris,

Hachette, 1886), pp. 318–322.

33. Alfred Chapel, Navigation aérienne, systéme Debayeux

(Paris, Chapel, 1880), p. 13: ‘l’air forme une espèce de

chemise, c’est ce que j’ai représenté par des flèches,

cette barrière sera suffisamment forte pour opposer

un obstacle aux vents obliques, mais ces expériences

n’ayant pas encore été faites, les formules que nous

pourrions employer, ne résoudraient sans doute pas

la question.’

34. Laurent Stalder, ‘Reform of the Urban Block: Paris,

Concours Fondation Rothschild, 1905–1909, and Bou-

levard Periphérique, 1919–36’; Wolfgang Sonne,

‘Dwelling in the metropolis: reformed urban blocks

1890–1940’: Project Report, University of Strathclyde

and Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA),

Glasgow, United Kingdom (2005).

35. A-A. Rey and (?) Gautrez, ‘Logements ouvriers’, Assai-

nissement et salubrité de l’habitation: compte-rendu

des travaux du deuxième congrés international tenu

a Genève du 4 au 10 Septembre 1906 (Paris,

Rousset, 1907), p. 169: ‘On peut comparer une ville

à une vaste organe sillonné par des canaux où l’air, cir-

culant constamment, transporte au loin les germes

malsains produits par la vie de la cite qui se purifient

au contact des plaines. Là la nature se charge de tout

épurer, de tout régénérer. Ne voit-on pas que la cour

intérieure fermée, telle que la comprennent nos règle-

ments de voirie, telle que la crée nos architectes, ne

participe pas à ce mouvement régénérateur de l’atmo-

sphère. Cette cour constitute un reservoir d’air enfer-

meé, confiné, stagnant, donc le renouvellement ne

peut que se faire avec une lenteur qui exclut toute

idée sérieuse d’hygiène.’

36. Before the advent of wind tunnel testing, a soufflerie

referred to any device that produced a stream of air,

such as the ensemble of bellows for a pipe organ or

an air blower for a forge. Entry for ‘soufflerie’, Diction-

naire de l’Académie française, 6th Edition (1835); Émile

Littré: Dictionnaire de la langue française (1872–77). In

his Dictionnaire raisonné, Viollet-le-Duc notes how an

organist sits in front of a soufflerie whilst playing: Dic-

tionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe

au XVIe siècle, Vol. 2 (1858–1868), p. 253.

37. Horace Lamb, Hydrodynamics (Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1895), p. 20.

38. Lamb’s work was important to Marey and other figures

from French aerodynamics in the late nineteenth

century: see Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des

séances de l’Académie des sciences, Vol. 100 (1885),

p. 1317; Lucien Bull, ‘La photographie des mouve-

ments invisibles: expériences de M. Hele-Shaw’,

290

Triangular blocks and windtunnels: Augustin Rey’s logic of

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La nature (7th September, 1901), p. 247; H.S. Hele-

Shaw,’The Motion of a Perfect Liquid’, Annual Report

of the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution

(Washington, Government Printing Office, 1901),

p. 107, n.1.

39. César Daly, ‘De la locomotion aérienne’, Revue génér-

ale de l’architecture et des travaux publics, Vol. 4

(1843), p. 16: ‘Est-il étonnant que ces myopes intellec-

tuels qui ne croient qu’aux faits accomplis, impuissants

qu’ils sont à porter leurs regards dans l’avenir, est-il

étonnant que ces esprits qui ne savent que ramper

dans le domaine de la science, s’effraient dès qu’on

leur parle de quitter la terre? Ces gens-là, à coup sûr,

doivent mieux aimer voyager en tunnel que dans les

airs.’

40. Henry Heathcote Statham, The Logic of Architectural

Design: Abstract of a Lecture Delivered at the Royal

Institution, January 31, 1879 (London, William

Clowes and Sons, 1879), p. 8.

41. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue,

and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, University of

California Press, 1992), p. 98.

291

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