Form Follows Fuel - Barnabas Calder, Florian Urban

Modernists believed that “form follows function”. Form Follows Fuel shows that in fact energy has been the biggest influence on the world’s architecture throughout the history of our species. The availability of energy under different fuel regimes — including human labour, firewood, coal, oil, gas and renewables shapes architecture at all scales, from what gets built to how its doors hinge.The book is the first to quantify energy inputs for a range of buildings worldwide and across the historical record. In the process it throws up both detailed challenges and practical solutions to today’s ecological crises, highlighting the aspects of today’s buildings that make architecture responsible for 37% of human climate-changing emissions, and revealing the enormously lower impacts of historical alternatives to today’s default building practices.The book shows that the shift to fossil fuel, which started in the seventeenth century, came to be the most consequential move in the history of architecture as well as in human history in general. This brought about remarkable wealth for the built environment and at the same time unprecedented dangers for our planet, as evidenced by the exacerbating climate emergency.The book consists of 14 accessibly-written case studies, illustrated with beautiful and revealing new measured drawings of each project by John Joseph Burns. Each chapter focuses on a single structure in a particular historical con
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