The New Eco-Architecture alternatives from the Modern Movement. (Vers Une Architecture Verte).

By Colin Porteous. London: Spon Press. 2001. [pounds sterling]27.50

New Eco-Architecture is an intriguing book and it prompted me to re-read Reyner Banham's The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment of 1969 to see how times have changed over more than three decades. Both books have much in common, including many of the same built exemplars, but the arguments of each author are of course the result of very different global situations. Nowhere in Banham's book can I detect a hint of the concerns that began to be raised from the early 1970s. And yet, with a great deal of hindsight, it is Colin Porteous's contention that the seeds of the 'green' movement were sown well before this, in the early days of the Modern Movement.

Porteous takes us on a swift tour of early green landmarks, using 1927 as his base date, then moving to 1963, then on to today. He compares at length the mono-material approach of Frank Lloyd Wright versus the multi-layer approach of the International Style protagonists, showing how buildings from each approach performed environmentally, sometimes well (often by mistake), more usually badly. Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier share the limelight (Banham was tempted to rate Corb as 'the most signally delinquent of his generation in matters of environmental management'), but many more are covered: Gropius, Aalto, Schindler, Neutra, Mies van der Rohe et al. So too are the ingredients which later became the hallmarks of sustainable architecture: glass, green roofs, sun-facing aspect, shades and blinds, brise-soleil, the double-skin neutralizing wall, the use of local materials and so on.

But did these early heroes really understand environmental control in the terms that we must today? Porteous argues they did, but I find this unconvincing. Climate-sensitive design is as far as they got (on their better days). The fact that this approach might consume huge amounts of energy and in so doing harm our globe simply did not occur to them (Buckminster Fuller was surely one of the first to recognize this dilemma, and that was not till the early 1960s). Sustainably responsible design is surely far more than this, to the extent of making spurious any academic search for 'green roots in the Modern Movement.

Porteous's book is full of interesting snippets of information as well as drawn details from some of the early buildings, but it lacks a convincing thesis. There is an abundance of examples by which he attempts to justify his argument, but his tedious dialectic gets the better of him. There is a limp conclusion followed by an even limper 'personal post-script'. Above all, it lacks the poetry of Reyner Banham, confirming my growing belief that too many mediocre books are being published nowadays, presumably to gain brownie points for funding their authors' university departments.