Sustainability

by Michael J. Crosbie, PhD
Contributing Editor

Summary: Next month is the centennial of the birth of James Marston Fitch, a genuine Renaissance figure in architecture who helped change the way we think about buildings in the environment and their preservation. Fitch’s contributions to architecture and how they have shaped our understanding of sustainability are woefully underrated, and he is long overdue for a re-assessment of his influence.

Fitch was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Tennessee, and attended architecture school at Tulane. Financial difficulties prevented him from graduating, but he found work with a design firm in Nashville, where he began his study of old buildings. In the Army, Fitch worked as a meteorologist, and later as a journalist for such architecture publications as Architectural Forum and Architectural Record. He also wrote scholarly works, among them his most influential book—American Building: The Forces That Shape It, first published in 1948. The book was prescient, and its appearance at the cusp of Modern architecture’s dominance made it all the more visionary. Fitch was not into abstractions. His approach to architecture was practical, but it was based in a strong belief in building as a humanistic undertaking. “The ultimate task of architecture is to act in favor of human beings,” is how Fitch described his working thesis.

In American Building, Fitch celebrated the design of vernacular buildings as they responded to climate, lauding the native genius of those untutored in architecture who paid close attention to environmental forces and how design and construction should respond. Fitch was a Modernist, but not a proponent of the “International Style.” He understood that contemporary architects should study older buildings to understand how they accommodated the fluctuations of climate, incorporated regional materials and construction techniques, and generally worked with the environment instead of against it. Fitch was one of the few concerned about such matters in post-war America.

Years later he wrote in the preface of the 1972 edition of American Building: The Environmental Forces That Shape It: “American architecture today pays less attention to ecological, microclimatic, and psychosomatic considerations than it did a quarter of a century ago.” For many architects, technology promised to take architecture to a new plane of sophistication and performance. But Fitch saw technology, ironically, as the root of the problem with our buildings. He was perceptive about how too great a reliance on technology could undermine its environmental performance. “The sheer ubiquity of equipment for the manipulation of the natural environment,” Fitch wrote, “has led architects, engineers, and planners to behave as if this circumambient environment could be ignored as a factor in design.” He understood that we cannot “tech” our way out of the environmental problems we’ve created.

If we are aware of Fitch at all today, it is most likely because of his work as a preservationist. He joined the faculty of Columbia University’s architecture program in 1954 and a decade later helped found its graduate preservation program. Fitch’s passion for preservation can be seen as a part of his overall worldview of architecture’s relationship with the environment. Before Fitch, the preservation movement focused mostly on architectural landmarks. But Fitch saw entire neighborhoods and urban precincts as worthy of preservation. Retaining urban fabric is important, but today we know that often the most sustainable approach is to reuse existing buildings. Preservation can be seen as stewardship of existing resources for future use, transforming architecture sustainably for future generations.

How would Fitch appraise our profession’s embrace of sustainability? He’d caution us against making the same mistake as the Modernists by placing too much emphasis on technological fixes. He’d goad us to study the ways in which vernacular architecture uses native genius to keep buildings in environmental equilibrium. He’d encourage us to pursue preservation, restoration, and adaptive use as tools toward sustainable cities. And he would no doubt chide us in his warm, Southern drawl, “Took you long enough.”