I’m re-reading with great pleasure Steele’s Ecological Architecture: A Critical History. Today I’m looking at the six-page chapter on Rudolf Schindler. Steele is interested in the way he genuinely unified indoor and outdoor space and experience. Los Angeles set up very favorable conditions, and Steele finds him to be the one who most thoroughly seized the opportunity, already in the 1920s
There’s an important connection to be made between this character of Schindler’s work and the early going of the Top Ten Toolkit, very much part of today’s scene. It is part of COTE/AIA effort in 2018 to make patterns out of the substantial portfolio represented by the Top Ten projects, 20 years’ worth. The passage that caught my eye comes early on, in Measure 1—Design for Integration:

If you can do only one thing…
1. Design a building to lift the spirits and delight the senses.
Of the three Vitruvian virtues — firmitas, utilitas, and venustas — the following nine Measures of sustainable design [i.e. Measures 2-10] will cover best practices for the first two. Integrating Strategies for achieving Firmitas, or firmness and Utilitas, or function, might be difficult, but the formulas are relatively straightforward. If a design team adheres to the rules of thumb for daylight, the resulting building will be well lit or if a project team provides native habitat, the site’s biodiversity will benefit. Developing Strategies for Venustas, designing a building that delights, is a much more difficult endeavor. 

I’ve become sensitized to delight as a pressing issue from pursuing the ‘sustain-willing’ insight, namely that getting to sustainability requires more than -ability, it requires -willingness as well. Like many, I care about beauty, spirit, delight, but have largely contented myself with applauding them when they appear without feeling that they could be campaigned for.
My professional history has, however, taken me along some stepping stones to a more assertive, activist place. The Evergreen program, In the Presence of Beauty; Christopher Alexander on beauty as a covert issue in community design reactions; the presentation of food in Japan, even in low-end places; and so on. They deserve some reflection and articulation, but not here. Here I should just loop back to some of what Steele has to say about Schindler:

[The King’s Road house] presages all of the environmental principles later labelled as ‘sustainability’ in the late 1980s and early 90s: low embodied energy, high thermal mass in the concrete outer walls and floor, natiral ventilation induced by slidding screen internal walls, and the fficienct use of a renewable resource in its timber structure. (p.80)
By removing the intervening walls of glass that Mies van der Rohe had imposed, Schindler finally managed to sweep away Loos’s fears [that the modern world is so harsh that homes should keep it at bay], providing a prototype for a liberated modernism. (p.83)