Traces of Oil in the Architectural Archive: Some Aspects of a Larger Project

This paper revisits the publication of A Bucket of Oil: The Humanistic Approach to Building Design for Energy Conservation,1 produced in 1973-74 by researchers at the multinational architecture firm Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS).2 The publication was a response to the US experience of the oil embargo, but it was also an index of a transformation in the firm’s research practices—a transition from experimental research in the laboratory to historical research in the archive. While arguing for domestic energy conservation, A Bucket of Oil strategically exercised the agency of the archive to conceal the firm’s rapidly growing commitment to the international oil industry and the oil producing and exporting countries of the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia and its project for the University of Petroleum and Minerals (UPM). The relationship between archival research practices and fossil fuels, both then and now, raises serious questions about the nature of the architectural archive in the age of anthropogenic climate change.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.56

Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon

ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1