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Daniel A Barber, University of Pennsylvania
LECTURE TITLE: Emergency Exits, Stranded Assets, Thermal Habits: Reimagining Architecture and Climate
The design of the built environment is central to the well being of societies as never before. The climate crisis directly implicates the design of buildings, in terms of site implications, material selections, and the carbon emissions that result from air-conditioning. And now a global pandemic has forced millions to come to terms with new habits and practices in their interior spaces, and new conditions for urban sociality.
Yet, the architectural discourse strains to adjust its practices and presuppositions to encounter these epochal changes. While numerous critics, designers, and technologists have reimagined their practices according to climate pressures, a status quo of incremental change persists. While we can specify the details of a zero-carbon architecture, it still hovers like a spectre, there but not quite visible, not yet realizable. Far too often, the environment is simply another opportunity for the computational production of novel form – rather than an instigation, an opening to a new framework for a relational, engaged, and transformative practice.
This presentation will explore three figures of thought – Emergency Exits, Stranded Assets, and Thermal Habits – as means to reconfigure architectural ambitions. I aim to provide discursive tools, precise vocabulary, and new frameworks for knowledge production that aspire to the scale of the crises we collectively face. All three figures are simultaneously historical and conceptual, discursive and operational, precise and widely resonant. They all focus inexorably on climate, yet also harness knowledge that sits right outside of architecture’s disciplinary frame. They identify connections to economic, racial and gender inequities, and they insist that architecture is a valuable instrument for reimagining possible futures.
Following discussion of these three figures of thought, and their potential for reimagining architecture and climate, I will conclude with reflections on how they relate to the current pandemic. To do so I will summarize some aspects of the CovidXClimate project at the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities, which I co-direct, and consider how interior life is being reconsidered as we encounter unexpected transformations to social life.
Biography
Daniel A. Barber is the author, most recently, of Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton University Press, 2020). He is the editor of the Accumulation series on the e-flux architecture online platform, and the chair of the PhD Program in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
