Dwelling in Matter and Energy #2 - Modern Comfort

The Four P’s: Points, Periods, Paradigms, Prospects

Welcome back to our investigation of the embodied experience of matter and energy in the built environment. Adding to our previous post, we wanted to outline an - incomplete - chronology of the history of these topics. For that, we used one of the frameworks proposed in our thesis preparation, referred to as the four Ps: Points, Periods, Paradigms, and Prospects.

With this framework in mind, we gathered important dates and moments that chart the evolution of humans' relationship with matter and energy. We juxtapose the histories of matter and energy by laying them out on each side of a timeline, on which you'll find Points: key moments that defined these fields. At the top and bottom, Periods: specific stretches of time that shaped them, and in between are Paradigms: deciding historical shifts. Finally, all the way at the right, tipping into the future, we laid out potential Prospects: speculations on what may come next. Since our thesis is situated in the European context, the events and trends belong primarily to the Western world, its climate, and its built history. 

An Incomplete History: An Evolving Material/Energetic Abstraction

Looking at this historiography helps us identify the foundational pillars of the modern material paradigm.* Stirring away from the traditional medieval practices of construction using timber framing with wattle and daub infill, the reconstruction of London after the great fire and later the rebuilding of Paris under Haussmann initiated in Europe a much more standardized understanding of the city's built fabric. The standardization of building techniques became a significant project of modernization, starting with cast-iron architecture, and culminating with the development of reinforced concrete. It enabled a new kind of structural typology exemplified in the Dom-ino scheme; and the glass curtain walls, inaugurated as early as 1850 by the Crystal Palace in London and typified in its prefabricated version by SOM's Lever House a century later. The steel-reinforced concrete and glass triad was completed in the '70s with new kinds of plastics and composites materials for cladding and interiors, forming the « quadrivium industrial complex, »* a term used to define our recent building stock according to Mark Jarzombek. In the meantime, the modern turn saw the disappearing of localized and embodied sources of conditioning such as warm objects, chimneys, and stoves that directly conditioned the space they inhabited in favor of centralized heating systems that gradually migrated to the obscure spaces of our basements or attics. 

This progression of events sheds light on a simple correlation. While the industrial revolution fueled architecture towards more indoor comfort, the flows of material and energy that conditioned our shelter became ever more abstract. At the height of modernity — as most of our time is spent inside the walls of our building environments — the articulation of a universal standard of comfort sponsored by stakeholders like the ASHRAE* caused an alienation from the material and energetic realities of our lives. In the modern complex, the divide is clear: from now on matter shelters, energy conditions, and both are hidden from the eye.

This divide partly resulted from the obsession to create buildings that shield evermore inhabitants against weather, temperatures, and moisture. These sterilized boxes became so good at alienating themselves from the variability of outdoor climate that they would be downright unsafe to inhabit if it was not for the constant hustle of their mechanized lungs: the 24/7 life support on which they are everlastingly plugged. This legion of HVAC systems, water pipes, fans, filters, radiators, chilled towers, and conditioning units powered by fossil fuels are cleverly dissimulated behind partition walls, drop ceilings or raised floors until no proof of the wasteful comfort machine and their high-tech material assemblies can be seen. 

This observation may be trivial, but it is not without consequence. Once reminded that the aspiration to « modern comfort » is inevitably linked with the overconsumption of fuels that affects our planetary equilibrium, the lack of affects induced by this modern paradigm is concerning. As Lisa Heshong elaborates about our thermal experience in the modern built world*: « When thermal comfort is a constant condition, constant in both space and time, it becomes so abstract that it loses its potential to focus attention.» In other words, it becomes invisible, a norm, a default condition.

Post-Comfort: Looking Back to Look Forward

More than ever, our thesis argues that we need architecture that re-focus our attention on the energies that support our lives. Architectures that bring us beyond the alienation of the invisible and everlasting thermal constant. As prompted by Daniel A. Barber, we need « to express and build non-carbon possibilities, to explore life after comfort »*. For us, this is most visible in the form of historical typologies.

Exploring life after comfort necessarily prompts us to inquire how life before comfort took shape. What experience did it imply in terms of spatiality, materiality, and thermality? Undoubtedly some aspects of it were precarity and harshness. Still, as Lisa Heschong points us in Thermal Delight, pre-modern paradigms also implied vibrant cultural practices that fostered social cohesion around meaningful experiences of the natural environment. From the Greek Hypocaust to the french Foyer and going through the Chinese Kang or the Japanese Kotatsu, countless devices show that punctual heated spaces in cold climates become meaningful places of social gathering that articulate cultural practices around a local and contrasted conception of comfort. Similarly, the traditions of Islamic gardens or the narrow stone streetscapes of Southern European and Asian cities are other rich examples of localized spaces of comfort in warmer climates that structure social life in the city around a collective affective experience. 

Concluding Thoughts

As explored through the 4Ps, modern obsession for comfort, emphasizing control and predictability, has given birth to a hyper-complexified architectural reality in which incredible material intricacy has to work hand in hand with counterproductive space conditioning to smoothen all experiential thermal "defects," erase all traces of variability. But is that really needed? And knowing the climatic cost at which it comes, is it the future in which we want to live?

In a time of a carbon-saturated atmosphere, we posit that comfort could be defined as something other than the eradication of unpredictability. Beyond modern notions of comfort, other futures call for architectures that are conceived, built, and inhabited differently. Ones that can move away from the spiral of hyper-complexification, ones that break the artificial separation between matter as the building block of dead shells, and energy as the fuel that mechanically conditions them. These architectures could promote tactical heating and warm bodies rather than spaces. They could harness the thermal properties of materials to give them energetic relevance and express these material assemblies. These architectures could forge a new symbiosis that reunites matter and energy and in a redefinition of our outdated notions of comfort.

• * Lisa, Heschong. Thermal Delight in Architecture. MIT, 1979.

• * Barber, D. A. (2019). After Comfort. In Log 47 - overcoming carbon form. essay, ANYONE CORPORATION. 

• * American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air‑Conditioning, established in 1894

• * We use here “pre-modern” and “modern” as markers of the transition into the “modern material and energetic paradigm”. This paradigm being still very much active, we consider that the transition towards a post-modern paradigm with different material and energetic practices and a different conception of comfort is not yet achieved (more likely has it barely started). Hence, our definition of a potential future as “post-modern”.

• * Jarzombek, Mark, et al. “The Quadrivium Industrial Complex - Architecture - e-Flux.” e, https:// www.e-flux.com/architecture/overgrowth/296508/the-quadrivium-industrial-complex/.