Abstract:
The weather is an ephemeral situation and sensory stimuli continuously crafted in the realm of any geographical location in the world. One may truly be immersed in a rhythm of time and space: Through hue and warmth of light, length and direction of your shadow, earthy scent before the rain, or the sound and temperature of the traveling wind. Architecture originated as a suggestive assemblage of a more favourable micro-climate to extend the time we may physically inhabit a particular place since our human body alone is incapable of enduring all forms of climatic variations. Indeed, it has been said that “Buildings, even in the conventional ways we now build them, can be viewed as a way to modify a landscape to create more favourable micro-climates.”
Today architecture seeks high dependence on manipulation of these micro-climates in pursuit of extreme levels of comfort, control, style and efficiency: ultra-insulated, air-conditioned, centrally heated spaces with sealed windows (if they have windows at all). Towards dispersion of the “standard” post-industrial cityscape augmented with predictable and anonymous “flatscapes” that undermine the significance of human experience nor the natural environment in shaping a sense of a place. We are burdened by the addictive nature of familiarised comfort and a conditioned intolerance for anything outside of this narrow zone. Yet, since antiquity, the weather is a defining characteristic of a place: the landscape, the plants and animals that occupy it, and the culture and society of the people who inhabit it. What then is the role of architecture that abstracts its inhabitants from the weather; from that place? In our pursuit of a built environment that is entirely weather-proof, are we not also engendering one that is also place-proof, indeed, “placeless”?