After Comfort: A User’s Guide - e-flux

Editors Daniel A. Barber, Jeannette Kuo, Ola Uduku, Thomas Auer, Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch

Contributors Aleksandra Kędziorek, Roger Boltshauser, Matthias Peterseim, Soha Macktoom, Nausheen H. Anwar, Mariam Ahmad, Marc Angélil, Cary Siress, Rachael Wakefield-Rann, Muoto, and more…

The fossil fuel era is ending rapidly. The International Energy Agency has indicated that global use of fossil fuels will peak by the end of the 2020s. However, the projected data looks more like a cliff than a pinnacle, whose long, flat plateau will stretch decades into the future. This is in part because of the ways that fossil fuel use is locked into buildings and has become integral to so many aspects of our lifestyles. As a result, we cannot just “build more efficiently” to stem the extraction of fossil fuels. Rather, the duration of fossil fuel dependency is in large part determined by how rapidly and radically existing buildings can be decarbonized.

After Comfort: A User’s Guide is a project by e-flux Architecture in collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Liverpool, and Transsolar.

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44 essays

Highest and Best Use

Georgina Baronian

The principle of highest and best use has roots in the neoclassical economics of the late nineteenth century. Its premise—that the value of any property must be determined by the use that would generate maximum financial return—is foundational to how American real estate has been assessed, bought, sold, and financed for more than a hundred years.

The Crystal Palace: Thermal Modeling of an Iconic Building

Jeremy Lecomte and mlav.land

When the British botanist Joseph Paxton drew up the plans for the Crystal Palace in 1850, he was not merely seeking to apply his knowledge of horticultural greenhouses to the design of a building capable of housing the first of the world’s fairs.

The Sweating Body Across Time

Mae-ling Lokko

Sedentism, the practice of settling in a place over extended periods of time, has had a long history in some parts of the world as one concurrent with agricultural intensification, food domestication, and sociopolitical development.

Rethinking Space, Material, and Climate in Nigeria

Adeyemo Shokunbi

The New Alternative Nigerian Architecture is a movement and framework for practice that sees comfort not as mechanical conquest but as continuous environmental negotiation.

Building Outside the Norm

Summer Islam, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, and Jeannette Kuo

Rather than returning to “traditional” ways of dealing with climate and comfort, behavioral adjustments and surrendering small comforts taken for granted could go a long way.

At Hand

TEd'A arquitectes

The materials nature gives us perfectly fit with climatic exigences.

Solastalgic Architecture: Post-Permafrost Futures and the Poetics of Collapse

Harriet Harriss

Permafrost is a paradox: the frozen bedrock of northern worlds is both a repository of ancient carbon, microbial life, and ancestral memory, and, in its thaw, a database of deadly instability.

Refrigerator as Linchpin

Gretchen Bakke

Instead of hot-blooded logics in overheated times, we might turn our minds toward the cold. For there is one miraculous pocket of chilled air that we all quite likely share, and which, as improbable as it may seem, is critical to holding the fossil-fueled power system in place: the electric refrigerator.

Of Envelopes and Air

Liz Gálvez

Bringing an open flame indoors amplifies its warmth-giving potential, but also its consequences, for instance, by filling the static air with smoke and exposing the structure to the risk of catching fire. The intertwining of comfort and enclosure thus necessitated builders and designers to invent new forms of environmental management.

The Specific Ambiguity of Intermediate Spaces

Camilo Restrepo Ochoa

In heliomorphic architecture, an extra, intermediate space between the interior and exterior often passively regulates temperature by administering light, heat, and air. This is also an indefinite space that is elastic, generous, and becomes a tangible experience of multi-directionality.

Living Without AC in the Deep South

Michelle Addington

After four weeks without HVAC, including eight days of no power at all due to Hurricane Helene’s impact on Georgia’s electrical grid in September 2024, I was reminded of an emphatic declaration that the late George Baird made about me nearly thirty years ago.

Acclimatizing Extractivism

Ksenia Litvinenko

One night, when it was suddenly too cold to stay in our summer house, my grandmother hurried my cousin and I towards the boxcar (vagonchik). The vagonchik was for nights like this—when the chill cut too deep—as the stove inside and its insulated walls helped retain heat until morning.

Knowing Nature Through Domestic Work

Fabian Zimmer

The nineteenth century bourgeois interior has a reputation for being an oppressive, dysfunctional, and lifeless space, separated from the outside world.

Coolth as Commons

Stephen Healy, Abby Mellick Lopes, Helen Armstrong, Cameron Tonkinwise, and Bhavya Chitranshi

Anthropogenic climate change has great immediacy in Australia.

Lessons on Energy Sobriety

Mireille Roddier

In my ongoing attempt to correlate my dwelling practice with my values over the last few years, I have found that theoretical information imparted by building experts can complement—but not replace—the essential embodied knowledge yielded by experimentation feedback.

The Will to Change

Amica Dall

Stories, or at least conventional stories that are driven by plot, are machines to interrogate the relationship between intentions, actions, and their consequences.

Keeping It Cool in Melbourne

Sarah Bell, Lucy Benjamin, and Enzo Lara-Hamilton

In 1965, architect Cedric Price proposed replacing the Palace of Westminster with a “Pop-Up Parliament.” The project sought to redefine the relationship between the people and their political representatives.

Conservation After Conditioning, Part 2: Letting the World In

Mal Ahern

Since the 1990s, conservation scientists have worried about AC’s carbon footprint and thus started to question this approach. Newer research suggests the flat, unchanging museum environment is likely unnecessary for many types of collections.

Taking Stock of an Energy Transition

Frans Saraste

We dwellers are simply demanding too much from buildings, and not enough from ourselves.

Climate Portraits: Nieuwe Instituut

After Comfort Collective

Architecture can reduce dependence on carbon fuels by reimagining the collective relationship to comfort.

Blackout: A Manifesto

Dehlia Hannah

How many psychoanalysts does it take to change a lightbulb? Told at the expense of national or social types, lightbulb jokes poke fun at the excessive effort expended on a paradigmatically simple task.

Lessons From the Arctic Vernacular

Panu Savolainen

Although modernization in wealthy Nordic countries has completely transformed ideals of residential comfort, thousands of vernacular log houses still remain in residential use throughout Fennoscandia, the Baltic states, and Western Russia.

Conservation After Conditioning, Part 1: Keeping the World Out

Mal Ahern

Wars, flood, and fire threaten today’s most vulnerable collections, while better resourced institutions develop ever more pristine and hermetically sealed spaces. Modern art preservation is modeled on the idea that one can—and should—keep the world out.

Heating the House

Kate Wagner

The twentieth century electric revolution came and went, the choice was made to trade in one form of burning for another, and, at some point, the coal-burning stove was exchanged for the gas-powered radiators we have today.

Moist Subjects

Marianna Janowicz

“The purpose of the home is to keep inside inside and the outside outside,” writes Jonathan Hill, implying a deep, psychological layering of what is u...

Spaces of Convergence

Silvia Benedito

When does the scope of architecture stop and landscape architecture start (and vice-versa) relative to thermally safe public environments? Disciplinar...

The Perpetual Climate Glass Pavilion

Octave Perrault

If the industrial age dreamt of perpetual motion, then we must dream of perpetual climate.

Inno-native Design

Joe Osae-Addo and Kwabena Appeaning Addo

My first thought was “How do I create a building that responds to the weather better than most,” so that I don’t have to use air conditioning? That was my primary focus.

A New Commitment

Gail Brager and Mark DeKay

Imagine for a moment what life would be like if you and everyone around you ate the same foods at every meal, never experienced weather or the sky’s changing light, heard only a constant monotone with no music or bird song, and lived devoid of art to delight the eye.

Building Non-Buildings

Xu Tiantian

As I was writing this, the mid-June daytime temperature in Beijing reached 40°C, exceeding the average by nearly 10 degrees. In times like these, it i...

Recalculating Typology

Florian Idenburg

Since the founding of your office, you’ve built several cultural projects across New York City, but, recently, you have started working on housing projects, all of which are in Brooklyn.

Lost Loops

Salmaan Craig

Today’s drug of choice is convenience. We live cut off from its side effects, surrounded by unnoticed magic. Flick a switch, and cool air decants from expected places.

The City as an Open-Air Classroom

Ecosistema Urbano

Bioclimatically conditioned public spaces can bring equity to the city by making comfort more accessible. But these public spaces could also be something more.

Marble and Salami

Second Edition

Today, comfort in the home has too often come to mean excess. Home describes not a space to be comfortable, but rather a space that is convenient, a servant to the whims of its occupant.

Reinterpreting Locality

Ikko Kobayashi and Fumi Kashimura

We aimed to approach the architecture in the same way, which meant carefully observing and reinterpreting the environment, climate, way of life, spatial arrangements, and materialities that can be seen in Kampala.

The Color, Green (Excerpts)

Aziba Ekio

The Color, Green We scuttled along village roads we pretended were runways. Back then Green was just a color and not a manifesto Back then...

The Ethics of Use: Repurposing Debenhams

Simone Ferracina

Architects and designers tend to think of themselves as agents of change and innovation, yet what they do is overwhelmingly reactionary. Indeed, design mobilizes and transforms disparate objects and materials towards one another, unlocking their ability to communicate and interact.

How to Skin a Rabbit

Muoto

The environmental crisis could lead to the emergence of a new, strange form of communion between beings and things. But up until now, the opposite has happened.

Solutions of Concern

Rachael Wakefield-Rann

The modernist optimism that saw the advent of air-conditioning, mass produced materials, standardized buildings, and global distribution networks is predicated on the illusion that we have transcended our ecologies. However, as we have continued on this trajectory, our bubbles have come to seem increasingly porous.

The Urgency of Stewardship

Marc Angélil and Cary Siress

Despite all design intentions, nothing ever goes as planned. Everything eventually breaks down. Ultimately, whatever is there will have to be fixed.

Heatscapes and Evolutionary Habitats

Soha Macktoom, Nausheen H. Anwar, and Mariam Ahmad

In the design of Karachi’s largest public university, notions of identity and specific visions of development have long overshadowed conversations about thermal comfort and heat exposure.

Three Theses on Hybrid Ecological Comfort

Roger Boltshauser and Matthias Peterseim

This paradigm of site-specificity was eliminated with the introduction of fossil-fuel driven HVAC. However, dealing with local climates has not been totally forgotten; even celebrated modern architects like Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn made efforts to adapt to different climate zones.

The Clothed Home

Aleksandra Kędziorek

The Hansen family clothed and unclothed their home according to the rhythm of the seasons. During heatwaves, they would place a tulle curtain in the doorway. During frosty weather, a thick, quilted fabric was nailed to the front door to insulate the hall.

Editorial

Daniel A. Barber, Jeannette Kuo, Ola Uduku, Thomas Auer, and e-flux Architecture

After Comfort: A User’s Guide is a project by e-flux Architecture in collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney, the Technical University of Munich, the University of Liverpool, and Transsolar.

Subject

Architecture, Climate change, Environment

Contributors

Georgina Baronian Highest and Best Use
Jeremy Lecomte and mlav.land The Crystal Palace: Thermal Modeling of an Iconic Building
Mae-ling Lokko The Sweating Body Across Time
Adeyemo Shokunbi Rethinking Space, Material, and Climate in Nigeria
Summer Islam, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and Jeannette Kuo Building Outside the Norm
TEd'A arquitectes At Hand
Harriet Harriss Solastalgic Architecture: Post-Permafrost Futures and the Poetics of Collapse
Gretchen Bakke Refrigerator as Linchpin
Liz Gálvez Of Envelopes and Air
Camilo Restrepo Ochoa The Specific Ambiguity of Intermediate Spaces
Michelle Addington Living Without AC in the Deep South
Ksenia Litvinenko Acclimatizing Extractivism
Fabian Zimmer Knowing Nature Through Domestic Work
Stephen Healy, Abby Mellick Lopes, Helen Armstrong, Cameron Tonkinwise and Bhavya Chitranshi Coolth as Commons
Mireille Roddier Lessons on Energy Sobriety
Amica Dall The Will to Change
Sarah Bell, Lucy Benjamin and Enzo Lara-Hamilton Keeping It Cool in Melbourne
Mal Ahern Conservation After Conditioning, Part 2: Letting the World In
Frans Saraste Taking Stock of an Energy Transition
After Comfort Collective Climate Portraits: Nieuwe Instituut
Dehlia Hannah Blackout: A Manifesto
Panu Savolainen Lessons From the Arctic Vernacular
Mal Ahern Conservation After Conditioning, Part 1: Keeping the World Out
Kate Wagner Heating the House
Marianna Janowicz Moist Subjects
Silvia Benedito Spaces of Convergence
Octave Perrault The Perpetual Climate Glass Pavilion
Joe Osae-Addo and Kwabena Appeaning Addo Inno-native Design
Gail Brager and Mark DeKay A New Commitment
Xu Tiantian Building Non-Buildings
Florian Idenburg Recalculating Typology
Salmaan Craig Lost Loops
Ecosistema Urbano The City as an Open-Air Classroom
Second Edition Marble and Salami
Ikko Kobayashi and Fumi Kashimura Reinterpreting Locality
Aziba Ekio The Color, Green (Excerpts)
Simone Ferracina The Ethics of Use: Repurposing Debenhams
Muoto How to Skin a Rabbit
Rachael Wakefield-Rann Solutions of Concern
Marc Angélil and Cary Siress The Urgency of Stewardship
Soha Macktoom, Nausheen H. Anwar and Mariam Ahmad Heatscapes and Evolutionary Habitats
Roger Boltshauser and Matthias Peterseim Three Theses on Hybrid Ecological Comfort
Aleksandra Kędziorek The Clothed Home
Daniel A. Barber, Jeannette Kuo, Ola Uduku, Thomas Auer and e-flux Architecture Editorial

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Subject