We live in the Comfortocene. Over the past century, many aspects of daily life have been shaped by manufactured thermal comfort, to the point where we now treat it almost as a human right. But because it comes with huge carbon emissions, mechanical comfort is destroying our future. To enable a sustainable transition, we need to reconsider and renegotiate our comfortable way of living, especially our climate-controlled interiors. Professor Daniel A. Barber suggests that architecture’s new ambition should be to condition humans to be uncomfortable. Could designing for discomfort become the new standard in our efforts to combat climate change. Are you ready to be uncomfortable?
This lecture is organized in collaboration with the 4TU centre History of Technology.
Comfort is an integral part of our designed interiors and the causal chain that ties together the systems for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), the fuels that power them, and the resulting carbon emissions. But the global carbon sink is already full. If we can no longer emit carbon, traditional air conditioning is no longer feasible. This calls for a new approach to conceptualizing, designing, and constructing building interiors. But what types of new construction can be justified? How much discomfort can we take in our homes, offices, schools, and institutions? How uncomfortable are we willing to be? Changing personal and social expectations is one important element of this challenge. Architecture has the opportunity, if not the obligation, to define and explore this new threshold – to design right to the edge of comfort.
Daniel A. Barber is Professor and Chair of Architecture History and Theory at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His most recent book is Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton, 2020), follows his previous work, A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (Oxford, 2016). His article “After Comfort” (Log 47, 2019) has been translated into four languages and is the basis for the co-edited series “After Comfort: A User’s Guide” on e-flux architecture, which publishes texts, projects and experiments focused on how we will live indoors without fossil fuels.
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