Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary brings together writings and work at the intersection of architecture and climate change. Neither a collective lament nor an inventory of architectural responses, the essays in this volume consider the cultural values ascribed to climate, and ask particularly how climate figures, historically and at present, in our conception of what architecture is and does. What are the material and conceptual infrastructures that render climate legible, knowable, and actionable, and what are their spatial implications? How do these interrelated questions offer new vantage points on the architectural ramifications of climate change, extending and amplifying our understanding of ideas like resiliency, sustainability, and ecotechnology? These essays and projects offer new ways of understanding climate in architecture, both revealing and reacting to the exigencies of environment through design.

Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary is a project of the Avery Review, a journal of critical essays about books, buildings, and other architectural media, produced by the Office of Publications at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The volume features contributions from over forty authors, including Amale Andraos, Daniel Barber, Shantel Blakely, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Heather Davis, Jeanne Gang, David Gissen, Delhia Hannah, Phu Hoang, Eva Horn, Adrian Lahoud, Michael Manfredi, Reinhold Martin, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Philippe Rahm, Saskia Sassen, Emily Eliza Scott, Felicity D. Scott, Catherine Seavitt, Pelin Tan, Marion Weiss, and many others. Climates also contains a dossier of precedents for thinking about architecture and climate change drawn from a number of leading practitioners.