Thermal Practice - A lecture by Daniel Barber
Thermal Practice aims to reposition familiar narratives and protagonists of modern architectural history, now revolving around climate and carbon as organizing figures of thought. Case studies of the thermal interior – as an aggregate of distinct designed spaces and as the experiential condition of politics and inequity – will serve as evidence to construct a history where architecture is a device of climatic adaptability.
The presentation will focus this decentering of narratives on a discussion of the brise soleil in Brazil - through buildings and projects that elaborated inter-war design principles to produce dynamic facade systems, and through the complexities of their renovation and conservation. On the one hand, these systems mitigated the effects of diurnal and seasonal solar patterns; on the other hand they aimed to produce normative spaces that drew the flow of capital further south. Such practices offer a complex counter-narrative as well as novel design strategies for the move away from fossil fuels in the present.
Daniel A. Barber is Associate Professor and Chair of the PhD Program in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton UP, 2020); an article “Active Passive: Heat Storage and the Solar Imaginary” recently appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly. His research and teaching narrate eco-critical histories of architecture and seek pathways into the post-carbon future. Starting next month he will be a Senior Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Universität Heidelberg. Daniel edits the accumulation series on e-flux architecture and is co-founder of Current: Collective on Environment and Architectural History.
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Organized as part of the Preservation Lecture Series, an initiative of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia GSAPP. GSAPP is committed to providing universal access to all of our virtual events. Please contact Meredith Brull via email at hp@arch.columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
