"Perhaps architecture is nothing more than the art of building climates that artificially correct what nature presents in its path," as Vitruvius maintained. For Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, architecture exists because the natural climate is often inhospitable to humans: too hot or cold, too dry or humid, too dark or sunny. Architecture must soften, intensify, mitigate, and regulate the natural climate to make it habitable.
This volume brings together a series of essays by the Swiss architect that address how the effects of global warming and pandemics have transformed the environmental historiography of architecture—which, for the author, is an individual refuge with significant symbolic and sociopolitical weight, or, at the very least, a purely ecotechnical and objective solution.
Contents
Toward a Thermodynamic Urbanism
White Architecture
What Is Beauty?
Architecture, Climate, and Meteors
What Is Meteorological Architecture?
The Coronavirus or the Return to Normalcy
Anthropocene Style: Decorative Art in the Time of Epidemics and Global Warming
