Lecture 6: Daniel Barber – After Comfort: Architects as Agents of Decarbonisation

As the impacts of the climate crisis are increasingly felt, the role for architecture, and architects, is changing. No longer concerned with formal elaborations, architects and urbanists are now focused on sufficiency measures and other means of managing the demand for energy in buildings.
After Comfort: Architects as Agents of Decarbonisation will explore this social role in two parts: first, with a historical account of architectures that have been concerned with air conditioning and the thermal interior as a space for social transformation; and second, with reflections on contemporary practices aiming to reimagine spaces of habitation and life in common, after carbon.
Across both of these discussions is a concern for thermal comfort, its role in carbon emissions, and aspects of conditioning, social practices, and social change that underlie it. Recent experiments push building users to reassess their comfort expectations and will be discussed according to the challenges and potential they suggest.
The presentation will conclude with considerations of how design interventions can emphasize a shift in comfort expectations, especially in overindustrialized economies, as a pathway towards reparations for loss and damage in the built environment and more generally.

Daniel A. Barber is Professor and Head of School Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney. His research and teaching explore the history and future of architecture’s engagement with the environment. His most recent book is Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton, 2020), following 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. Daniel earned a PhD from Columbia University, and has held fellowships at Harvard University, Princeton University, and through the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. His research on architecture and sufficiency is supported by a fellowship at the Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the Universität Heidelberg, the British Academy, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Daniel co-edits the series “After Comfort: A User’s Guide” on e-flux architecture, commissioning texts, projects and experiments focused on how we will live indoors without fossil fuels.

ACC Lecture Serie 2024 - Limits of architecture. Architecture of limits is curated by DASP Students / Phd in Architecture. History and Project: Federica Joe Gardella, Giulia Montanaro, Paolo Bianco, Hongye Wu, Federico Madaro, Federica Serra, Saurajeeta Bose, Caterina Juric, Marta Rossi. And coordinated by Professor Mauro Berta.