To mark the launch of the new curriculum and the course “Natural Processes in Architecture”, we invite you to join us for a lecture by the Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, where he will talk about his research and practice in working with climatic architecture. This lecture is a part of a broader three-week program of the course, where the participants investigate architecture’s relationship to environmental processes.
“Architecture and urbanism were traditionally based on climate and health, as we can read in the treatises of Vitruvius, Palladio or Alberti, where exposure to wind and sun, variations in temperature and humidity influenced the forms of cities and buildings. These fundamental causes of urban planning and buildings were ignored in the second half of the 20th century thanks to the enormous use of fossil energy by heating and air conditioning systems, pumps and refrigerators, that today cause the greenhouse effect and global warming.
The fight against climate change forces architects and urban designers to take seriously the climatic issue in order to base their design on its local climatic context and energy resources. Faced with the climatic challenge of the 21st century, Climatic Architecture proposes to reset our discipline on its intrinsic atmospheric qualities, where air, light, heat or humidity are recognized are real materials of building, convection, thermal conduction, evaporation, emissivity, or effusivity are becoming design tools for composing architecture and cities, and through dialectical materialism, are able to revolutionize esthetic and social values.”
Philippe Rahm is a Swiss architect, principal in the office of “Philippe Rahm architectes”, based in Paris, France. His work, which extends the field of architecture from the physiological to the meteorological, has received an international audience in the context of sustainability. He is a tenured associate professor at the National Superior School of Architecture in Versailles, France (ENSA-V). In 2020, he is the curator of the exhibition “Natural History of Architecture” at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. “Climatic architecture”, a monographic book is published at Fall 2023.
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