Climate Comforts

“I’m merely the messenger…I am offering how to draw attention to a different timeline, a different series of events with a different resonance, at the nexus of architecture and climate,” said Daniel A. Barber at U. Penn Landscape Architecture on Thursday. Beginning in 1940s Brazil, Barber quickly jumped temporally and geographically to follow performative façades and brise-soleil around the globe, including France, Spain, Algeria, Sweden, Bahrain, Nigeria, Congo, the Philippines, and the United States. Really, it all comes down to desire and comfort, wherein the politically transformative locus of Barber’s work lies: “A big struggle we face collectively is not simply that it’s about refining an approach to energy efficiency but it’s about affecting new desires…On the one hand we look to architecture to solve the problem of energy efficiency, but what we don’t look to architecture enough for it to inspire a culture that lives differently.” Don’t take this for utopianism, for Barber is more than the messenger proclaiming a new world needs to be born: “How do we see thi…