Leaving Our Comfort Zone

Explicitly addressing the construction of comfort provides a vital pedagogical approach to understanding and designing with architecture’s ecological entanglements. Such entanglements were historically discussed in fiction as part of a civilizing process. Today, the dominance of air conditioning ,and its related comfort standard, have largely eliminated the conscious consideration of comfort from architectural education. Architects’ collective difficulty in formulating imaginative design responses to climate change stems in part from our inexperience with alternative theories of comfort and diverse interior climates. This paper traces how the author has integrated a comfort-based approach to teaching in a history seminar, an options studio and a building systems class. This approach removes students and faculty from our comfort zone to offer a new framework for design.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.107.83

Volume Editors
Amy Kulper, Grace La & Jeremy Ficca

ISBN
978-1-944214-21-0