UTS and the Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building are pleased to welcome Professor Daniel A. Barber to the School of Architecture.
Professor Barber is a highly-regarded architectural theorist and historian. His research and teaching are organized around two major trajectories: the first involves an archivally-rich environmental history of architectural modernism, the second offers a theoretical framework for architects and others to better engage the climate crisis.
He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His project Thermal Practices is a research and teaching agenda focused on how to design and live in buildings now that fossil-fuel energy is no longer socially viable. The project frames the “thermal interior” as a space for the engineered precision of comfort, and also a space for design experimentation – where novel techniques and habits can reduce carbon dependency.
Professor Barber received his PhD in Architecture (History and Theory) from Columbia University, and a Master of Environmental Design (MED) from Yale University. He has held fellowships through the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich), at the Princeton University High Meadows Environmental Institute, and at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, among others.
His most recent positions include a senior research fellowship at the Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Universität Heidelberg and Associate Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Graduate Group (PhD Program) in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.
Professor Barber is co-founder of the Current Collective for Architecture History and Environment. He is on the Advisory Board of the Intersecting Energy Cultures Working Group, and an International Editor at the Journal of Architecture. Since 2017 he has co-edited the series on Accumulation on the E-flux architecture online platform. A new monthly series on E-flux, After Comfort: A User’s Guide, will begin early next year.
Professor Barber takes up his position with the UTS School of Architecture this month.
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Professor Barber's recent publications include:
- Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton University Press 2020) read the introduction here
- A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (Oxford University Press 2016)
- After Comfort in Log 47 (2019)
- Jane Drew in Lagos part of the edited collection Rethinking Global Modernism (Routledge 2021)
- Doors and Portals, Revisited, part of a dossier on intellectual work during and after Covid in Architecure Theory Review
- A collected print volume of the E-flux architecture series on Accumulation is available now.
- Coming in August 2022: A special issue of Future Anterior, co-edited with Fallon Samuels Aidoo, on "Retrofit: Energy Crisis and Climate Exigencies in Preservation".