After Comfort: A User’s Guide
Please join us for the launch of the new series on e-flux architecture: After Comfort: A User’s Guide.
Please join us as we host a hybrid Sydney launch of the series, with contributors Nausheen Anwar, Aleksandra Kędziorek, Rachael Wakefield-Renn, and Amy Seo and Isaac Harrison from Second Edition.
After a brief summary of the project and these contributions, we will open to a discussion on the prospects and challenges of life after comfort.
After Comfort: A User's Guide
After Comfort: A User’s Guide is a new project by e-flux Architecture in collaboration with Daniel A. Barber, Jeannette Kuo, Ola Uduku, and Thomas Auer. It explores the way fossil fuels have shaped how we live in buildings, and it imagines how this life might change as we adapt to unstable climates.
How can our practices and habits within the thermal interior alleviate carbon dependence? Do these practices scale up to “make a difference”? How do our desires and expectations change as mechanically produced comfort becomes more socially costly? And: what are the design strategies, broadly considered, that can facilitate or cultivate these practices of living in dialogue with our thermal environments?
Comfort considered in this way enters into dialogue with embodied energy and calls for reuse, as well as reconsiderations of the subject of architecture and the normative conditions that designed interiors have largely upheld.
After Comfort: A User’s Guide explores deviant conditioning strategies, as well as non-normative material supply chains, spatial configurations, and aspirations. The series will publish reflections on re-conditioning, speculations on practices, and recounting of past iterations where the thermal interior was, as it is today, a site of political contestation.
Learn more about After Comfort: A User's Guide
About the panellists
Daniel A. Barber is Professor and Head of School Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney. 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).
Dr Rachael Wakefield-Rann is a Senior Research Consultant at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS. She specialises in research related to the political, social and health dimensions of product stewardship and the transition to a circular economy.
Aleksandra Kędziorek is an architecture historian and curator based in Warsaw, Poland.
Nausheen H. Anwar is Founder & Director, Karachi Urban Lab (KUL) and Professor City & Regional Planning, School of Economics & Social Sciences (SESS), Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi.
Second Edition (Amy Seo and Isaac Harrisson) is a research-based practice exploring deconstruction and reuse within the built environment through consultancy, design, material experimentation, prototyping, and knowledge sharing. We are working towards practical, local, and feasible solutions with real-world applications.
