Dwelling in Matter and Energy #1 - Affective Emergies
Fig. 1 - Kotatsu and Kintsukoroi - Altered image based on a print by Suzuki Harunobu (1725–1770).
This altered image shows two women seated under a Kotatsu (Japanese heated table) and practicing Kintsukoroi (Art of repairing broken pottery). The scene captures an energetic practice - Local heating - and a material practice - Repair. Together, this synergy may offer an alternative stance on contemporary predominant modern practices of matter and energy overconsumption.
Hello hello, this is Olivier & Tim, currently writing from Steam! The column we are starting today is a platform for us to formulate and share the ideas we juggle with as we lay the first bricks of our thesis.
As we enter our last year, we are synthesizing our learnings on the interrelated topics of energy use, material resources, and environmental design. Of course, our ideas are very much in flux, but the preliminary goal for our thesis is to put together a framework that interrogates our contemporary building practices and constructs new affective imaginaries.
As we know, the modern built environment plays a significant role in the on-going environmental crisis. As far as buildings are concerned, the cause is primarily the massive mobilization of extracted materials required to build them (embodied energy) and the constant flow of energy necessary to power them (operational energy). Throughout the architectural development of "modern comfort" — characterized by abstract white surfaces and 24/7 thermally controlled spaces — our modes of dwelling have become more and more alienated from the practical realities of our buildings' material and energetic consumption.
For example, before the popularization of central heating in the early 19th century, dwellers heating their homes by burning wood in chimneys had a precise understanding of the volume of timber necessary to feed their fires and the quantity of fire adequate to their heating needs and means. Today, the modern uniform heating and conditioning of interior spaces are taken for granted; although it is a largely inefficient process, we do not realize the energy it wastes. To put it bluntly, if the intended result is "the comfort of bodies in spaces," it is unthinkably more energy-intensive to constantly heat up large volumes of air in which people may (or may not) be than it is to tactically heat the bodies themselves for the duration of their stay.
Similar waste applies to material ressources in the modern construction industry, building materials tend to be abstracted and commodified in an inherently linear economy. Yet construction techniques were not always so stiff in their lifecycles; Half-timbering for example, was a widespread building system in Europe during the 13th to 18th century which allowed for disassembly and reuse of the timbers. While this practice was partly prompted by the scarcity of material resources, our conception of reuse and design for disassembly has radically diminished in current building practices.
While avoiding romanticizing past practices that had good reasons to be superseded, we wish to question the current inability of our building environments to convey to us the physical reality of the energetic and material consumption on which they rely. We hypothesize that the endorsement of new practices to shift the building environments to more sustainable grounds is slowed by the lack of embodied experience and affects towards energy and matter in the modern space of comfort. This thesis is a space for us to think about how to make visible what is invisible. More specifically, to render the intangible nature of energy and matter tangible again
Moving forward, we are becoming increasingly interested in surveying alternative energetic and material practices in relation to building environments, such as the rich histories of local heating devices, radiating surfaces, traditions of spolia, or building for disassembly. And propose new imaginaries to re-formulate the material and energetic contract we enact in our building environments. We will borrow and develop representation methods that depict the hidden realities of energy and materials, such as thermal imaging, mappings of extraction and sourcing, or material processing. Lastly, we will prototype material tectonic assemblies that question our current practices and hopefully provide architecture with more embodied experiences to support new affects towards energy and material.
Bear with us as we embark on this adventure; we are looking forward to having passionate debates with you all on these topics!
Fig. 2 - Diagram of the Energetic and Material contract enacted by buildings environment.
The diagram places the buildings environment at the central position in the mediation between humans and the Energy-Matter dyad. The building we dwell in consumes matter and energy while defining our relationship to these two essential things.