Reyner Banham once remarked that historically we have controlled our environment in one of two ways, either by avoiding it entirely and hiding under a rock, tree, tent or roof, or alternately through manipulating the local atmospheric conditions surrounding us by building a campfire. The first approach led to a form of architecture that we commonly understand: architecture as shelter, primarily concerned with defining and regulating the boundary between internal and external environments. The second approach was for Banham beyond the purview of architecture: the freedom and variability of the campfire’s boundaries were qualities architecture could not hope to equal.
This design research studio will question Banham’s claim of the limits of architecture. Our primary inquiry will revolve around the question of how architecture itself can be understood as an atmospheric condition. Specifically, we will investigate how natural and artificial atmospheric systems can serve as models for the design, analysis and interpretation of the architecture of urban environments. We will study how atmospheric conditions influence how we relate to and interact within architecture and urban space, as well as how thinking of architecture as a synthetic weather system enables conceiving the construction of urban situations in terms of ambient conditions and atmospheric qualities. At a micro-scale, this involves the sensory qualities of space in relation to visual and haptic modes of perception. At a macro-scale, this involves emergent spatial organizations of uncertain predictability.
