Student Work
Title
Thermo-Sensual Domesticity
Project Description
Sustainable homes ignore thermic alliesthesia in favor of strictly energy-driven prerogatives. Rather than embracing the ever-shifting quality of the environment, interiority is increasingly confined into static and hermetically sealed domains. This trend marginalizes thermal stimuli that would otherwise embody the corporal body to the fundamental experience of domesticity. Rarely are such subtleties described in strictly pragmatic terms such as ‘too hot,‘ but instead are expressed in hedonic overtones like ‘pleasant’, ‘basking’ or ‘luxuriating’. Thermal-sensual pleasures thus constitute an essential need of the human psyche, which is clearly articulated in pre-modern houses where the heating (or cooling) sources serve as principal social nuclei. In contrast, contemporary society is “never outside without having recreated another more artificial, more fragile, more engineered bubble."4 While technology has consequently greatly increased individual comfort, it has also gravely eroded collective thermal sensory experience. Therefore, it is imperative to explore textured alternatives that posit climate as an active design medium in architectural production. Rejecting prescriptive homogeneity, this project will thus aim to recontextualize traditional spatial protocols with current technological advances in order to define novel forms of fluid, thermally conscious domesticity.