(Dis)Comfort

Written as a final project for Contemporary Architecture with Alex Maymind

How often do you think about HVAC? Maybe every day, maybe never, maybe only in the moment after entering a building on a cold day before you take off your coat, racing against your own body to escape the insulating layer before your brain realizes it’s too hot and decides to produce sweat. Or on a hot summer day, when somehow you manage to get goosebumps indoors because of the blasting cool air. But these are only brief moments; the body adjusts, settles into the 72 degree microclimate, and forgets. Daily we traverse through diverse microclimates, each enclosed by their own architectural skin. Our schedules do not allow for time to simply sit and cool off in the summer, no holidays dedicated to winter preparations. So we rely on these microclimates, our comfort resiliency at an all time low.

This ‘we’ is not universal. The forms of mass comfort that have become standard in urbanized America necessitate the reduction of comfort in other places. Even within one city, the standards of comfort vary drastically, stratified by class. And as our cities burn fuel to cool down glass towers, climate disasters increase yearly; as the temperatures go up, so does the fan speed on the AC, if you have it. Architecture is complicit in this, designing buildings that rely on HVAC to make them habitable year round. Perhaps a way around this is taking some of the pressure off the architecture to provide the ideal climate, and instead let the weather in. It may be too hot some days, too cold on others, but this is the nature of the seasons.

If we continue to shut out the world, we won’t notice when it’s burning, because it already is. Architecture that utilizes natural elements to provide shelter, prioritizing the human over the economic function they are supposed to serve; architecture that engages and invites change, that doesn’t cling to year-round stability to serve its purpose; this is (dis)Comfort architecture.

Most designers have realized by now that we can’t go on like this much longer. Our lifestyles are inherently unsustainable, we live in a polemic of ‘exploit or be exploited,’ architectural labor is simultaneously devalued and hugely inflated. (Dis)Comfort architecture is an opportunity for design to have a real impact on how we live; it disrupts the things we have come to expect, and forces bodily awareness. Renegotiating the relationship between indoor and outdoor, rethinking the very purpose of each building, and opening ourselves up to discomfort are necessary to enact the kind of change needed to curb climate change. Building off the ideas of “After Comfort” by Daniel A. Barber and “Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity” by Elisa Iturbe published in issue 47 of Log, this anthology of texts, projects, and images provides a theoretical and practical foundation for the field of (dis)comfort architecture.