language + temperature tp: How did you discover the tools for experimenting with temperature and bringing it into your design approach? You use colour and drawing as a tool, as well as thermal modelling (using colours for coding there as well). How do you creatively visualise this process of thermal modelling? Rahm: Architecture is a question of void. And of course the void is not empty. It’s full of chemical and physical particles, electromagnetic waves, vapour and temperature. I use a digital tool, physics software, to study the thermal landscape created by the placing heat sources. tp: So how do we begin to develop a visual language for temperature, humidity, and climate? Is a new visual language necessary? Rahm: Yes. For the moment, we use the tools of thermal and meteorological software. But more far from this, there is the fact that working on invisible parameters of space change the way of designing the plan and the section. I like this change of paradigm. tp: Your work is often about ephemeral experiential qualities as they relate to architecture and space — areas that we don’t really have a (verbal) language for as architects: taste, smell and temperature. Rahm: You are absolutely right. Sometimes it’s difficult because it’s so tiny and of course not so spectacular as image. But the most interesting for me is really to develop a new language, to be in this research of new tools and new sensation. We must create a kind of new dictionary, new codes, for projecting architecture as meteorology. comfort + architecture tp: How important is comfort? Rahm: Comfort is not the most important thing. I’m against the modern idea of a fixed state of comfort. I don’t want to get to a fixed continuous and homogeneous state of comfort. I’m working on a thermal concept, more related to sensuality. I like the idea that space is not defined only by walls, matter and color but also by temperature, relative humidity, and light. It’s open to a more sensual approach to space, where the body is completely immersed into architecture, through all senses. tp: With the Digestible Gulfstream project, how did you experiment with ideas of thermal comfort and what did you see as outcomes? Rahm: The thermodynamic imbalance created with the two thermal sources generates a complex and imbalanced thermal landscape between the two different temperatures. I like that people are free to change places as a natural migration inside the climate. tp: What do you think about how comfort is described and communicated in architecture? How do we currently measure comfort? How should we? Rahm: We have to reduce the energy consumed in buildings for heating and cooling because it’s one of the most important causes of global warming. This is why we are looking at the lowest level of comfort, to economize energy. We don’t have to think of the idea of comfort as a norm. Inside the building you could also create an uncomfortable space. This is also architecture.
tp: So you are seeking to challenge these notions of comfort at all costs? Rahm: All the new constraints related to global warming and sustainability do not have to stay as problems. They have to become tools for architecture. The goal of my architecture is not comfort. Architecture is a composition between, sustainability, physiology and meteorology. *
above: Digestible Gulfstream installed at the Venice Biennale: the hot and cold plates indicated in the temperature drawings are shown here. The hot plate is the low one with the people sitting on it, clearly happy to be naked in a perfectly tempered climate in the generally underheated air of the Arsenale! The gulfstream current is created from the temperature differential between the two plates. Image courtesy: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, Photo Giorgio Zucchiatti. This installation was part of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia.
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On Site review 21: stormy weather
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