HTC Experiments

For those of you in Europe or interested in the events circulating around the UN Climate Conference, the Royal Danish Academy of Art is hosting a symposium on the aesthetics of climate in architecture next week, December, 10th. Organized by Philippe Rahm, the conference “seeks to integrate the climatic mission of architecture not only as the purpose of contemporary architecture but also as the process.” Rahm asks “Can a new aesthetic be born out of our environmental awareness? Can space be inhabited like a climate? Can we envisage meteorological architecture?” I’m very happy to be one of the invited lecturers.

Following this event I’ll be speaking in a public event — an informal seminar on Subnature at UCL in London, December 14. The seminar is sponsored by the Bartlett’s HT wing and also the new UCL Urban Laboratory, headed by Matthew Gandy. Thus far, I’ve discussed the Subnature project solely in terms of its content and imagery; the London seminar will involve a more methodological discussion. Subnature came out of (more literally fell out of!) a PhD thesis conducted at UCL. In this context I want to position the book as a new type of “not-my-dissertation” book. This is a book composed of what was not ultimately used in a thesis, but that still emerged from the research spirals that entail doctoral-level research. Such an idea has a curious relation to the actual content in Subn — an idea explained in a bit more detail below.