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- Convenors:
-
Jiat-Hwee Chang
(National University of Singapore)
Alla Vronskaya (University of Kassel)
Rafico Ruiz (Canadian Centre for Architecture)
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- Chairs:
-
Jiat-Hwee Chang
(National University of Singapore)
Alla Vronskaya (University of Kassel)
Rafico Ruiz (Canadian Centre for Architecture)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel invites critiques of thermal objectivity that foreground spatial and technological cultures that sustain regimes of thermal power. It provides a forum for the growing interdisciplinary subfield of “critical temperature studies” that cuts across the divides of hot and cold worlds.
Long Abstract:
For humans, being alive means keeping the core body temperature to a narrow range around 37 degrees celsius. For many things, their material properties change with their temperatures. The deceptive simplicity of these facts opened the epistemological and political trap that Nicole Starosielski (2021) identified as “thermal objectivity,” the technoscientific study of heat or cold as natural phenomena that uses temperature as a universal metric. However, despite its seeming objectivity, the transmission and distribution of heat is subjected to political interventions in thermal regulations and modulations, which frequently entail technological and built environmental mediations that form thermal-scapes of knowledge, practices, and artifacts around humans and more-than-humans. Therefore, this panel seeks to, firstly, critique thermal objectivity by foregrounding the spatial and technological cultures that structure our sensitivity and vulnerability to temperature, tacitly sustaining regimes of thermal power, which manipulate temperatures in service of socio-political objectives. We are interested in exploring critical temperature studies across the divides of hot and cold worlds–the Tropics and the Arctic, the global north and the global south–during hot and cold wars. Secondly, our aim is to provide a forum for the growing subfield of “critical temperature studies”, crossing STS, media studies, environmental history, and the history of the built environment, in order to specifically address these issues through the lens of spatial technologies. Potential topics include, but are not limited to, temperate-normativity and the racialized imaginaries of “tropical”, “Arctic”, desert and other “extreme” thermal environments; hegemonic thermal imaginaries and the remaking of worlds through the built environment (broadly understood across different scales and forms); the imperialist technopolitics of constructing and maintaining thermal norms, zones and standards; the building of heating, cooling, and refrigeration infrastructures to perpetuate and counter imperial ecologies; the thermal cultures of acclimatization and adaptation, and their entanglements with the colonization of land.
Accepted papers:
Session 1marwa koheji (New York University Abu Dhabi)
Short abstract:
Air-conditioning consumes 60% of the domestic electrical load in Bahrain. This is not simply due to Bahrain's hot climate. Rather, this paper argues that the proliferation of air-conditioning is also related to the electrical grid and the historical and political context in which it evolved.
Long abstract:
The abundance of air-conditioning in Bahrain is not simply connected to high temperatures but also to a particular configuration of the electrical grid. As the arrival of electricity in Bahrain co-emerged with colonial demands for cooling, it resulted in a technical configuration through which cheap and readily available air-conditioning became a key aspiration. This aspiration intensified following independence, generating a mode of citizenship predicated on comfort security. While the state maintains stability through overdesigning its infrastructures to provide uninterrupted comfort, citizens negotiate their entitlements by pursuing unauthorized cooling that compromises the grid. Infrastructural overdesign rests on the work of engineers who overestimate and reproduce cooling expectations but who can also facilitate the procurement of unauthorized overloads. Focusing on infrastructural overcapacity, this article illuminates how techno-politics can take excessive forms and how it can consequently shape everyday, sensory life.
Sharad Pandian (National University of Singapore) Jiat-Hwee Chang (National University of Singapore)
Short abstract:
This paper traces how Human Rights organizations sought to concretize the systematic heat harms suffered by migrant workers in the run up to the Qatar World Cup, thereby revealing not just the contingency but also the maltreatment produced by the Qatari government's thermal regime
Long abstract:
Since the announcement that Qatar would host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, tens of thousands of migrant workers were hired to construct the massive amount of necessary infrastructure - including stadiums, transportation, and cultural landmarks. However, Qatar quickly came under fire from multiple Human Rights Organisations (HROs) for its long-standing abusive labour practices. While the criticism of practices such as the Kafala system are relatively well-known, this talk argues that considerations of heat played an important role in this intervention.
To publicize the phenomenon of unexplained worker deaths and chronic diseases, HROs deployed worker testimony, statistical analysis, and legal arguments to make institutionally perceptible these workers and how their deaths were being rendered invisible by the Qatari political and medical apparatus. Despite being faced with constant counter-manoeuvres by government actors, World Cup officials, and contractors, the persistence of HROs moved the needle from denial to limited acknowledgement of the issue.
However, the eventual Qatari response was not to accept full responsibility and make whole the affected workers, but the circulation of updated technocratic solutions such as new body suits and standards. Thus, the myth of thermal objectivity was shattered, but this simply opened up a new terrain of negotiation where powerful actors still possessed formidable resources to shape future thermal regimes.
Jean Souviron
Short abstract:
Though all-glass facades have dramatically increased overheating risks, behind them have been built controlled artificial climates for office workers immersed in a “comfort zone.” The global spread of this architectural form has contributed to climate change that now threatens its very existence.
Long abstract:
In the post-war period, fully glazed curtain walls were first introduced to enclose office buildings in the USA. The greenhouse effect caused by the excessive use of glass exacerbated overheating problems and increased reliance on mechanical conditioning and energy infrastructures to control indoor climates. Despite early warnings about the risk of discomfort, North American corporate architecture, with its smooth, fully glazed façade, crossed borders to shape the urban landscapes of globalised metropolises. This architecture spread across climates, creating a new class of office workers immersed in a “comfort zone” defined by the development of technologies and a thermal culture rooted in the Western modernity. This culture articulates metrics and norms that have sought to objectify thermal comfort. Today, as climate change accelerates and the risk of power outages increases, there is a renewed fear of losing control of these indoor climates. This paper traces the journey of John I. Yellott, an American engineer, from the USA to Hong Kong, and stops in this Asian city to analyse the Bank of China and the HSBC Main Building. Based on archival documents and an analysis of the physical conditions of the buildings, this paper examines this architectural history in relation to the “new climatic regime,” particularly in the light of the latest IPCC report. It finally discusses the path dependencies resulting from the construction of fossil-fuelled “thermal modernities” and explores “emergency exits,” which may mean recognising that the imperialism of Western culture has created uninhabitable heritage.
Sasha Crawford-Holland (University of Chicago)
Short abstract:
This presentation diagnoses and analyzes a double bind faced by media investigations into thermal violence. It explores how anti-carceral activists negotiate between universalizing rubrics of objectivity mobilized to corroborate injury and the inherent subjectivity of thermal experience.
Long abstract:
Historically, extreme temperatures have offered carceral institutions a mechanism of corporal punishment that evades accountability. Such violence is difficult to document: carceral spaces restrict access; temperature is assumed to be natural; its effects are subjective and embodied; and they do not leave the kinds of evidentiary traces that beatings and floggings do. Recently, journalists, researchers, and activists have developed strategies of documentation and visualization to render carceral thermal violence legible as such. Projects including Susan Schuppli’s video series Cold Cases (2021) and The Intercept’s investigation “Climate and Punishment” (2022) frame the weaponization of temperature in U.S. prisons and detention centers as human rights violations. In doing so, they face a double bind: they depend on the language and parameters of thermal objectivity to corroborate forms of injury so subjective and intimate that they elude such universalizing rubrics. On one hand, these projects marshal measurements, codes, and laws to produce irrefutable evidence of thermometric harms that violate humanitarian standards. On the other hand, they reference unverifiable sensations from subjective testimonies that describe differential experiences of and vulnerabilities to heat—from punitive dehydration to medical conditions that exacerbate thermal risk to tactics that target individuals’ thermoregulatory capacities. How do—and how should—advocates negotiate between the objective physics and subjective experiences of thermal harm? Does activism toward thermal justice necessarily require the legitimating scaffolds of thermal and journalistic objectivity? Drawing on feminist theories of intimacy, this presentation will analyze how media investigations into thermal violence contend with its inherent indeterminacies.
Paz Araya (IRI THEsys - HU Berlin)
Short abstract:
Exploring warmth deprivation in Chilean urban contexts, this study unveils the nuanced dynamics of "friolento/a" (cold-sensitive) experiences within energy poverty. Insights from Araucania underscore the intersection of gender, stigma, and urban planning, revealing hidden facets of energy precarity.
Long abstract:
My work delves into sensitivities and emotional responses to cold within the contexts of energy poverty, specifically focusing on warmth deprivation. Grounded in extensive ethnographic work conducted during the prolonged cold seasons in medium-sized cities of the Araucania region, southern Chile, the study explores the concept of being "friolento" or "friolenta" (excessively sensitive to the cold). It unveils thresholds of tolerance in everyday life and urban planning, examining how gender norms, stigma, and shame intersect with rural memories, shaping diverse experiences of the cold. The argument posits that sensitivity to the cold, coupled with emotional and physical responses, is constructed within social relationships entwined with gender dynamics, socioeconomic relations, and connections to the territory. These sensitivities appear dislocated from those typically considered in urban planning processes, offering nuanced insights into the often-overlooked dimensions of cold vulnerability specific to Araucania, Southern Chile.
Thomas Lemke (Goethe Universität)
Short abstract:
The presentation proposes two extensions of 'critical temperature studies'. The first argues for research to analyse how thermal regimes modify temporal trajectories, while the second suggests mobilising the concept of environmentality to capture the design and modulation of thermal 'milieus'.
Long abstract:
Over the past decade, scholars in STS, sociology, anthropology, geography and media studies have proposed to attend to the cultural and social dimensions of temperatures and how they are implicated in particular strategies of power. These 'critical temperature studies' (Starosielski, 2021: 8) are characterised by three important features. Epistemologically, CTS challenge the dominant positivist understanding of the thermal as a pre-social and neutral force. Instead, they examine 'temperature' as a historical and social entity. Empirically, they cover the full spectrum of cold and hot, ranging from a 'cryopolitical analysis' (Radin and Kowal, 2017: 4) to 'critical heat studies' (Hamstead and Coseo 2020). Analytically, CTS conceive of heat and cold as technologically mediated, and their modulation offers new forms of social, biological and environmental control.
In my presentation, I would like to suggest two extensions of this research perspective. First, while the analytical focus in CTS has been on spatial configurations, geographical regions and architectural arrangements, it is worth exploring how thermal regimes also modulate and modify temporal horizons and trajectories. Second, while research interest has focused on the biopolitical effects of thermal technologies - from infrared camera surveillance, to the colonial legacy of Western temperature norms, to new regimes of making life and death available through practices of cryopreservation (Radin and Kowal 2017; Beregow 2019; Starosielski 2021; Hobart 2023) - it might be useful to mobilise Foucault's concept of environmentality to capture how humans and non-humans are governed through the design and modulation of thermal 'milieus' (Lemke 2021).
Anthony Powis (University of Sheffield) Harshavardhan Bhat (The Ohio State University)
Short abstract:
Developing our work on 'The Monsoon Above and Below Ground', as a result of our research with the ERC funded project 'Monsoon Assemblages', this paper intervenes and expands on the discourse of the thermal in reference to the monsoon.
Long abstract:
Anthropologists, architects, and social scholars of science have in recent years revived the discourse of the thermal in reference to wetness and humidity in the context of the severe heat phases and the climate breakdown in the global south. We notice that while the discourse calls on urgent action to secure human life and livelihood in the context of the anthropocene, the analytics of heat within monsoonal worlds retains methodologies of imperial metrics and approaches of interpreting humidity and its relationship to embodiment in the context of heat.
By merging our shared scholarship on how notions of thermal water below the ground (Powis) and in the air (Bhat) animate monsoonal science and knowledge, we seek to expose critical issues in how monsoonal potential is understood and crafted in an environment of uncertainty. How does a thermal theorisation of water differ from what is below the ground to the air? How does monsoon politics inform the temporality of the thermal characteristics of water below the ground and the air 'we' breathe? Based on our research in architecture and the environmental humanities, this paper uses colonial archives, as well as primary fieldwork on contemporary regimes of thermal power, in order to intervene and expand on the discourse of the thermal in reference to the monsoon.
Zhengfeng Wang (Leiden University)
Short abstract:
This paper examines the role of refrigerated space in the urban governance of treaty-port Shanghai. It offers a nuanced understanding of the mediations and frictions involved in the modernization of the foodway and how cooling technology empowered diverse subjects living in the cosmopolitan city.
Long abstract:
In Shanghai, a treaty-port city that opened to foreign trade and residence in the mid-19th century, Western-administered sanitary authorities adopted the germ theory, attributing the prevalence of diseases to food contamination. The advent of mechanical refrigeration, ensuring precise temperature control for the production, preservation, and consumption of perishable products, not only addressed the dietary needs of European expatriates, overcoming long-term prejudice against food sanitation in Asia, but also played a pivotal role in regulating the urban environment through technological rationality and social ordering.
As “native ice” from lakes and rivers was deemed a public menace, cooling plants emerged in the municipal laboratory, public markets, and the abattoir complex. Health authorities promoted household refrigerators, particularly among newcomers from nations with established sanitary regulations, alongside the popularity of the electric appliance among the Chinese upper class. While foreign administration mandated cold storage installation in food premises for sanitary concerns, Chinese authority harnessed techno-power to effectively, though briefly, reconfigure the city’s supply chain logistics. Despite local resistance against government interventions in commercial activities, mechanical refrigeration permeated the foodscape, embedding thermal knowledge and sanitary norms into everyday life and providing fresh experiences to the metropolis.
This paper shifts away from the narrative that construes cooling technology as a tool of the empire and emphasizes its unilateral enforcement in facilitating Western acclimatization to the tropics. Refrigerated spaces, as socio-environmental-technical systems, participated as infrastructure in modernizing the foodway, a process imbued with mediations and frictions contesting the incomplete cold chain, which is commonplace nowadays.
Rebecca Wright (Northumbria University)
Short abstract:
This paper explores how thermal regimes shape national economies and the workforce. By analysing how far job creation drove the design of Britain's thermal infrastructure in the 1970s and 80s, it argues that warmth has been as much about keeping the population in work as preserving bodily comfort.
Long abstract:
Up until the second world war, warmth was a major stimulus to the British economy and workforce. In 1953 the National Coal Board (NCB) employed 713,000 miners, with roughly 20% of the coal supply used in coal fires to keep British homes warm. With the growth of gas and oil central heating in the 1960s and 1970s, the link between a distinctive thermal regime and its labour force collapsed. This paper will uncover how the (NCB) and the National Union of Miners (NUM) fought to preserve the labour-intensive nature of heat throughout the 1970s and 1980s, looking at their promotion of district heating systems as an employment generator. The NCB and the NUM actively lobbied councils, housing associations, and even provided interest free loans sacrificed from wages to establish district heating systems run on solid fuel. Ultimately, these efforts were unsuccessful as gas became the dominant heating method for British homes. The conceptual relationship between heat and work was not lost, however. Over the 1980s inner-city home installation programmes that emerged as part of the government’s energy efficiency programme stressed the importance of ‘warmth’ as a critical area of job creation. By highlighting how the battle over Britain’s thermal infrastructure was fought on the grounds of labour-intensity (and how much work warmth could generate) this paper will highlight the role of ‘thermal regimes’ in shaping national economies and the workforce.
Frederike Lausch (ETH Zurich)
Short abstract:
This paper analyses two DFG-funded research projects on climatic conditions in West African courtyard houses from the 1970s, exploring thermal imaginaries. It studies how on-the-ground data interacted with models in wind channels to construct (and counter) an objectifiable notion of comfort.
Long abstract:
The research projects, “Climatic conditions in West African courtyard houses” (1973–75) and “Microclimatic and climate-psychological effects, as well as constructive requirements of added storeys to West African courtyard houses” (1976–79), involved collaboration between the Institute for Tropical Building at TH Darmstadt, the Institute of Aerodynamic Studies at TU Munich, and the Faculty of Architecture at UST Kumasi. The test field was in Nima, Accra’s Zongo residential area. Researchers proposed a ventilation apparatus to improve comfort inside the houses, and specific second-story patterns to increase density while maintaining proper courtyard ventilation. Models in 1:100 and 1:30 simulated the situation in a Munich university wind channel. The distribution of tasks reflected neo-colonial epistemological hierarchies: the researchers in Kumasi retrieved the data on the ground and constructed the mock-up second storey; models served Munich researchers for testing; both ground measurements and simulations were analysed in Darmstadt and Munich. Inhabitants were mostly seen as disturbances, impacting data collection by opening doors or switching measuring devices off. The assumption that these houses needed climatic improvements is questionable. A 1970 survey in Nima, undertaken by Darmstadt students, revealed most respondents found the houses “comfortable” or didn’t respond to questions of comfort. The survey’s failure was attributed to unclear questions or “non-objectifiable answers”. In summary, the project appears to have been based on imaginaries of thermal comfort that were challenged by the residents. Ultimately, as the proposed “enhancements” were not embraced by development stakeholders, the projects predominantly served the academic community in Germany.
Asya Uzmay (Cornell University)
Short abstract:
By looking at the techniques of producing and circulating climate and resource maps produced by the UN in the 1950s, this paper aims to look at the standardization process in architectural production specifically in self-built and low-cost housing in the postwar period.
Long abstract:
In 1952, the United Nations published a world map showing the “Tropical Zone.” Unlike the earlier scientific definitions of the tropical zone, the area between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer, this new map depicted a larger territory. A meandering but clear line carefully follows postwar nation-state borders, separated geographies beyond climatic differences. Juxtaposed with the other maps depicting climatic differences produced by the UN from the 1950s, such as the “Arid Zone” map of 1951, this paper argues climatic maps produced by the UN during that period functioned as evidence and template in architectural production and aid structures for architects, planners, engineers, development aid and state officials. Particularly, new nation states’ financial interests in self-built and low-cost housing required the making of standards to produce a common language in international aid distribution.
To discuss how the climatic and architectural difference was made and remade in the postwar period, first, this paper will tackle the production processes of these maps. Second, it will trace techniques of reproduction and circulation of the maps in multiple mediums such as building manuals, technical pamphlets, reports, and journals like Colonial Building Notes and Housing and Town Country Planning Bulletin. Dwelling on the recent scholarship on critical temperature and postcolonial studies in architectural history, critical cartography, and postcolonial STS, this paper aims to show how "tropicality" (climate), "underdevelopment" (skills), and "arid lands" (natural resources) were produced and translated into architectural categories by the experts in the UN and nation states.
Ksenia Litvinenko (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space)
Short abstract:
Drawing on Soviet extractivism studies (Brown 2013, Collier 2011, Kochetkova 2024), the paper reconstructs how late Soviet mobile architecture was imagined and used as a method of 'acclimatisation' during the 'resourcification' (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014) of oil and gas in Western Siberia.
Long abstract:
In 1977, a rotational settlement from fourteen barrel-shaped wagons was erected near the Noyabrsk railway station amid the Western Siberian taiga. These mobile living units, praised by contemporaries for their ‘thermal effectiveness’ in the ‘extreme’ cold climate, facilitated the access of fly-in-fly-out workers and geologists to the oil fields of the West Siberian petroleum basin – the world’s largest physical oil deposits ‘discovered’ in 1960. Throughout the 1960s-80s, dozens of such temporary rotational settlements were erected to ensure the steady supply of labour power and facilitate inflated extractive targets, making the Soviet Union a major global supplier of hydrocarbons. Utilising meteorological and geological knowledge, analyses of contemporaneous American, Canadian, Finnish and Norwegian architecture, and observations of the material culture of the region’s ‘indigenous’ ethnic minorities – Khakass, Khanti, Mansi, Nenets, Selkup and others – the Soviet architectural establishment attempted to imagine rotational urbanism and mobile architecture as a method of ‘taming’ the climatic features of the region, such as gushing winds, permafrost, swampy soils and low temperatures. This paper critically reconstructs the epistemic hierarchies and materialisations of Soviet mobile architecture and rotational urbanism in Western Siberia during the years of the oil and gas extraction boom and across three scales – territory, housing, and construction technologies – as a politics of ‘acclimatisation’. It will do so by drawing from the archives of the LenZNIIEP and SibZNIIEP, the State Research and Design Institutes responsible for testing and providing spatial solutions for Western Siberia’s North.
Megan Eardley (University of Kassel)
Short abstract:
In the twentieth century, the mining industry in South Africa drove research on the limits of human physiology in high heat. Tracking NASA's use of South African research, this paper asks how thermal physiologists tested racial categories in environments that will not sustain biological processes.
Long abstract:
In the mid-twentieth century, South African mining companies developed the deepest and hottest mines on earth. As they moved deeper, they established new laboratories to test the limits of human physiology in high heat. This paper builds on research which examines how South Africa's mining industry tested and remade racial categories in "Tropical Africa" using surface acclimatization chambers. Tracking NASA's use of South African laboratory studies, particularly within its technical standards, I examine how U.S. contractors translated South African racial categories for reference publications. Engaging theories of racial capitalism, I further analyze how thermal physiologists reinvested in racial logics in environments that will not sustain biological processes.
Paul Bouet (Université Gustave Eiffel)
Short abstract:
This paper discusses the concept of “thermal colonization” by examining the construction of French extractive settlements in the Algerian Sahara during the war of independence (1954-1962). It shows how the definition and implementation of a thermal normativity was key in this colonial endeavor.
Long abstract:
This paper explores the concept of “thermal colonization” proposed by Nicole Starosielski (2021) as “the use of a sense of temperature to justify colonial expansion and inhabitation.” It does so by analyzing a case study: the construction of French extractive settlements in the Algerian Sahara during the war of independence (1954-1962). I argue that the French agenda was not only about extracting the major reserves of fossil fuels discovered there, but also consisted of defining and setting a thermal normativity in the desert.
The paper analyzes how this “thermal colonization” was implemented through four steps. First, the construction by experts of the Sahara milieu as “extreme,” mainly due to its aridity and high thermal amplitude. Then, the discrediting of the habitat and practices of indigenous communities, deemed admirable but overall “backward” and non-modern. Thirdly, the setting of a comfort norm based on the physiological and psychological reactions of human bodies and minds to the desert climate, so as to guarantee their working efficiency. And lastly, the building of air-conditioned settlements in the desert, from single dwellings to entire cities, to house oil industry workers and the soldiers protecting them.
This episode played a pivotal role in advancing knowledge about comfort, air-conditioning technologies, and acclimatization to non-temperate climates, which persisted after the French withdrew from Algeria in the 1960s. It also shows that, beyond temperature, what was at play was a whole “environmental colonization,” involving a broad set of parameters defining the acclimatization of individuals to the desert.
Rafico Ruiz (Canadian Centre for Architecture)
Short abstract:
This paper examines projects by the Montreal-based architectural firm Papineau Gérin Lajoie in the 1970s and 80s across the Northwest Territories as a response to environmentally-inflected Cold War military research in Arctic environments and on the lands of the Inuit.
Long abstract:
This paper examines the schools, laboratories, and airports designed and built by the Montreal-based architectural firm Papineau Gérin Lajoie in the 1970s and 80s across the Northwest Territories as a material response to environmentally-inflected Cold War military research in Arctic environments and on the lands of the Inuit and other northern Indigenous communities. These buildings, many still functioning today, have become darkly iconic examples of architectural colonization in the Canadian Arctic, particularly in relation to the use of polyester resin in their designs. My aim is to situate this body of work and the environmental and military research underlying its development to understand how PGL created an architecture oriented towards the mediation of thermal exposure in the pursuit of colonial settlement. Critically, thermal processes are never neutrally or objectively present as the result of ecological dynamics, but carry with them a long history of themselves being mediated by colonial processes in situ. This is the conjuncture that projects like PGL’s Nakasuk Elementary School, completed in 1976, and its now iconic prefabricated fibreglass panels articulates: a long-standing settler colonial Qallunaat (white, southern) architecture that needs to be named and understood in order to lay the groundwork for an Indigenous-defined future within the design professions and their manifestation across Inuit Nunangat (Inuit homelands).