Climatic Architecture

This book is about climate and architecture. Written by the Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, it is at the same time a monograph on the architectural, urbanistic and landscape work of the office 'Philippe Rahm architectes', a manifesto for a climatic architecture to face global warming, and a theoretical and practical treatise on the art of building atmospheres.

Architecture and urbanism were traditionally based on climate and health, as we can read in treatises of Vitruvius, Palladio or Alberti, where exposure to wind and sun, variations in temperature and humidity influenced the forms of cities and buildings. These fundamental causes of urban planning and buildings were ignored in the second half of the 20th century thanks to the enormous use of fossil energy by heating and air conditioning systems, pumps and refrigerators, that today cause the greenhouse effect and global warming.

The fight against climate change forces the architects and urban designer to take back seriously the climatic issue in order to base their design on more consideration to the local climatic context and energy resources. Faced with the climatic challenge of the 21st century, we propose to reset our discipline on its intrinsic atmospheric qualities, where air, light, heat or humidity are recognised are real materials of building, convection, thermal conduction, evaporation, emissivity, or effusivity are becoming design tools for composing architecture and cities, and through materialism dialectic, are able to revolutionize esthetic and social values.