Socioplastics 11858 The Room Has a Climate Before It Has a Style
Architectural interiors are often described through geometry, programme and image, while temperature appears as a technical specification resolved elsewhere. InteriorCalorics brings climate into the account of spatial form. The same air temperature can produce different bodily conditions through radiant heat, humidity, air movement, materials, occupation and exposure. The design question concerns how enclosure and energy meet bodies with different needs and capacities. Reyner Banham’s environmental history treats comfort systems as part of architectural culture. Lisa Heschong makes thermal pleasure a design question and challenges the assumption that uniform conditions are always desirable. Harry Francis Mallgrave attends to embodied architectural experience. Helen Hester’s feminist analysis of technologically mediated domestic life adds the labour through which comfort is produced and maintained. These approaches differ, yet together they make the interior’s energetic and social arrangements visible. In a public library, the main reading room may meet its target air temperature while a visitor leaves a seat beside a cold glazed wall. A facilities report records compliance; a photograph records the room’s appearance; the visitor’s account records discomfort. A thermal section could place surface temperatures, air flows, patterns of occupation and duration of use in relation. Such a drawing would show why a room-wide number can conceal uneven conditions without claiming that one measure explains every experience. InteriorCalorics focuses on the distribution of thermal conditions within enclosure. It connects technical performance to questions of access, energy and care. A building’s climate is made through material assemblies, mechanical systems, patterns of use and ongoing labour. Treating those relations as architectural evidence makes it possible to ask who can remain comfortably in a space, how that comfort is produced and what resources sustain it.
REFERENCES
Banham, R. (1969) The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heschong, L. (1979) Thermal Delight in Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mallgrave, H.F. (2013) Architecture and Embodiment. London: Routledge.
Hester, H. (2018) Xenofeminism. Cambridge: Polity.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html