Fellow 2021-2022DANIEL A. BARBER
Term: 07/2021 – 06/2022
Daniel A. Barber is Associate Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture (PhD Program) at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He was recently a Research Fellow at the Centro de Estudos sobre a Mudança Socioeconómico e o Território (ISCTE Instituto Universitário de Lisboa). Last year he was the Topic Director for the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities exploring the theme of transition/transformation as it relates to the built environment and the production of knowledge. Daniel edits the 'accumulation' series on e-flux archtecture (soon to be a book) and is co-founder of the Current Collective for Architecture and Environmental History. Some of his most prominent publications, articles, and lectures include
- Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
- A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- “Active Passive: Heat Storage and the Solar Imaginary” in Imre Szeman and Darin Barney (eds.) “Solarity,” a themed issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 120, no. 1 (January 2021).
- “Stranded Assets” in Maibritt Pedersen Zari, Peter Connolly, and Mark Southcombe (eds.) Ecologies Design: Transforming Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism (London: Routledge/Earthscan, 2020): 260-267.
- “The Shaded Modernism of the Global Interior: Climate and Risk in the Architecture of MMM Roberto, Rio de Janeiro, 1936-1955” in Martin Mahoney and Sam Randells (eds) Weather, Climate, and the Geographic Imagination: Placing Atmospheric Knowledge (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020): 232-272.
- “Emergency Exit: Architecture and Equity after Carbon” part of the public lecture series, University of Technology Sydney, Australia (remote), June 11.
- “After Comfort” at Overcoming Carbon Form, panel to launch Log 47, with Michael Bell, Elisa Iturbe, Doug Spencer, and Cynthia Davidson, November 19.
INTERVIEW WITH CAPAS FELLOW DANIEL A. BARBER
Carbon, Comfort, and Climate: Architecture as Apocalyptic Media
This project aims to construct a concept of architecture appropriate to the challenges of climate instability. It takes said climate challenge as a cipher for an apocalypse: A social and industrial trajectory that is past the point of return, and will upend ways of life around the globe until they are unrecognizable. The project takes a stark look at the predictions of climate disruptions, and approaches the emergence of apocalyptic climate challenge from the perspective of the ongoing crisis of colonialism and settler colonialism; that is, from the perspective that a ways-of-life changing catastrophe has been occurring, unevenly across the globe, for centuries, and that pre-industrial practices and indigenous epistemologies.