51. Editor's Choice Edition: New Ontologies for Our Changing Climate

“…there is something radically wrong, because we’ve been trying to hold this water in rivers for centuries, and they’ve constantly defied us. So I’m asking this question: is India a river landscape, or is it an ocean of rain?”

This week, we conclude our editor’s choice series with an episode to inspire new possibilities in how we can approach issues of, and futures within our changing climate. We will hear two approaches to how we might re-imagine our relationship with climate. From Daniel Barber we will hear a conversation that focuses on contemporary issues in how we envision sustainability as a movement and culture. And our second conversation, with Dilip da Cunha re-imagines, not how we relate to climate necessarily, but how we define, culturally and physically, what our environment is. 

Timestamp Outline

2:15 The Global History of Architecture and Climate module at GAHTC
2:36 Lecture 1: “Primitive” Architecture and the Timeless Climatic Type 
4:33 Climate and vernacular design strategies, the climate effects of adobe in a pueblo like Taos
9:53 A technology and data-driven contemporary sustainability vs a culturally imaginative way of climatic living 
11:24 The embodied energy of the Passive House 
11:54 “Climate is, in effect, a realm for cultural interaction.” 
13:28 An Apocaloptimist in the presence of the IPCC report 
15:20 Elon Musk as an apocaloptimist: electric cars, batteries, Mars
17:13 Kate Orff and oyster-tecture: “We can completely reimagine the socio-biotic relationship.”
19:41 David Benjamin architect at Columbia: talk to the fishes in east river; mushroom bricks
20:19 New Materialism: what it means to talk to materials
20:52 Lecture 4: Modernism, Climate, and Post-Colonial Development; tropical modernism
23:11 A climate-responsive modernism vs HVAC-oriented modernism
24:38 Le Corbusier’s 1936 lecture in Buenos Aires: all buildings to have 68° F interior 
28:20 “Climate becomes a cipher for the “civilizing” project of the colonial period.”
30:12 “Tropi-pocaly-optimism”
30:40 “How to design for discomfort?”
32:27       Role of fashion in thermal engagement with architecture

36:34      The colonization of rivers 
38:21       “Rivers are products of a particular moment in time, and that moment in time can be clarified with the hydrologic cycle. The Hydrologic cycle goes through various forms of wetness. One particular part of wetness is water, and that time…when water is very visible as water has become our anchor…”-DD
40:51       “…there is something radically wrong, because we’ve been trying to hold this water in rivers for centuries, and they’ve constantly defied us. So I’m asking this question: is India a river landscape, or is it an ocean of rain?”-DD
42:13       An alternate ontology, rather than an alternate knowledge 
43:11     “Why are you questioning this line?”-VP
45:00      Rain and Rivers 
47:12      Discussion of flooding in India 
48:03     Native American Mound building surrounding the Mississippi system 
48:22      Inhabiting wetness 
49:15      Looking at the world sectionally 
52:35      “…I wouldn’t call it migration…[cultures who used mound building strategies] just work with a consciousness, that certain activities were more appropriate to higher wetnesses…”-DD
54:15       China’s harnessing of the Brahmaputra  
55:38        On naming and language 
57:27        Ganga vs Ganges