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Weather dissidents: from natura naturans to ‘space’ and back again

This paper questions the touted appearance of a vitalist concept of nature in contemporary architecture (‘It’s Alive’). It situates the discussion in a historical and philosophical context and a philosophical dichotomy: is nature really is an independent agency or a materialist technology that can be redesigned at will?

The original was written in response to the 2012 AHRA Conference topic ‘Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence’. The resulting book chapter is one in a series of papers researching the architectural implications of my PhD, ‘The Gnat and the Vacuum: Robert Boyle and the History of Air’. My research in general questions the invention of space as a philosophical concept and examines the history of air as a way of disclosing its predecessors and alternatives. My methodology follows that of intellectual history: a scholarly investigation into the history and philosophy of science, and interprets the impact of Newtonian space on architectural thinking and practice. This paper brings to the fore the project to denature nature that characterised the development of science, and investigates its continuing influence on how we build, in this case the relationship between architecture and weather if weather is understood as an agent of ‘nature’.

This is an important contribution to the discussion of aerial topics in philosophy, now appearing in architectural discourse. It is original in its cross disciplinary approach and rigorous in its grounding in the history of science. The discussion is significant in a world that is increasingly man-made in terms of its ecologies, geologies, and weather systems - the Anthropocene age.

This paper was developed in concert with a conference paper given at the ‘City Air’ session at the SAH Annual Conference, Detroit 2012, entitled ‘From City Air to Urban Air: passion and pollution’ (forthcoming special edition of Journal of Architecture).