Permanent Impermanence with the House in Three Climates or Living and Perceiving with Material Temporal Cycles

Abstract

In a civilization of rapid temporality and supposed linear progress, a human-nature dichotomy proliferates from our ways of living all the way to the building wall section. As our temporal rhythm of the solar movement became diagrammed to a circular clock face and our architectural conceptions became built with anonymous materials, we have constructed a way of living in which the materials’ reactions to the environment became imperceptible. This silencing of the materials’ relationship to the environment and to the inhabitants of the building is an outcome of the well tempered environment, where interior spaces are insulated and severed from the exterior environmental conditions. This thesis proposes the antithesis to ocularcentric buildings and thermostatic lifestyles. Can perceiving materials and its ability to mediate the exterior climate allow for a building that creates an understanding of the environment through our inhabitation? By being able to perceive and interact with materials, a relationship with the building can be formed where inhabitants will live with and care for the materials through diurnal, seasonal, generational, and material timescales.

The thermal fluctuations of diurnal and seasonal changes recalibrates material and spatial organization to consider thermally active surfaces and heat retention, which can render programs, as we currently understand it, secondary to gradients of thermal qualities. Thick materials resist obsolescence by generational and material changes, offering materials the ability to weather and have continual use, becoming a form of carbon sequestration. The building moves through three different climates for three generations of family, reorganizing and re-layering itself to adapt to the new environment, while continuously building a reciprocal relationship with those who live with it.