While we have achieved unprecedented infrastructural feats, technical developments, and increased prosperity, our urbanity has also created the grandest challenges we have ever faced. The societal successes that enabled our massive urban expansion have simultaneously enabled our intellectual capabilities to recognize these problems. We can now characterize and predict with confidence the very real and dire consequences of unchecked resource consumption and environmental degradation. The urban climate is full of dangerous positive feedback loops that models show are driving conditions to be less and less conducive to life (Meggers et al. 2016; Bruelisauer et al. 2014; Allegrini, Dorer, and Carmeliet 2012; Salata et al. 2016).
But we don’t create solutions by developing models or by disseminating the science and statistics of climate change, urban heat islands, and ecosystem contamination. We must design solutions to these problems. With a significant cohort of people disinterested in scientific reason, our solutions must not simply react to those scientifically defined motivations. They must be creative beacons that enable new paradigms on a tangible level that broadly engages the community. We can combine solutions to perceivable goals like beauty and comfort with those derived more abstractly like climate change (Bruelisauer and Berthold 2015). The surfaces of our urban infrastructure and, more importantly, our urban living ecology must be recognized as an underutilized actor with great potential to affect paradigm changes.
Our understanding of the dynamics of the built environment and its impact and interface with the environment has never been more important. Buildings are constantly trapping heat from the sun, utilizing high value generated energy, and rejecting heat into the environment. Dealing with these dynamics leads buildings to be the largest sector of greenhouse gas emissions, but also implicates them as a major source of the urban heat island. In our work at the CHAOS lab at Princeton, we investigate energy exchanges and explore the thermal interfaces that are directly perceptible to the public they face (Teitelbaum and Meggers 2017). These are clearly mediated through the spaces created by the buildings both inside and out. Although the people living inside a building certainly experience space, the perception of comfort and the thermal condition imbued upon those people has far less to do with space than most consider. Surfaces matter.
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