Architecture and urbanism were traditionally based on climate and health, where exposure to wind and sun, variations in temperature and humidity influenced the forms of cities and buildings. These fundamental causes of urban planning and buildings were ignored in the second half of the 20th century thanks to the enormous use of fossil energy, that today cause the greenhouse effect and global warming. The fight against climate change forces the architects and urban designer to take back seriously the climatic issue in order to base their design on more consideration to the local climatic context and energy resources.

Faced with the climatic challenges of the 21st century, we propose to reset our discipline on its intrinsic atmospheric qualities, where air, light, heat or humidity are recognized as real materials of building, convection, thermal conduction, evaporation, emissivity, or effusivity are becoming design tools for composing architecture and cities, and through dialectical materialism, are able to revolutionize esthetic and social values.

Philippe Rahm is a swiss architect, principal in the office of “Philippe Rahm architectes”, based in Paris, France. His work, which extends the field of architecture from the physiological to the meteorological, has received an international audience in the context of sustainability. His recent work includes the first prize for the Farini competition (60 ha) in Milan in 2019, the 70 hectares Central Park in Taichung, Taiwan, completed in December 2020, a 2700 m2 Exhibition architecture for Luma Foundation in Arles, France. He has held professorships at GSD Harvard University, Cornell, Princeton or Columbia University where Mr Rahm is currently Dean’s Visiting Associate Professor. He is a tenured associate professor at the National Superior School of Architecture in Versailles, France (ENSA-V). In 2020, he is the curator of the exhibition “Natural History of Architecture” at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. “Climatic architecture”, a monographic book is published at Fall 2023.