Weather Architecture

Weather Architecture further extends Jonathan Hill's investigation of authorship by recognising the creativity of the weather. At a time when environmental awareness is of growing relevance, the overriding aim is to understand a history of architecture as a history of weather and thus to consider the weather as an architectural author that affects design, construction and use in a creative dialogue with other authors such as the architect and user. Environmental discussions in architecture tend to focus on the practical or the poetic but here they are considered together. Rather than investigate architecture's relations to the weather in isolation, they are integrated into a wider discussion of cultural and social influences on architecture. The analysis of weather's effects on the design and experience of specific buildings and gardens is interwoven with a historical survey of changing attitudes to the weather in the arts, sciences and society, leading to a critical re-evaluation of contemporary responses to climate change.

An architect and architectural historian, Jonathan Hill is Professor of Architecture and Visual Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he directs the MPhil/PhD Architectural Design programme. Jonathan is the author of The Illegal Architect (1998), Actions of Architecture (2003) and Immaterial Architecture (2006), editor of Occupying Architecture (1998) and Architecture-the Subject is Matter (2001), and co-editor of Critical Architecture (2007).

Introduction 1. Things of a Natural Kind 2. The Seasons of A Life 3. A Life in Ruins 4. The Garden of Architecture 5. Pigments and Pollution 6. The Weather of Our Houses 7. Submitting to the Seasons 8. Fog, Glare and Gloom 9. Sweet Garden of Vanished Pleasures