THE LIBRARY IS OPEN: PHILIPPE RAHM

Philippe Rahm will take part in the fourth edition of “The Library is Open” with a presentation of his recent book Climatic Architecture (Actar 2023)

Architecture and urbanism were traditionally based on climate and health, as we can read in the treatises of Vitruvius, Palladio or Alberti, 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 by heating and air conditioning systems, pumps and refrigerators, that today cause the greenhouse effect and global warming. The fight against climate change forces architects and urban designers to take seriously the climatic issue in order to base their design on its the local climatic context and energy resources. Faced with the climatic challenge of the 21st century, we propose to reset our discipline on its intrinsic atmospheric qualities, where air, light, heat or humidity are recognized are real materials of building, convection, thermal conduction, evaporation, emissivity, or effusivity are becoming design tools for composing architecture and cities, and through materialism dialectic, are able to revolutionize esthetic and social values.

Philippe Rahm is a Swiss architect, and 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, Columbia, Cornell or Princeton Universities. 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.