Architecture Beyond Europe Journal: Entanglements of Architecture and Comfort beyond the Temperate Zone

This thematic section of ABE Journal, edited by  Jiat-Hwee Chang and Daniel J. Ryan, explores the wide-ranging socio-environmental implications of comfort for architectural history. The contributions over this and the next issue complicate and expand upon our understanding of comfort. Each essay unpacks how comfort was situated and assembled in the built environment of different temporalities and geographies, beyond the taken-for-granted immediacy of the present and the discursive familiarity of temperate European and North American contexts.

Drawing from the cognate fields of scholarship in, among others, Science and Technology Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Sociology of Practice, the contributions show how, during the past two centuries, comfort and the built environment were historically entangled with (settler) colonialism and decolonization, and the various (dis)enchantments of modernities and modernization in Asia, Australia, Latin America, and West Africa. By understanding comfort in relation to these cross-cultural and cross-climatic encounters, these contributions have far-reaching implications for comprehending our shifting and situated relationships with not just built environmental transformations but also planetary climate change.

Full edition freely available here: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.7853

• Jiat-Hwee Chang and Daniel J. Ryan
  Editorial: Historicizing Entanglements of Architecture and Comfort beyond the Temperate Zone 
• Cathy Keys Shifting priorities of shade and northern Australian architecture: Colonial settlement prior to the 1920s 
• Natalia Solano-Meza Aesthetics of Comfort: A Third Moment in Costa Rican Histories of Tropical Architecture
• Dustin Valen Imperial Atmospheres: Race and Climate Control on the Niger
• Sascha Roesler and Madlen Kobi Urban Climate Indoors Rethinking Heating Infrastructure in China’s Non-Heating Zone
  
• Varia: Jasper Ludewig Mapoon Mission Station and the Privatization of Public Violence Transnational Missionary Architecture on Queensland’s Late-Nineteenth-Century Colonial Frontier
  
• Debate: Hannah le Roux: Comfort, violence, care: decolonising tropical architecture at Blida, 1956
  
• Documents/Sources: Monika Motylińska“A cross section of colonial technology”? Zooming in and zooming out on a photograph of a 1930s German trade fair “Kolonialtechnik im Querschnitt”?
  Ein Foto einer deutschen Messe aus den 1930er Jahren – zwischen Nah- und Weitblick 
  
• Dissertation abstract: Dalal Musaed Alsayer Architecture, Environment, Development: The United States and the Making of Modern Arabia, 1949-1961 PhD thesis, Committee: Daniel A. Barber, Ph.D. (Chair), Etienne S. Benson, Ph.D. (Co-Advisor), Pamela Karimi, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Stuart Weizmann School of Design, December 2019