Claude Dutson

In this PhD by practice, I explore, through J.L. Austin’s concept of ‘performative’ speech, how thermal management in architecture becomes entangled with the imperative of organisational management. The project work – a video performance and a database – investigates the interconnected concepts of performance and heat as they materialise in the  workplace of the knowledge economy at a moment of convergence between smart technology with architecture. Where notionally, agency is given over to autonomous environmental systems to do the right thing, and where work environments are embedded in performative-discursive company cultures that urge their occupants to ‘do the right thing’.

The concept of thermal delight proposed by Lisa Heschong in 1979, ‘rich in cultural associations’ which celebrates the ‘bonds of affection and ceremony' is updated with the excesses of high-performance management: burnout and exhaustion – cool-hunters and hot-to-trot stocks. 

The database brings together over 1000 entries drawn from dictionary sources of metaphors, idioms and synonyms for heat used in English as a global lingua franca for business, economics and politics. I propose that the thermal culture of architecture is not primarily one of comfort, but a layered discursive field of power, economics, anger, desire, love, productivity and war. The metaphors are not poetic embellishments, but are actively used in everyday communication and are partially constitutive of the subjects of knowledge work. 

Taking seriously the occupant as a subject constituted by management, whose entire being and passions are put to work, I place this subject into a thermal environment latent with the full cultural significance of its metaphors. In a series of HEATED EXCHANGES an Actor, and Reactor, negotiate for control of a thermostat, using metaphors and idioms derived from words for heat.

This final-year project consolidates various research interests that I have been pursuing for a few years; processes derived from geometric anomalies found in built form, environmental engineering and the physiological side-effects of buildings, and a typology of public buildings that one could unofficially live in. Through manipulating border controls and layering bye-laws in a downtown check-in terminal for Heathrow, located on the site of the New Covent Garden Market, loopholes in jurisdiction can be inhabited by unexpected programs. Environmental stasis is disrupted by the market, which permeates the terminal, and feeds off the airport infrastructure.

ADS1/Binaries/Oxymorons: Nature vs. Culture