The Nature of the Image: Architecture, Climate, and Media

In this talk, Daniel Barber will discuss the role of image making and distribution as a central arena for rethinking the relationship between architecture and climate in the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing on discussions from numerous fields, he will emphasise the complicated role of academic institutions and non-governmental organizations in reframing the relationship of architecture to global ecological knowledge.

Daniel A. Barber is currently the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in Environment and Humanities at Princeton University. He is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and has held research and teaching positions at Harvard University and the University of Auckland. Starting this summer, he will hold an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship through the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich. Daniel has lectured widely, and has published essays in Grey Room, Technology and Culture and forthcoming in Public Culture, as well as in many edited volumes. His first book, A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War will be published by Oxford University Press this summer; a second book on climate methods, from which this talk is drawn, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2018.

Supported by the Griffith Climate Change Response Program and the Architectural History Group in the Griffith School of Environment.