The Unbearable Tightness of Building

Abstract

To environ means to surround. Today, to surround translates as built enclosure.2 Enclosures remove the discomforts of the outside world and of our premodern lives; lives no longer reliant on the earth’s temperament and geographic specificity. If “the primary task of architecture is to act in man’s favor; to interpose itself between man and his natural surroundings in order to remove the environmental load from his shoulders,”3 then a building is an effort to create a “small controlled environment” within a larger, more unruly (and less comfortable) natural world.4 The building envelope theoretically and materially delineates society from nature: it forms a dividing line between the environs that can be controlled and those that cannot. In modern buildings, favorable atmospheres are defined by a membrane that serves to delineate environments and mechanical technologies that act on the atmosphere itself.5