The Unbearable Tightness of Building

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