+/– 1 °C: In Search of Well-Tempered Architecture

Ecology has significantly influenced the development of architecture in the past decade; in this field, often understood as “energy efficiency of buildings.” Other engineering disciplines have taken care of the presumed greater ecological nature of architecture with heat pumps, zero-energy house technology, ventilation with heat recovery, and similar technologies; these turn our homes into high-tech machines intended to contribute to economical energy management. “Energy efficiency” thus does not appear as the starting point of architectural design but rather as a completely separate, independent component of the building. Vernacular architecture of past centuries did not know such distinctions – ecology in previous periods generated architecture and was inseparable from it.

The book +/- 1 °C: In Search of Well-Tuned Architecture, in collaboration with 50 architects and creators, explores and analyzes examples of vernacular objects from Europe that, unlike current contemporary practice, address the question of ecology holistically as an integral part of architectural design. The book is accompanied by 4 interviews with domestic and foreign experts who professionally deal with ecology in various fields. The curator and design consultant Jane Withers, economist and politician Janez Potočnik, chemist  Michael Braungart, and philosopher Timothy Morton place the complex and multi-layered theme of ecology in architecture, which cannot be thought of in isolation, into a broader socio-economic context.