Student Work
Physical version of MED Thesis Unsettling Climate with graphic design by Daedalus Li.
Physical version of MED Thesis Unsettling Climate with graphic design by Daedalus Li.
Physical version of MED Thesis Unsettling Climate with graphic design by Daedalus Li.
Psychometric chart with different colonial houses’ types overlapping the different climatic conditions for each of them.
Axonometric diagram with environmental mechanisms for adaptation of Case Study I: Casa las Damas, in Cartagena, Colombia, built at the turn of the 17th century.
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Title
UNSETTLING CLIMATE The Consequences of Domestic Building Technologies Across the Spanish Empire
Project Description
Alberto Martinez Garcia | Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) 2024
Advisor: Professor Mae-Ling Jovenes Lokko, Ph.D.
Reader: David Sadighian, Ph.D.
Chair: Keller Easterling.
Upon their arrival in the Americas in the sixteenth century, Spanish colonizers encountered a tropical climate previously unknown to Europeans. In the four hundred years of their empire, the colonizers set themselves on a collision course of maladaptation, violence towards Indigenous people, and erasure of their knowledge. Unsettling Climate investigates the domestic constructions of Spanish colonization in the tropics during the colonization of the Americas and the Philippines. Using case studies from patio houses in Cartagena in Colombia and bahay na bato (houses of stone) in the Philippines, this project analyzes the relationship between the natural environment, domestic space, and social hierarchies in the colonial realm. Two transitional chapters accompany these case studies. In the first one, I describe the evolution of patio houses in the Iberian Peninsula and the spread across the Spanish Empire. In the second, I investigate the influence of early modern colonization in the construction of new climatic epistemologies. Historical chronicles, maps, ordinances with paleoclimate information, floor plans, building sections, and environmental simulations constitute some of the evidence assembled to reconstruct these histories and track environmental dynamics in relation to building technologies. The unsettling urban climate constructed by the Spaniards fixed the spatial imaginaries in the contemporary imaginaries but also highlights the potential to disrupt this colonial entanglement in the future.
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