Parution du numéro 17 de la revue ABE Journal: Architecture beyond Europe sous la direction de Jiat-Hwee Chang (prof. associé à la National University of Singapore, Singapour) et Daniel J. Ryan (maître de conférence à l’université de Sydney, Australie). Le dossier thématique explore l’émergence de la notion de confort dans l’habitat et ses incarnations transculturelles en Asie, Australie, Amérique latine et en Afrique de l’Ouest, accompagnant les bouleversements politico-historiques (décolonisation), environnementaux et climatiques. https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.7853
This thematic section of ABE Journal explores the wide-ranging socio-environmental implications of comfort for architectural history. The contributions over this and the next issue complicate and expand upon our understanding of comfort. Each essay unpacks how comfort was situated and assembled in the built environment of different temporalities and geographies, beyond the taken-for-granted immediacy of the present and the discursive familiarity of temperate European and North American contexts. Drawing from the cognate fields of scholarship in, among others, Science and Technology Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Sociology of Practice, the contributions show how, during the past two centuries, comfort and the built environment were historically entangled with (settler) colonialism and decolonization, and the various (dis)enchantments of modernities and modernization in Asia, Australia, Latin America, and West Africa. By understanding comfort in relation to these cross-cultural and cross-climatic encounters, these contributions have far-reaching implications for comprehending our shifting and situated relationships with not just built environmental transformations but also planetary climate change.