In conjunction with our current exhibition, The Nature of Art, and its themes, join scholar Dr. Daniel A. Barber as he discusses ecology in non-modernist cultures, tropical modernism, new narratives of ecological thinking, designing for discomfort, and architecture as the mediation between the infrastructural and the personal.
Daniel A. Barber is a professor of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney and a research affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research and teaching focus on how the practice and pedagogy of architecture are changing to address the climate emergency. Daniel has held academic positions and fellowships at Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale, and at the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, the Rachel Carson Center (Munich), and most recently at the Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the Universität Heidelberg. He is a 2022-2023 Guggenheim Fellow, working on the project “Thermal Practices.” His books include Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton University Press, 2020) and A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Daniel is increasingly focused on amplifying the climate-relevant work of scholars and practitioners and developing concepts and frameworks for architects, policymakers, developers, and others to engage in the climate emergency. He is co-founder of Current: Collective on Environment and Architectural History; co-editor of the annual Accumulation series on e-flux Architecture; and co-editor of a special issue of Future Anterior focused on preservation and retrofit; and a member of the Cohabitations editorial collective supporting interdisciplinary and multi-sited research on climate, displacement, and design.