Architecture as the Ethics of Climate

This remarkable study by Jin Baek draws important insights about architectural sustainability and ethics from the non-dualistic philosophy of Tesuro Watsuji (1889-1960). Showing the limitations of current positions that objectify the environment and propose an architecture of personal experimentalism, the book participates significantly in current conversations around the concept of atmosphere and attunement. Drawing particularly from Watsuji's central concept of climate (Jap. Fudo) as a trans-subjective and encompassing context for the social body involving both culture and nature, Baek demonstrates both the misconception of atmosphere as a subjective effect, and the radical limitations of a discourse on sustainability that treats this problem as a mere technological question reducible to mathematical parameters. - Alberto Perez-Gomez, Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal Not since Ruskin's Ethics of the Dust (1865) has there been such a persuasive account of the inseparability of architecture's ethical and environmental responsibilities. Baek's study is particularly relevant today, when sustainability discussions suffer from both a narrow dependency on the natural sciences and corresponding neglect of the social and cultural dimensions of resource allocation. Through studies of great architects-Ando, Neutra, Aalto and others-Architecture as the Ethics of Climate has reoriented architecture toward more humane, just, and inspiring solutions. - David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania, USA It's rare that architectural writing reaches the depths that Jin Baek's does, rich in scholarship and without undue technicality. Based in the ethico-phenomenological philosophy of Tetsuro Watsuji-one of Japan's most prolific philosophers and a critic of Heidegger's-Baek generates new avenues of architectural thought, ones that give deeper meaning to sustainability as well as how architecture might help us live happily among each other. Climate understood as fudo, inescapable even as we try to escape it, is best accepted with an opened window, a reached-for sweater, a shaken umbrella, and a friend to agree it's gotten fresh outside. As neutralization gives on to engagement, so experience gives on to relationship. - Michael Benedikt, Hal Box Chair in Urbanism, ACSA Distinguished Professor, Director, Center for American Architecture and Design, School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin, USA