Quasi-Materials and the Making of Interior Atmospheres

n The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Reyner Banham presents a parable in which, having come across an amount of wood, a nomadic tribe must decide how to use it to keep warm overnight: build a structure or build a fire (and burn the wood as fuel). The first of these uses the materials directly to create an amenable interior condition using the tangible materiality of geometric construction. The second, however, generates heat from combustion, thereby creating an intangible, graduated, thermal interiority, which one can draw deeper into, by moving closer to the fire, or recede from, by moving away.