Open Collections

Abstract

What is comfort? It promises predictability, safety, and control over the instability of the natural world. The pursuit of thermal homogeneity—sealed interiors, regulated temperatures, mechanized air—ties architecture to the carbon economy and patterns of overconsumption. In a time of climate crisis, the experience of comfort indoors is increasingly predicated on the acceleration of climatic discomfort outside. Achitecture must no longer deliver comfort by default but choreograph discomfort as a medium for bodily adaptation and cultural transformation. Post-Comfort proposes a new architectural logic: to condition humans to be less comfortable. This entails a shift in values, habits, and desires. Through temperature extremes and recovery, discomfort can be desirable through spatial sequences that heighten thermal awareness and invite users into a new way of living. This transformation is explored through the adaptive reuse of the Dal Grauer Substation in downtown Vancouver—a former node of electrical energy transmission, now reimagined as a public sweat facility. Within its concrete structural grid, a thermal program of saunas, cold plunges, semi-exterior lounges, and transitional spaces unfolds in temperature cascades. Comfort zones are dissolved through blurred thermal boundaries to encourage variations. Discomfort becomes purposeful. Bodies adapt not only to temperature, but to one another. In a post-comfort world, shared rituals of heat and cold produce new forms of collective presence.