Baumer Lecture Series, Philippe Rahm

The fight against climate change forces the architects and urban designer to take back seriously the climatic issue in order to base their design on more consideration to the local climatic context and energy resources.

Faced with the climatic challenges of the 21st century, we propose to reset our discipline on its intrinsic atmospheric qualities, where air, light, heat or humidity are recognized are real materials of building, convection, thermal conduction, evaporation, emissivity, or effusivity are becoming design tools for composing architecture and cities, and through materialism dialectic, are able to revolutionize esthetic and social values.   

Philippe Rahm is a Swiss architect and the principal of Philippe Rahm architects based in Paris, France. His work, which extends the field of architecture from the physiological to the meteorological, has received an international audience in the context of sustainability. Rahm's recent work includes the first prize for the Farini competition (60 ha) in Milan in 2019, the 70-hectare Central Park in Taichung, Taiwan, completed in December 2020, a 2700-m2 Exhibition architecture for Luma Foundation in Arles, France.

Rahm has held professorships at GSD Harvard University, Cornell, and Princeton. Currently, Mr Rahm is serving as the Dean’s Visiting Associate Professor at Columbia University. He is a tenured associate professor at the National Superior School of Architecture in Versailles, France (ENSA-V). In 2020, he is the curator of the exhibition “Natural History of Architecture” at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. “Climatic architecture”, a monographic book is published at Fall 2023.

Note this event was originally scheduled for September 18 and was rescheduled.

The Baumer Series invites prominent researchers and practitioners of architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning to present their work and to engage subjects both topical and enduring.