(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Buildings consume immense amounts of energy in order to mechanically create environments of cooled, warmed, filtered and (de)humidified air to shelter human activity in narrow definitions of comfort. Building facades or exterior skins are layered material boundaries of various levels of air-tightness and efficiency, acting as conditioned containers of human activity, separating interior from exterior. Any discontinuities or inefficiencies in exterior skin assemblies, make them act like a sieve, either leaking air or BTUs between conditioned inside to the outside. The energy wasted contributes to carbon emissions and thus, climate change. Yet, this waste through the exterior building skin is invisible to the human. Detailed thermography of a building’s facades completed at different times of year, is stitched into a seamless thermal image. This image is projected onto the building, creating a visible and vibrant mapping of the building’s energy waste on the building itself. By making energy waste publicly visible through thermographic projection, this research layers contradictory imagery, as it transforms the building facade from a mechanism of concealment, a tool for projecting beauty, to one of unmasking and questioning notions of beauty, grounded in perfection of compositional form, proportion, and symmetry. With these projections, the building facade is positioned as contested ground between private (ownership) and public (impact of energy waste), bringing into question who has a voice in what happens at those junctures. The conception of a contested boundary recognizes that the surface does not belong to one or the other separate domains but are liminal thresholds of perception and action, where transgressions can foreground activism through an act of deliberate aggression. We ground the thermographic projections within the history of projective events as urban activism. Finally, we position building facades as sites for action in the fight against climate change, revealing the built environment’s culpability.