Sascha Roesler – författare

Urban microclimates cannot be explained solely on the basis of scientific phenomena, but are also affected materially and spatially by the city’s local architecture. The layout, design, and facade construction of buildings have a major impact on wind and temperature conditions. For this reason, architecture and urban design that have an effect on microclimates must be investigated in their social and cultural contexts.

The publication uses international case studies to explain these relationships. The focus is on manifestations of urban microclimates in an architectural and urban design context. The places investigated are located in France, Italy, the USA, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Burkina Faso.

The publication rethinks climate control – a key concern of the discipline of architecture – through the lens of city climate phenomena over the course of the 20th century. Based on a history of climate control on urban scales, it promotes the integration of indoors and outdoors in order to reduce environmental and thermal loads in cities. Just as heating and cooling practices inside the buildings are affecting the (urban) climate outdoors, urban heat islands are influencing the energy requirements and thermal conditions inside the buildings.While the first part of the book focuses on the interwar period in Europe, the publication’s second part considers examples from all over the globe, tracing the growing significance of ecological thinking for the design of urban environments.

While 20th century architecture learned to control the climate of a building, the architecture of the 21st century needs to learn to cope with the climate of cities. Problems such as urban heat and air pollution need to be included in planning and design. Based on empirical realities in Cairo, Chongqing, Geneva and Santiago de Chile, the book underlines that the materiality and social practices attached to room heating, compound greening, street alignment or climate policies together form the tissue for contemporary urban climates. It interweaves socio-cultural with meteorological data and pioneers the new concept of "thermal governance" by linking architectural and technological as well as legal and economic dimensions of climate control in urban environments.

Second and revised editionThe publication rethinks climate control – a key concern of the discipline of architecture – through the lens of city climate phenomena over the course of the 20th century. Based on a history of climate control on urban scales, it promotes the integration of indoors and outdoors in order to reduce environmental and thermal loads in cities. Just as heating and cooling practices inside the buildings are affecting the (urban) climate outdoors, urban heat islands are influencing the energy requirements and thermal conditions inside the buildings.While the first part of the book focuses on the interwar period in Europe, the publication’s second part considers examples from all over the globe, tracing the growing significance of ecological thinking for the design of urban environments. Main outcome of a six-years research project on architecture and urban climate funded by the Swiss National Science FoundationNew and revised edition KLIMA POLIS: a series highlighting design-driven approaches to urban climates across the globe

Portuguese-born Mozambican architect Amâncio “Pancho” Guedes (1925–2015) designed several hundred buildings that became icons of late-colonial African modernism. His expressive design language, the Stiloguedes, is even recognised as a distinct style in its own right.Relational Modernities focuses on Guedes’s lesser-known work: the quieter, more austere buildings he designed for Swiss and British Protestant missionary societies in the then-Portuguese-ruled Mozambique: schools, student dormitories, and community centres. Architectural historian Silvia Balzan situates them within the unequal society and politics of the country in the later stages of colonial rule. She demonstrates how Guedes and the missionary societies created alliances and spaces that were inevitably intertwined with colonial structures, yet at the same time already open to a postcolonial future. As “relational modernity,” Guedes’s hybrid practice dissolved dichotomies between the colonizers and the colonized, the secular and the religious, Western modernity and Indigenous African culture.Silvia Balzan reexamines Guedes’s legacy beyond stylistic eccentricity or missionary charity and assesses the sociopolitical and cultural significance of the buildings themselves, which continue to shape Mozambicans’ everyday lives to this day.