Daniel A. Barber

Daniel A. Barber is an architectural historian. His research and teaching are organized around two trajectories: the first involves an archivally-rich environmental history of architecture. His books, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton UP 2020) and A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (Oxford UP 2016) place climate and energy at the center of architectural narratives, offering a history with searing relevance to contemporary challenges. The second trajectory involves collaboratively developing concepts and theories to encourage architects and students to reconsider their aspirations in the face of the climate emergency – as in his essay “After Comfort” (Log 49, 2019) and the ongoing series on Accumulation that Daniel co-edits for e-flux architecture. His Guggenheim project, Thermal Practices, brings these trajectories together, speculating on how we might design and live in buildings after fossil-fuels are no longer viable – i.e., right now! Daniel was recently a research fellow at the Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Universität Heidelberg. He has taught at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton and was Associate Professor of Architecture a the University of Pennsylvania for the last decade. After his Guggenheim Fellowship, he will begin a position as Professor of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), working with colleagues to reshape architecture education with a focus on climate justice.