Peter Sloterdijk links a growing distrust of the surrounding environment to a rising impulse toward internalization. Pollution, climate change, and other threats push people to seek greater control and comfort through technologies that shape architectural spaces. In his view, the atmosphere we inhabit today emerges from a design that mirrors a shifting society. It is something that can be influenced, managed, and stored almost like a laboratory product. The interior, the space people inhabit, is not just equipped with technology; it acts as a remarkable climate machine, a large air sculpture through which inhabitants move, almost like a breathable installation.
The idea moves from abstraction into practice as human beings become not only users but owners and masters of climate within built environments, a concept noted by scholars in parallel discussions about reality and perception.
So where might the origin of this notion be traced?
A clear milestone appears with the 1906 patent by American inventor Willis H. Carrier, who introduced a method to control humidity in living spaces. Carrier’s breakthrough opened a path for the marketing of indoor air conditioning products and fundamentally reshaped how people experience temperature and moisture indoors. The result was a new capability: to isolate occupants from the disturbances of the external world through engineered climate control.
From that moment, architects gained the ability to move, mix, and alter the air that is breathed, bestowing air with new properties that informed a revised understanding of architectural spaces as environments rather than mere volumes.
One striking example of forward thinking is Winterhouse, created in 2002 by architects Jean Gille Decosterd and Philippe Rahm. This project resembled an environmental simulation chamber drawn from scientific contexts, built to reproduce particular conditions in a controlled setting. Commissioned to house artist Fabrice Hybert, the project reimagined a French Atlantic coast site as a Tahitian landscape. It featured deciduous plants without sap in winter and tropical species thriving in summer, with strong fragrances replacing seasonal norms.
The dwelling was planned on the Vendée countryside near a small river, deliberately distant from other homes. It functioned as a continuous time delay, a residence living with jet lag, where spatial quality extended beyond dimensions and visuals to influence the invisible aspects of light, its streams, intensities, and spectral components. Changes in light speed were part of the design, alongside humidity and temperature management.
During winter, for example, with exterior temperatures around five degrees, interior heating could rise to twenty degrees while humidity hovered at fifty percent. In this setting, the Vendée home transformed into a southern or tropical climate according to occupant preference. The designers developed an aerial architecture that was invisible yet physically altered, offering a thermally diverse topography that distributed varying uses according to chosen temperatures for each area.
In this framework, Sloterdijk’s ideas imply that contemporary architecture serves as the design project for the air that surrounds people, rather than solely shaping space through geometry. From Los Angeles to Tokyo, Dubai to Sydney, a globalized world breathes an ever more synthesized, biased, and dizzying air, enveloping occupants in a carefully crafted, fragrant atmosphere.
These thoughts reflect a broader dialogue about climate, space, and perception that continues to influence practitioners and scholars in architecture today, illustrating how air and environment shape human experience on multiple scales.
Luis Navarro works as an architect and professor at the University of Alicante, contributing to this evolving discourse with insights into how built environments interact with climate and perception.