ACT5: The Invisible – Dean’s Talk with Paul Bouet: Air-Conditioning the Sahara: A History of Environmental Architecture
Author: Parity Group
Tags: #Parity Talks VIII
In the mid-1950s, massive reserves of fossil fuels were discovered in the Sahara, coinciding with the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. This led the French colonizers to try to control and extract these strategic resources by creating industrial settlements in the desert. Architects, engineers, urban planners, scientists, medical doctors, military staff, policymakers, and industrialists participated in this endeavor. Among the many challenges faced by the colonizer, the most crucial one was the extremely hot and arid desert climate, which the French attempted to adapt to by developing strategies for air-conditioning buildings and cities. Bouet’s project investigates both the history and the legacy of this attempt, which left traces in the African desert, in practices of European architecture and thermal engineering, and in the planet’s atmosphere.
Dr. Paul Bouet is the first Egon Eiermann Postdoctoral Fellow at the gta institute. He is an architectural and environmental historian, holding master’s degrees in architecture from ENSA Paris-Belleville (2012) and in the history of science and technology from EHESS (2017), and a PhD in architecture from Université Gustave Eiffel (2022). His work investigates the cross histories of architecture and the environment in the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on research about adaptation to climate, experiments with alternative energies, the emergence of environmentalist theories, the aesthetics of energy devices, and colonial and postcolonial circulations of technologies and knowledge. He lectures at ENSA Paris-Est and Haute école d’ingénierie et d’architecture Fribourg.