On Cloud Studies

Abstract

Suspend your disbelief for a second, and ask yourself: what is architectural about clouds? For many researchers, practitioners and students of the field, a concern with the architectural is a concern with stable forms, organised layouts, inert materials, and recognisable cultural expressions. Yet in recent decades, relational and process-oriented approaches to analysing ‘the social’ have advanced architectural concerns with intensities of human and nonhuman flows, regulating energy exchanges and microclimatic milieux, and territorialising space through built enclosures and envelopes. The notion of flows in architecture is not only a philosophical category but a practical and programmatic one.