Architecture and Climatic Power: Control Valves, Fluid Territories, and Circulation in the Globalizing China, 1919–1995

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Architecture

First Advisor

Peters, John

Abstract

This dissertation explores the entanglement of environmental control, architectural form, and globalization, focusing on 20th century technological and ideological exchanges between the United States and China. Unlike existing scholarship that examines technological systems from an external perspective through architecture, this study adopts an internal approach, using the control valve as a research and narrative vessel to analyze architecture through machines. Valves are openings in conduits that regulate the passage of gases or fluids, permitting only unidirectional flow. Historically functioning as doors, they assume roles once held by architectural openings like doors and windows. When connected to sensors like thermostats, valves become control valves—junctions where information wires and environmental conduits intersect. Suspended between the conceptual and the material, control valves translate environmental data into material forces. Valving is a territorial act. By sorting flows, regulating movement, and permitting only the qualified to pass, valves create information and energy differentials, distinguishing interior from exterior, system from environment, and advantage from disadvantage. Positioned with globalization, this dissertation argues that control valves in air-conditioning systems construct an airscape at the planetary scale. It demonstrates that global flows of information, ideas, money, and materials possess an atmospheric dimension. The airscape, examined through a topological lens, encompasses not only manufactured indoor weather but also varying intensities of control, degrees of entanglement, and unintended environmental consequences produced by transnational organization. This airscape implies a different kind of territory—one predicated on regulated fluidity rather than fixed solidity. Here, infrastructure itself constitutes the territory, as conduits regulating flows define its expanse and produce its dynamic boundaries through valving. This dissertation captures the interplay between the conceptual and the material through its structure. Following Carrier Corporation’s Mechanical Weather Men—control valves such as the dew-point thermostat and the direct-acting steam valve—Chapter 1 and 2 discuss how material valves conceptualize. Examining Carrier’s involvement with thermal comfort research since 1919 and its role in the global circulation of money and goods from the 1930s, these chapters demonstrate that architectural concepts are ecological—comfort requires control valves, and circulation depends on conduits. Highlighting Buckminster Fuller’s environmental valving, Chapter 3 and 4 examine how conceptual valves materialize. Contrary to readings that emphasize Fuller’s visionary side, these chapters argue that his environmental valving articulates the technical reality of architecture, revealing a fundamental shift in interior generation. Through Fuller’s engagement with China’s Special Economic Zones between 1979 and 1989, they contend that interiors are not solely defined by architectural enclosures but by environmental valves that must be turned off and on. This dissertation introduces the concept of climatic power, which can be defined through Foucault’s theory of power as a series of technologies and strategies used to management climate. By absorbing meteorological phenomena and converting weather into repeatable industrial processes, air-conditioning became a form of climatic power, standardizing not only hygroscopic products but also breathing, metabolism, and thermal practices. Climatic power can also be understood through water. Unlike hydropower, which mobilizes, climatic power enables. It is inseparable from fossil-fuel-driven machines such as the steam engine, which absorbs planetary hydrological cycles, channeling rivers through pipes while mitigating weather disruptions that once affected production. By integrating planetary hydrological and atmospheric cycles, climatic power inverts cosmologies and liquefies land, making production, cultures, and architecture less dependent on traditional notions of site or place. With climatic power, the site moves to the architecture rather than the other way around. Long entangled with biopower and geopower, climatic power has been harnessed by extrastate actors for extraction, expansion, and exclusion. This dissertation concludes by addressing the inhuman side of climatic power. Embodied by frictions and waste heat, climatic power belongs not only to human institutions but also to the atmosphere. This inhuman climatic power invites further inquiry into heat design, techno-diversity, and infrastructural commons—subjects warranting deeper exploration by historians, theorists, and designers.

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