How Heat Got Out of Hand (PhD Thesis)

Doctoral thesis (2022–2026). ”How Heat Got Out of Hand – The Architecture of Thermocultures, Helsinki Case Studies 1870s-1970s”

Dissertation advisors: Prof. Barnabas Calder, Dr Ranald Lawrence, Prof Panu Savolainen. Thesis defense on 12.6.2026 with Prof. Edward Denison as the opponent.

This dissertation argues that heat — its extraction, flow, distribution and dissipation — has always required an architecture. Tracing the thermocultural process across three Helsinki apartment buildings between the 1870s and 1970s, it shows that fuel extraction, fuel flow, heating, warmth and exhaust are not merely technical operations but the spatial and material components of a way of relating to heat, and that understanding their architecture is a necessary condition for understanding how modern thermal culture was built, and how it got out of hand.

The argument is developed through three case studies, each representing a distinct thermoculture: birch-fuelled stove heating in the late nineteenth century, coke-fuelled central heating in the interwar period, and oil and coal-fine-fuelled district heating in the postwar decades. Helsinki provides an instructive context, as its northern climate made heating an existential concern, its position as a harbour city at the edge of boreal forests placed it at the intersection of domestic and imported fuels, and its rapid urbanisation meant that distinct thermocultures emerged within a remarkably short period. These three cases also span a period of profound geopolitical reorientation from western trade integration to Soviet entanglement, and that shift is not invisible in the thermocultures that emerged.

The thesis finds that the transition to fossil-fuelled heating was not always driven by popular demand but engineered by industry, by capital, and by an architectural profession increasingly aligned with both. Resistance to central heating, dismissed at the time as conservatism or ignorance, turns out on closer inspection to reflect genuine and sophisticated embodied knowledge that the new systems could not accommodate. As the fuel chain lengthened and abstracted, the architecture of heating became simultaneously more powerful and less legible, more total and less controllable: heat got out of hand.