How Heat Got Out of Hand (PhD Thesis)
Doctoral thesis. (2022–). Dissertation tentative title: ”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
This thesis investigates how architecture and the relationship with domestic heat evolved in Helsinki between the 1870s and 1970s. It examines three case studies from distinct historical moments, each representing a particular thermoculture — a specific way of relating to heat. These thermocultures are presented by tracing the sequence from fuel source to exhaust through the act of domestic heating. Architecture is approached as the spatial, material, and infrastructural medium that both supports and mediates this relationship. Each case centres on an apartment building, treated as a kind of material site through which this relationship can be understood.
By approaching architecture through the concept of thermocultures, the thesis introduces a new interpretive framework for understanding architectural history in relation to heat. It defines the thermocultural process as the sequence connecting fuel, combustion, heat distribution, comfort, and exhaust, and uses this to trace dependencies and causalities within each case. Once established, this process-based framework allows for comparison across historical periods, revealing what changed and what was compromised. Rather than presenting a linear story of either progression or regression, it aims to show what forms of thermal culture were sustained or displaced. Helsinki provides a particularly instructive context: its rapid urbanisation and northern climate made heating an existential concern, while its position as a harbour city in a forest-rich country placed it at the intersection of domestic and imported fuels. Like many Nordic cities, it has developed a culture of maintaining exceptionally warm interiors during the heating season.
Relying on extensive archival research, the thesis traces the architectural entanglements of fuel, its flow, heating, comfort, and exhaust, and demonstrates that understanding the connections between them historically, for good and for bad, is vital in accounting for architecture’s role on a societal level. It also asks whether thermocultures shaped during the era of cheap fossil fuels continue to inform how heating is understood and designed today.
The thesis shows that during the first half of the 20th century, as fossil-fuelled central heating became widespread, its adoption was not always driven by public demand but often by the promotional efforts of the building and engineering industries. From the perspective of contemporary comfort science, much of the resistance dismissed at the time as irrational, reflected genuine embodied discomforts that the industry refused to acknowledge. The thesis also introduces the concept of comfort inflation to describe how, as heating systems evolved, manual control and bodily adaptation were gradually replaced by technological automation, a transformation that continues to shape how comfort is defined and pursued today.