Les éléments enchaînés

Abstract

The article focus on an architectural design: a house designed to provide a comfortable climate for human bodies—in a region where heat, humidity and typhoons reign—at a lower energy cost, thanks to a “natural air-conditioning” system. Based on an ethnography carried out on the small Japanese island of Miyakojima, where this eco-house has been set up as a model, the analysis endeavors to bring out the regimes of relation to the elements of the climate that this new form of habitat commands. Put into perspective with other regimes that previously existed on the island, it is then possible to identify two relationships to the elements: one in the mode of conditioning, the other in the mode of affect, which are two very different ways of inhabiting the world(s).

Keywords

• climate elements
• affect
• conditioning
• dwelling
• smart