Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Comfort is one of the most ambiguous and contextual constructs in architecture. Throughout the history it has been associated with physical well-being, convenience, and ease, as well as certain amenities and/or habitability in a domestic environment. Contemporary understanding of comfort places a strong emphasis on controlling the physical environment, and dismisses its cognitive, social, psychological, and emotional aspects, which transcend its sensory perceptions. Considered as the spatial organization to attain privacy, security, comfort, and domesticity, “home” connotes both the tangible meaning of a place and the intangible sense of existence. Consequently, the concepts of comfort and home are used somehow synonymously and interchangeably. As a result of this coupling the extensive vocabulary of comfort best represents amenities, conveniences, and decencies in the domestic environment. Given such scope, it is no coincidence that the idea of comfort and its implements defined a contextually progressive domesticity and material culture. The present study discloses the connections between implements of comfort in architecture as transient consumables and the changing material culture of the twentieth century. With special emphasis on the pursue of comfort within the domestic environment, the study traces these connections through an archival research of well-known architecture periodicals that are published between early twentieth century and the present day. The selected period presents the changing political, economic, social, and technological drivers that targeted improvement in the domestic environment, revealing how the term “comfort” was instrumentalized via its various implements as the means to create new material cultures.