The project is interested in the house as a mediator between bodies and the environment. The project explores the social and architectural stigmas that surround the notion of ‘comfort.’

In response to the professional drive towards technological optimisation to reduce domestic emissions, the project contends that comfort cannot be isolated purely as a physiological requirement. Rather, it must be considered in relation to its cultural and social context. Any attempts to amend the ways people make themselves comfortable must simultaneously seek to amend relationships with everyday domestic spaces and objects.

Drawing from the local history of experimental ‘Houses of Tomorrow’, a cul-de-sac of three houses is proposed at the edge of Palm Springs. Each house captures an alternative, future view of the home: the primitivist, the technological optimist and the comfort skeptic. Everyday domestic conventions are dismantled to suit individual attitudes to comfort in the context of the desert climate. This exposes the power of these conventions in determining an understanding of what is comfortable and safe. A definitive solution to the issue of climate change and the home is intentionally avoided. Instead, multiple futures hold the architect responsible for new ideas about what it means to be ‘at home.’