ABSTRACT
Healthy housing and indoor climate have traditionally been fields of research within the natural and medical sciences. However, indoor environments also represent a crucial and undervalued component of architectural quality, concerning residents’ wellbeing and quality of life. This omnipresent and intimate aspect of architecture is usually invisible and unarticulated, yet associated conditions and potential health risks can have significant consequences for people’s everyday lives. Architectural anthropology, we argue, can help qualify our understanding of indoor environments by exploring the complex, multisensory entanglements between people, materials, and meanings through the micro-scales of everyday life. Entanglements, contingent on microorganisms and particles, and interrelated across domestic boundaries as parts of wider ecologies. This chapter presents two empirical studies: (1) a study of problems with mould growth in eleven public housing estates and the relationship between housing, indoor environment, everyday practices, politics, and public health; and (2) a mixed-method study of the indoor climate consequences of energy renovation with a focus on perceived indoor climate and everyday practices. These studies illustrate how architectural-anthropological explorations of people’s experiences and everyday practices can challenge the otherwise quantitative fields of healthy housing and indoor climate, as well as help bring architectural attention to the fields.
