The climate as a determining factor in architecture, our relationship with our physical and natural surroundings and how environment and place influence society and, therefore, its architecture, have been the subject of speculation since ancient Greece.
Social awareness of the need to respect the environment and our surroundings has grown over the past two decades, adding concepts such as sustainability and integration to everyday language and fostering a critical reading of architecture in which these aspects have acquired a hazy value, used in some cases to justify works of poor architectural quality.

Although Montesquieu, following the Enlightenment theory of ‘climates’, was already saying that different needs in different climates have given rise to different ways of life and these, in turn, to different kinds of law, architecture finds itself more concerned with responding to recognisable building types than to climate conditions. This distancing of itself from place became even more radical, if that were possible, with the Modern Movement, as architecture as an object decided according to the architect’s intentions prevailed over climate factors, which were to be solved by technology.

In this issue we return to the relationship between architecture and its surroundings, in this case from the point of view of the climate. Having detached ourselves from the last traces of the Modern Movement, architecture is responding to place, confronting extreme and mild climates with the same creative intensity.

If Van Gameren and Mastenbroek’s embassy in Addis Ababa speaks of a pleasant relationship with arid surroundings, Moita’s house in Manaus throws down the gauntlet to habitability in the jungle and Jarmund/Vigsnæs’ Svalbard University building protects itself from difficult climate conditions, the responses are equally interesting in other, apparently less complex situations. Manuel de las Casas’ house in the city centre of Toledo takes in and masters the peculiarities of the continental climate and while Siza Vieira’s Casa Tóló has fun with a series of situations, Ando’s Chichu museum hides itself, avoiding any confrontation with its surroundings. The works presented here therefore offer a gamut of dialogues between architecture and climate conditions in a wide variety of languages.