According to the International Energy Agency, we are facing “an energy crisis that is truly global”, for the first time (1). The prices for natural gas, oil and electricity have reached record highs (autumn 2023). On the other hand, as fossil fuels become more and more scarce, their extraction has ever more detrimental consequences for the environment and climate change. However, winter still comes each year and we do have to warm up.

Radiant House examines the role of insulation in our living environments. How to reduce energy consumption, how to protect and concentrate energy, to keep the energy in the room; how to create anti-conductive, warm, welcoming and generous spaces?

The exploration goes beyond the technical treatment of building materials and considers their socio-cultural interdependencies and potential for artistic expression. What is the relationship between warmth and community in an environment of architectural production that seems to be in the firm grip of pastel-colored styropor panels when it comes to insulating rooms? As if, at the moment, the only solution at hand was to glue never possibly degradable plastic sheets in a hopeless effort to maintain, to sustain warm climates inside – at the cost of petroleum-ruined climates outside (2). Yet, what other materials insulate? Insulation is a matter of storing air: the lightest and easiest of all (efforts) can be achieved by decomposable, abundant resources such as straw, wool, clay bricks…

By using materials such as felt and bricks, which are both culturally and materially complex, we delve into the metaphysical levels of our protective shell (3). The work investigates ecologically and socially compatible heating and insulation methods. The starting points are vernacular and nomadic, drop-out and protest architectures. Energy efficiency can be found where there is a high degree of adaptability, flexibility and limited access to resources. An important energy source to heat spaces are bodies that produce heat through movement and pass it on through convection (bodies touching air), conduction (bodies touching each other) and radiation (bodies sending heat waves through space). This way of looking at it is opposed to insulating singular apartments and isolating their inhabitants. Loneliness has a negative impact on generating energy efficient indoor climates. Heat is not just a temperature – it is a tangible property that can be shaped sculpturally, experienced sensually and shared mutually, growing with the numbers of its recipients.

Radiant House’s multiple spatial interventions that were installed in the foyer of Kunstmuseum Bochum create a network of heat flows to punctually warm human bodies in the spacious and open ground floor spaces of the brutalist architecture from the 1980s. The installation is supported by the modular exhibition infrastructure designed by the architects Jørgen Bo und Vilhelm Wohlert. Like the exhibition modules offer an infrastructure for display, Radiant House conceives infrastructures of heat supply and wellbeing, through a series of off-grid interventions. A solar heat collector on the glass facade of the building, inspired by the US-American dropout movement of the 70s/80s with a new topicality through survivalist DIY physics on youtube, collects heat directly from the sun as our supreme source of heat. Behind the eiderdown blanket hanging in the museum’s window, which represents a fictitious thermal image of our ideal system, the heat waves are absorbed inside the sculptural installation by a black surface, heating up air in black pipes. The hot air is channeled through well-insulated pipes via fans powered by small camping solar cells into a brick bench – a thermal mass that stores heat, thus emitting it over a more constant period of time than the limited moments in which the sun shines. Two low (1,8m) thermal caps above seating areas keep the warm air from dispersing in a chimney effect along the three-story air space in the foyer towards the museum roof. Thermal blankets on one of the tables in the museum café and on a kotatsu table for the pedagogic programme of the museum store the collective heat of the lower body parts under the table and wool insulations on the window edges of the museum’s glass facade break the thermal bridges towards the outside. So far in theory.

The museum serves as an in-vivo laboratory for testing the functionality and acceptance of experimental heating systems. The work visualizes a very contextual approach, which is also didactic in a certain way, because it tries to explain itself and be legible. Thermometers are installed at critical points, which document the process – the success or failure of the work – live for the visitors. Radiant House bridges an approach between functional requirements and an artwork with the character of a discursive sculpture. Through the time of its installation it was both trying to produce and convey learnings regarding thermodynamics and heating cultures.

Heat, as a concentration of energy, is subject to the second law of thermodynamics, always striving to disperse. Vilem Flusser applies this theorem to data that tries to disperse as much as possible. Only by organizing and concentrating does energy become heat and data become information. This concentration of warmth, as well as the concentration of knowledge about practices of sustainable heating into a meaningful and inspiring distill that goes beyond the technical, should be the outcome of our work.

Can we do anything differently without losing our warmth and comfort, while bound to the infrastructures at hand?