Criticism by design: drawing, wearing, weathering

摘要

Weather has become increasingly politicised precisely because it is an effective medium to link the particular and everyday to large-scale forces in the social and physical world. The weather, and its relationship to architecture, has assumed added significance since the mid-twentieth century because of changing attitudes to the environment, informed by publicity given to varied events such as military campaigns and climate change by human action. The principle that weather is a resource to be exploited led to its deployment as a military weapon in the second half of the twentieth century. For example, the 1940s' discovery that pure silver iodine sprinkled into clouds stimulates precipitation encouraged the US military to employ 'cloud seeding,' as in a CIA plan to destabilise the Cuban economy by seeding clouds before they reached the Cuban sugar crop. In response to such tactics, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3264 in December, 1974, which led to the 'Prohibition of action to influence the environment and climate for military and other purposes compatible with the maintenance of international security, human well-being and health'.