A few months ago, one of my old professors from architecture school — Phu Hoang — reached out to me through this blog. That’s one of the benefits of writing publicly — it becomes your calling card. In this case, it had been at least 16 years since I was in his design studio.

We connected over a call. He told me about his and Rachely’s firm, MODU Architecture. And he let me know that he’s no longer teaching at Penn. He is now the Head of Architecture of the Knowlton School at Ohio State University.

Then, following the call, he was kind enough to send me a copy of his new book, Field Guide to Indoor Urbanism:

The typical approach to modern building design is to have clearly defined boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. The outside is the outside. And the inside is a climate-controlled space that is, for the most part, sealed to the outside.

Most of us spend the vast majority of our lives in these latter spaces. In fact, since the advent of modernism and the International Style over a century ago, the general idea has been that these spaces can and should be mostly the same.

HVAC systems make it so that you don’t really need to worry about context or the environment. What works in Toronto can work in Phoenix. You just need to dial up your cooling loads.

This is so much the case that whenever I’m in a city with a fairly benign climate, such as somewhere in California, I always find myself fascinated by the fluidity between interior and exterior spaces. It’s such a foreign concept to me that it stands out: “Wait, how is this not sealed?

Indoor urbanism, on the other hand, makes the argument that this binary approach is the wrong way to think about spaces. Here’s an excerpt from a recent Metropolis article about MODU:

They call this approach “indoor urbanism,” which privileges the blurred boundary between what has traditionally been considered interior space and exterior space. This in-between space–straddling open and closed, artificial and natural–deserves architects’ keen attention, especially as the planet warms. “Indoor urbanism recognizes that architecture and cities are situated on an environmental continuum, as a matter of degrees rather than absolutes,” write Hoang and Rotem in Field Guide.

Examples of this thinking can be found throughout their work. This project in Jackson, Wyoming is one of my favorites both because I love Jackson and because it’s a cold and snowy place. And yet, even in this climate zone, their design includes for several “semi-exterior areas” that serve to connect you to nature.

This is a decidedly different way to think about architecture and urbanism. But as our climate crisis intensifies, it’s only going to become more relevant.