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“What could a utopic architecture be, if architecture remains grounded in the spatial alone? How can architecture open itself up to the temporal movements that are somehow still beyond its domain?”1 At the beginning of the 1960s Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested distinguishing between ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ societies in order avoid judgemental characterisations that separate supposedly ‘a-historic peoples’ that attempt to ‘annul the effect that historical factors could have on their balance and their continuity’ from those peoples that ‘decisively internalise historical growth in order to make it into the motor of their development.’2 According to this definition it seems logical to describe modern Western states and their populations as ‘hot societies’, after all, climate change appears to reveal just how incompetent these societies are as regards reversing their motor of development that is constantly focussed on acceleration and growth.
Jan Assmann has undertaken an important differentiation of this concept. Lévi-Strauss’ definition assumes that a ‘cold society’ can develop into a ‘hot’ one, but not the other way around, as it is taken for granted that the invention of written and visual media, which make it possible to exteriorise knowledge of the environment and therefore to disseminate it rapidly, cannot be forgotten. Assmann, however, points out that there have been both highly developed cultures of writing unfamiliar with any motors of progress (for example ancient Egypt), as well as ‘cold’ institutions such as the Church or the military which can ‘freeze’ social change in ‘hot societies’. For him cold and heat are to be understood as 'cultural options which at any time exist independently of writing, calendars, technology and rule’.3 Although every society has a tendency towards the ‘hot’ or the ‘cold’ pole, it can avail of ‘cooling and heating systems’, with which it can shape its existence and development.
Vienna's St. Stephen Cathedral, Photo: Lisa Schmidt-Colinet
IKA S2020
