Welcome to Weathered
The winter solstice occurred at 9:59 AM in Chicago
It’s December 21st, the shortest day of the year for Earth’s northern hemisphere and our astronomical first day of winter. There are 89 days until Spring.
In Chicago, where I currently live, winter is not an exceptional time. The season never takes us by surprise; unlike other entities that suck the blood from your face, it needs no invitation to enter. Rather, winter is an accepted condition—one that stretches from October through sometime in mid-May—marked by an endless parade of polar vortex after polar vortex, huddled amongst groups of strangers underneath feckless heat lamps at elevated train stations. AJ Aaronstein wrote so tenderly, in 2013, about those ubiquitous heat lamps for the Paris Review, remarking on what they signify to swaddled city-dwellers, and the meaning behind their ineffectiveness:
“..their constant lack of fulfilling our desire for warmth, the lamps serve as a perfect metaphor for the way that Lacan describes love. If the cold has anything to teach us from a psychoanalytic perspective, it relates to the doomed desire for the warmth that we provide each other.
For Lacan, to hold out the hope of love is to chase an elusive, imaginary projection of one’s own ego. Love is inherently narcissistic: the result of our constant desire to locate ourselves in the desire of another person…In other words, the reason it’s even possible for us to find someone to love comes from a constant effort to find ourselves out there in the world…
Here’s the cruel part. The other—the one we love—always recedes in front of us…The fantasy of connection, forever as out of reach as the heat from a heat lamp on a five-degree day in Chicago in February, proves the cause of most psychosis. In Lacan’s words: ‘Passionate love, as we concretely live it, [is] a sort of psychological catastrophe.’”
In some ways, this metaphor also extends to ourselves within winter’s accepted condition. In the winter we attempt to locate that part of ourselves that exists so purely in the summertime when we feel free, whether that sensation of freedom comes from riding a bicycle bare-legged or from a workplace ‘summer hours’ policy that affords its employees Fridays away from the office. Outdoors we can gather more freely, away from indoor pandemic anxiety; the long daylight gives us more time to run errands and to see the ones we love. “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer,” said the notoriously optimistic Albert Camus, on your co-worker’s coffee mug. Living through change, the relentless hammering of shifting daylight, compounding forces of dormancy and decay while attempting to locate this ‘invincible summer’-self in only nine hours of daylight and hidden beneath sweaters can, actually, become a psychological catastrophe. The more we try to find our summer selves, the further that self recedes.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t try. After all, something important happens to ourselves in seasonality; something that is deeply linked to our environment. It might not be our summer selves, but it is something else, entirely new.
Weathered is about this search, an open admittance that our selves—who we are as individuals, as communities—are as much a part of an accepted condition of change as our environments. Change is our only constant; “God is change,” wrote Octavia Butler. What happens to our environments is also what happens to us—a common understanding among public health researchers. This publication was created to explore and reflect upon our often-shifting social and ecological conditions, and to find out just who we are in the midst of it.
Wintertime represents a microcosm of those circumstances, and as an experiment, Weathered tries to help us locate our selves through the built environment within that microcosm, one of darkness, of dormancy—yet also of change.
In the coming weeks, you’ll receive a series of essays by authors around the country who explore the built environment in the wintertime. You’ll read about trains, climate change, making friends in a winter city, shelter, caring for trees, and so much more. It should be noted that, while Weathered is a publication about architecture, the built environment, and landscapes, we feature writers from all genres working in a variety of nonfiction formats, including reported stories, personal essays, lyric essays, and more. Open the field.
Coming up next in Weathered: “Living Room,” by Marianela D’Aprile
Thank you to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for their support of Weathered. Please visit grahamfoundation.org to learn more about their programs and initiatives. We miss spending chilly winter evenings amongst friends at the Madlener House.
It takes a big village to keep architecture writing and criticism alive. Thank you to our paid subscribers for making Weathered possible.
Thanks for the introduction to that great Paris Review piece. Definitely accurate.