Public defence, Architecture, landscape and urbanism, MSc Frans Saraste

Title of the thesis: How Heat Got Out of Hand – The Architecture of Thermocultures, Helsinki Case Studies 1870s-1970s

Thesis defender: Frans Saraste
Opponent: Prof. Edward Denison, University College London, UK
Custos: Prof. Panu Savolainen, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture

Every winter, Finnish homes are commonly heated to 23°C — five degrees above the World Health Organization's recommended minimum. How did this happen, and what role did architecture play in getting us here?

This doctoral thesis traces the history of domestic heating in Helsinki across a century of transformation, following three apartment buildings from the 1880s to the 1960s. Each building is a part of a distinct heating culture: birch-fuelled tiled stoves, coke-fired central heating, and oil and coal-fines-powered district heating. By tracking how fuel was sourced, transported, burned, and exhausted in each case, the thesis shows how architecture both shaped and was shaped by changing relations to heat.

The research introduces the concept of the thermocultural process to describe the chain connecting fuel extraction to the sensation of warmth and the dispersal of exhaust. It shows that Helsinki's shift toward fossil-fuelled heating was not simply a story of progress or popular demand. It was engineered by industry and capital, promoted by architects and engineers, and accompanied by genuine losses: in user control, thermal variety, food storage, and legibility of energy use. Resistance to new heating and ventilation technologies, dismissed at the time as ignorance or sentimentality, turn out, on closer inspection, to reflect real experiences that neither the new systems nor the science of the time could adequately account for.

The thesis proposes 'comfort inflation' to describe the outcome: indoor temperatures have risen while the actual quality of thermal experience may not have improved proportionally but require ever greater energy inputs to sustain. The findings are directly relevant to current debates on building renovation, heating transitions, and energy resilience. Understanding how today's energy-intensive thermoculture was constructed, one historical layer at a time, is a necessary step toward designing architecture that uses less energy, and engages its users more meaningfully in the process.

Welcome!

Keywords: Thermocultures, thermal culture, comfort inflation, comfort studies, energyscape, energy humanities, infrastructure studies, fuel, fuel supply chains, fossil fuels, fuel infrastructure, exhaust, domestic heating, central heating, district heating, stove heating, heating technologies, apartment buildings, housing architecture, architectural history, environmental history of architecture, twentieth-century architecture, Nordic architecture, Helsinki

Thesis available for public display 7 days prior to the defence at Aalto University's public display page. 

Contact: frans.saraste@aalto.fi, +358400253536, https://www.linkedin.com/in/frans-saraste-9825158a/