From Comfort to Life Habits. Qualitative Approaches to Comfort Research on Domestic Space in the Colombian Andean Tropics

Abstract

Comfort concept refers to the physical, psychological, and sociological conditions of inhabited space, mainly studied from its physical components with quantitative variables, thereon limiting the scope of qualitative variables from their life habits dimension as an existential circumstance—broad, subjective, continuous, and indeterminate. Traditional approaches to comfort allow partial readings of specific conditions of domestic space, ignoring complex relationships between architecture, culture, and place, specifically in tropical and mountainous contexts, such as the case of the Aburá Valley. This is a qualitative study with a descriptive, analytical, and comparative approach of four dwellings located in the Colombian Andean tropics, looking at comfort and habits of domestic life that allowed understanding the subordination of the former to specific daily situations of life in households, and the latter associated with events woven into a continuous, non-linear network of the domestic day. Particular conditions of each home were identified in their relationships with landscape, climate, and topography, manifested in singular domestic life habits despite their locations within the same territorial entity, while adding an unprecedented vision to comfort studies in the Andean tropics and/or the conscious decision of inhabitants to renounce comfort in favor of their perceptions of security, identity, or culture.