Weather can be seen and felt at a particular time and place, but climate cannot be directly perceived. Climate is an abstraction averaged over many years and across a whole region. The two differ in duration and scale, so designing for lived, everyday experience means attending to weather, not only to climate.
A building is not made by its designer alone: the weather also shapes how it is designed, built and used. It works in an ongoing creative dialogue with the architect and the people who occupy the building, so its effects are part of the work, not just damage done to it.
Discussions of buildings and the environment usually split into technical performance on one side and feeling and meaning on the other. Treating them together shows that how a building handles rain, sun and wind is also part of how it is experienced and what it means.
How people build for weather depends on how their society thinks about weather at the time, and those attitudes shift in the arts, sciences and everyday life. So relations to weather should not be studied in isolation from cultural and social influences. Seeing this history makes it possible to judge today's responses to climate change critically rather than taking them as purely technical.