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The legacy of a temperate hegemony continues to influence how the tropical is perceived: largely as an exotic paradise or pestilence-ridden landscape. Architectural discourse has long deemed the equator a condition to be tempered; an atmospheric problem that requires a temperate fix. Contemporary architectural responses that center on performance and efficiency improvements continue to purvey these prejudices as a foundation of their discourse, or, simply, to import temperate strategies as an atmospheric replacement to the equatorial. The work documented here investigates a theory of spatial depth and climatic gradient as key to developing buildings for the rapidly densifying urban equator.