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Air conditioning units in Shenyang, China. Photograph: VCG via Getty Images
Once, when I was staying in Houston, Texas, my
host was showing me round her house. It included a mighty fireplace.
“How often does it get cold enough to light a
fire?” I asked, as what little I knew about the city included the fact
that it is mostly hot and humid. Maybe once or twice a year, she
replied, but her husband came from Wisconsin. He liked a log fire. So
they would turn up the air conditioning and light one.
This was climate as television, to be summoned
with the twiddle of a dial, the outcome of a century which started in
1902, when Willis Carrier was simply asked to find a way to prevent heat
and humidity from warping the paper at the Brooklyn printing company
Sackett-Wilhelms. But the air-conditioning that he helped develop has
changed buildings, and the ways they are used, more than any other
invention: more than reinforced concrete, plate glass, safety elevators
or steel frames. Its effects have directed the locations and shapes of
cities. They have been social, cultural and geopolitical.
The shopping mall would have been inconceivable
without air conditioning, as would the deep-plan and glass-walled office
block, as would computer servers. The rise of Hollywood in the 1920s
would have been slowed if, as previously, theatres had needed to close
in hot weather. The expansion of tract housing in postwar suburban
America relied on affordable domestic air conditioning units. A
contemporary museum, such as Tate Modern or Moma, requires a carefully
controlled climate to protect the works of art.
Cities have boomed in places where, previously,
the climate would have held them back. In 1950, 28% of the population of
the US lived in its sunbelt, 40% in 2000. The combined population of
the Gulf cities went from less than 500,000 before 1950 to 20 million
now. Neither the rise of Singapore, nor the exploding cities of China
and India, would have happened in the same way if they had still relied
on punkah fans, shady verandas and afternoon naps.
There are, of course, other factors, such as the
presence of oil reserves in both Houston and the Gulf, but the
mitigation of otherwise unbearable temperatures radically changed the
way the stories of these cities played out. And so, in the 21st century,
we reached the point where a ski-slope with “real” snow could be built
in a Dubai shopping mall and air-conditioned football stadiums could be
planned for the 2022 Qatar World Cup, epics of refrigeration whose USP
was their outrageous – and hitherto unfeasible – inversion of nature.
With air conditioning goes a new kind of
architecture, one in which traditional hot-climate devices such as
porches, cross-ventilation or pools of water, which create both layers
and permeability between inside and out, have given way to sealed boxes.
Persian wind-catching towers, or the fountains of the Alhambra, or the
humble dogtrot house of the southern US, in which living and cooking
quarters are separated by a passage open to the breeze, all proceeded by
negotiation between built fabric and the environment. Now it is a
matter of technological conquest.
Building services – their heating, cooling and
ventilating systems – came to eat up larger proportions of their total
budgets. The people who designed them, services engineers, became
influential if underacknowledged officers in the shaping of cities. By
the 1980s, buildings such as Richard Rogers’ Lloyds building gave formal
expression to the ducts and extracts that until then had been hidden.
In the Die Hard movies they become a crucial setting of suspense and
action, being large enough to accommodate the body of Bruce Willis.
The most significant architectural effect of air
conditioning, however, is in the social spaces it creates. In Houston,
as in most southern American cities, you can progress from your
air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned garage and then in your
air-conditioned car to parking garages, malls and workplaces which are
all, also, air-conditioned. In the city’s downtown area, underpasses and
bridges link different buildings, so that you can go from one to
another without exposing yourself to the exterior. It is possible,
indeed habitual, to spend whole days and weeks in controlled weather.
In the brutal climate of Doha, Qatar (or indeed
in Dubai, Shenzhen or Singapore) similar spaces recur. Buildings which
appear separate from the outside (for the few, that is, who choose to be
outside) are internally fused, a hotel turning into a mall into a food
court into a multiplex via a series of lobbies whose décor of marble,
carpet and timber veneer can’t decide if it is internal or external. The
hierarchies and distinctions of European cities – between buildings and
streets, and between degrees of public and private space – are bypassed
and dissolved.
The architect Rem Koolhaas called this
phenomenon “Junkspace”, a “product of the encounter between escalator
and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock … always
interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits.” In the Gulf and
China as in much of the US, the mall became the principal gathering
place, being a zone where large numbers could comfortably pass their
time, leaving streets to be occupied by air conditioning’s mechanical
ally, the automobile.
The result is a form of sensory deprivation that
almost everyone now accepts without question, in which the active
interplay of body and atmosphere becomes homogenised and passive. The
stimuli of scent, touch, sound and sight are almost entirely at the
discretion of the mall management: “a low grade purgatory”, as Koolhaas
called it, “overripe and undernourishing at the same time … like being
condemned to a perpetual jacuzzi with millions of your best friends.”
There is also an absence of what a European
might consider public space, that is somewhere in principle available to
everyone, open to activities both unprogrammed and not necessarily
retail. It has been observed that the climate-controlled networks of
Houston or Jakarta or Dubai can serve not only to exclude heat and
humidity, but also those considered undesirable or insufficiently
profitable. In such places there is a clear divide, social and often
racial, between those inside the conditioned cocoon and those outside.
The street becomes actively hostile, the effects of weather compounded
by those of motor traffic and indifference to the needs of pedestrians.
Here are the people you don’t see in the malls – the blue-uniformed
migrant workers in the Gulf, the homeless and luckless in America.
Environmentally speaking, air conditioning is
anti-social. It buys its owner comfort at the cost of shifting the
surplus heat somewhere else, on to surrounding streets and ultimately
into the atmosphere of the planet. The night-time temperature of
Phoenix, Arizona, is believed to be increased by one degree or more
by the heat expelled from its air conditioning. This is, you could say,
the perfectly neoliberal technology, based on division and
displacement. According to one theory,
air conditioning helped to elect Ronald Reagan, by attracting
conservatively inclined retirees to the southern states that swung in
his favour.
In pointing out the shortcomings of air
conditioning, it is easy to overlook its achievements, to ask, in the
style of Life of Brian, what it ever did for us. Considerable reductions
in the loss of life through excess heat is one answer. Increased
productivity and economic activity in hot regions of the world is
another. Or better-functioning hospitals and schools. Most of us would
be grateful for its contribution to computing and movies. Few people who
have spent time in hot and humid climates would not sometimes want the
refuge of artificially cooled air.
One defence of air-conditioned cities is that they are more energy-efficient than very cold cities
– Minneapolis, for example – that need to be heated up in winter, and
if the statistics of energy consumption sound terrifying, they can also
be put in perspective. The US expends more energy on air conditioning,
for example, than the whole of Africa does on everything. Then again, it
expends even more energy on hot water, which doesn’t get the same rap.
The question then is not whether to condition
climate, but how. As long ago as the 1940s the Egyptian architect Hassan
Fathy demonstrated, with his village of New Gourna
near Luxor, how traditional techniques of orientation, ventilation,
screening and shading could be revived. Many contemporary architects are
following his lead – the Nigerian Kunlé Adeyemi, for example, whose new
Black Rhino Academy in Tanzania tries to optimise the conditions for its users by finding the best location, environmentally speaking, on its site.
If these principles are now better known, the
challenge remains to expand the village-scale achievements of an
architect like Hassan Fathy to large, fast-growing cities. Addressing
this challenge is the promise of high-profile, government-backed
projects such as Msheireb in Qatar and Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, which
boast of their combinations of old forms – shady courtyards and arcades;
narrow, breezy streets – with solar panel arrays and what Masdar’s
architects, Foster and Partners, call “state-of-the-art technologies”.
There has been some scepticism, about Masdar in
particular, that these projects’ purposes might be more symbolic than
truly environmental. But the places they create are incomparably more
pleasurable than the downtowns, mechanised by cars and air-conditioning,
of the cities in which they are placed. They are, at least, steps
forward in what is an essential task for the 21st century: to develop
new forms of public space in hot climates, not the city-scaled habitable
fridges of the 20th.
This post originally appeared on The Guardian
and was published August 14, 2018.
This article is republished here with permission.
Be a part of the Guardian’s future.
Become a Guardian supporter.
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Discover and capture the best stories on the web
Air conditioning units in Shenyang, China. Photograph: VCG via Getty Images
Once, when I was staying in Houston, Texas, my
host was showing me round her house. It included a mighty fireplace.
“How often does it get cold enough to light a
fire?” I asked, as what little I knew about the city included the fact
that it is mostly hot and humid. Maybe once or twice a year, she
replied, but her husband came from Wisconsin. He liked a log fire. So
they would turn up the air conditioning and light one.
This was climate as television, to be summoned
with the twiddle of a dial, the outcome of a century which started in
1902, when Willis Carrier was simply asked to find a way to prevent heat
and humidity from warping the paper at the Brooklyn printing company
Sackett-Wilhelms. But the air-conditioning that he helped develop has
changed buildings, and the ways they are used, more than any other
invention: more than reinforced concrete, plate glass, safety elevators
or steel frames. Its effects have directed the locations and shapes of
cities. They have been social, cultural and geopolitical.
The shopping mall would have been inconceivable
without air conditioning, as would the deep-plan and glass-walled office
block, as would computer servers. The rise of Hollywood in the 1920s
would have been slowed if, as previously, theatres had needed to close
in hot weather. The expansion of tract housing in postwar suburban
America relied on affordable domestic air conditioning units. A
contemporary museum, such as Tate Modern or Moma, requires a carefully
controlled climate to protect the works of art.
Cities have boomed in places where, previously,
the climate would have held them back. In 1950, 28% of the population of
the US lived in its sunbelt, 40% in 2000. The combined population of
the Gulf cities went from less than 500,000 before 1950 to 20 million
now. Neither the rise of Singapore, nor the exploding cities of China
and India, would have happened in the same way if they had still relied
on punkah fans, shady verandas and afternoon naps.
There are, of course, other factors, such as the
presence of oil reserves in both Houston and the Gulf, but the
mitigation of otherwise unbearable temperatures radically changed the
way the stories of these cities played out. And so, in the 21st century,
we reached the point where a ski-slope with “real” snow could be built
in a Dubai shopping mall and air-conditioned football stadiums could be
planned for the 2022 Qatar World Cup, epics of refrigeration whose USP
was their outrageous – and hitherto unfeasible – inversion of nature.
With air conditioning goes a new kind of
architecture, one in which traditional hot-climate devices such as
porches, cross-ventilation or pools of water, which create both layers
and permeability between inside and out, have given way to sealed boxes.
Persian wind-catching towers, or the fountains of the Alhambra, or the
humble dogtrot house of the southern US, in which living and cooking
quarters are separated by a passage open to the breeze, all proceeded by
negotiation between built fabric and the environment. Now it is a
matter of technological conquest.
Building services – their heating, cooling and
ventilating systems – came to eat up larger proportions of their total
budgets. The people who designed them, services engineers, became
influential if underacknowledged officers in the shaping of cities. By
the 1980s, buildings such as Richard Rogers’ Lloyds building gave formal
expression to the ducts and extracts that until then had been hidden.
In the Die Hard movies they become a crucial setting of suspense and
action, being large enough to accommodate the body of Bruce Willis.
The most significant architectural effect of air
conditioning, however, is in the social spaces it creates. In Houston,
as in most southern American cities, you can progress from your
air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned garage and then in your
air-conditioned car to parking garages, malls and workplaces which are
all, also, air-conditioned. In the city’s downtown area, underpasses and
bridges link different buildings, so that you can go from one to
another without exposing yourself to the exterior. It is possible,
indeed habitual, to spend whole days and weeks in controlled weather.
In the brutal climate of Doha, Qatar (or indeed
in Dubai, Shenzhen or Singapore) similar spaces recur. Buildings which
appear separate from the outside (for the few, that is, who choose to be
outside) are internally fused, a hotel turning into a mall into a food
court into a multiplex via a series of lobbies whose décor of marble,
carpet and timber veneer can’t decide if it is internal or external. The
hierarchies and distinctions of European cities – between buildings and
streets, and between degrees of public and private space – are bypassed
and dissolved.
The architect Rem Koolhaas called this
phenomenon “Junkspace”, a “product of the encounter between escalator
and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock … always
interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits.” In the Gulf and
China as in much of the US, the mall became the principal gathering
place, being a zone where large numbers could comfortably pass their
time, leaving streets to be occupied by air conditioning’s mechanical
ally, the automobile.
The result is a form of sensory deprivation that
almost everyone now accepts without question, in which the active
interplay of body and atmosphere becomes homogenised and passive. The
stimuli of scent, touch, sound and sight are almost entirely at the
discretion of the mall management: “a low grade purgatory”, as Koolhaas
called it, “overripe and undernourishing at the same time … like being
condemned to a perpetual jacuzzi with millions of your best friends.”
There is also an absence of what a European
might consider public space, that is somewhere in principle available to
everyone, open to activities both unprogrammed and not necessarily
retail. It has been observed that the climate-controlled networks of
Houston or Jakarta or Dubai can serve not only to exclude heat and
humidity, but also those considered undesirable or insufficiently
profitable. In such places there is a clear divide, social and often
racial, between those inside the conditioned cocoon and those outside.
The street becomes actively hostile, the effects of weather compounded
by those of motor traffic and indifference to the needs of pedestrians.
Here are the people you don’t see in the malls – the blue-uniformed
migrant workers in the Gulf, the homeless and luckless in America.
Environmentally speaking, air conditioning is
anti-social. It buys its owner comfort at the cost of shifting the
surplus heat somewhere else, on to surrounding streets and ultimately
into the atmosphere of the planet. The night-time temperature of
Phoenix, Arizona, is believed to be increased by one degree or more
by the heat expelled from its air conditioning. This is, you could say,
the perfectly neoliberal technology, based on division and
displacement. According to one theory,
air conditioning helped to elect Ronald Reagan, by attracting
conservatively inclined retirees to the southern states that swung in
his favour.
In pointing out the shortcomings of air
conditioning, it is easy to overlook its achievements, to ask, in the
style of Life of Brian, what it ever did for us. Considerable reductions
in the loss of life through excess heat is one answer. Increased
productivity and economic activity in hot regions of the world is
another. Or better-functioning hospitals and schools. Most of us would
be grateful for its contribution to computing and movies. Few people who
have spent time in hot and humid climates would not sometimes want the
refuge of artificially cooled air.
One defence of air-conditioned cities is that they are more energy-efficient than very cold cities
– Minneapolis, for example – that need to be heated up in winter, and
if the statistics of energy consumption sound terrifying, they can also
be put in perspective. The US expends more energy on air conditioning,
for example, than the whole of Africa does on everything. Then again, it
expends even more energy on hot water, which doesn’t get the same rap.
The question then is not whether to condition
climate, but how. As long ago as the 1940s the Egyptian architect Hassan
Fathy demonstrated, with his village of New Gourna
near Luxor, how traditional techniques of orientation, ventilation,
screening and shading could be revived. Many contemporary architects are
following his lead – the Nigerian Kunlé Adeyemi, for example, whose new
Black Rhino Academy in Tanzania tries to optimise the conditions for its users by finding the best location, environmentally speaking, on its site.
If these principles are now better known, the
challenge remains to expand the village-scale achievements of an
architect like Hassan Fathy to large, fast-growing cities. Addressing
this challenge is the promise of high-profile, government-backed
projects such as Msheireb in Qatar and Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, which
boast of their combinations of old forms – shady courtyards and arcades;
narrow, breezy streets – with solar panel arrays and what Masdar’s
architects, Foster and Partners, call “state-of-the-art technologies”.
There has been some scepticism, about Masdar in
particular, that these projects’ purposes might be more symbolic than
truly environmental. But the places they create are incomparably more
pleasurable than the downtowns, mechanised by cars and air-conditioning,
of the cities in which they are placed. They are, at least, steps
forward in what is an essential task for the 21st century: to develop
new forms of public space in hot climates, not the city-scaled habitable
fridges of the 20th.
This post originally appeared on The Guardian
and was published August 14, 2018.
This article is republished here with permission.
Be a part of the Guardian’s future.
Become a Guardian supporter.
Become a Guardian supporter.
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September 15, 2018Det gäller att fokusera på helheten med andra ord. Värme har vi svårt att generera utan energi, men ac kan vi få genom smartare byggnader.The US expends more energy on air conditioning, for example, than the whole of Africa does on everything. Then again, it expends even more energy on hot water, which doesn’t get the same rap. -
August 21, 2018The purgatory of air con"
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