#63: Air from Another Planet
I've been thinking about air conditioning a lot this past week. Not just how great it feels after 30 seconds outdoors in August, but about the kinds of buildings and spaces it creates. I recently linked to this short article about the impact of air conditioning on the modern city. While we're familiar with how artificial cooling made hot climates like the American sunbelt's more habitable and vastly expanded those regions' populations, it's less obvious that the technology produced "a new kind of architecture, one in which...layers and permeability between inside and out have given way to sealed boxes." Or, as Rem Koolhaas writes in "Junkspace" (maybe the best essay yet written about contemporary architecture), "Air-conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air-conditioning unites them." Thanks to the airtight urbanism that air conditioning pioneered, of which the car is an extension and pillar, even temperate cities now boast vast spaces that draw a sharp, airport-like distinction between inside and outside.
Lately, my own personal online filter bubble, which is full of urbanists, seems to be hinting that cities are in better shape than ever. Car ownership is decreasing, some buildings are LEED certified, crime is down, and more and more people are within walking distance of a barcade (my neighborhood, Williamsburg, is an urban accelerationist's paradise, complete with its own impending transit upheaval). In such a climate, it's hard to articulate what precisely isn't awesome about today's cities, at least for the affluent, without sounding terminally nostalgic (don't worry, I'm not about to say that air conditioning is what's wrong). It's even harder to stitch the various threads together into a coherent narrative, but Justin Davidson did a pretty good job, surveying Nashville's revitalized downtown and describing a "metropolitan version of Westworld: a place that looks like a city but isn’t," one that is in the process of "sorting the privileged from the powerless and making sure they never meet." You don't need Davidson to tell you that the air conditioning is bracingly cool throughout the new Nashville's interior spaces.
One possible explanation for why cities get worse as they get better is a decline in "publicness," a subtle phenomenon that's hard to criticize or even identify amid food halls and Westfield properties and hotel lobbies that teem with people but aren't truly public like a Central Park is (and we still have plenty of that, thankfully, although it's not evenly distributed). In Nashville or New York, you can find districts of dense, newly-built residential property whose streets seem a bit too quiet because Amazon will deliver whichever amenities the buildings don't contain internally, bypassing the outside altogether. Koolhaas also writes that "junkspace pretends to unite, but it actually splinters. It creates communities not out of shared interest or free association, but out of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics." Air conditioning isn't the cause of waning publicness, but a perfect symbol for it. Already in certain places, the exterior of the climate-controlled "endless building" feels as foreign as the surface of the moon.
Reads:
The City Born in a Day: Oklahoma City's Land Run, “the most disorderly episode of urban settlement this country, and perhaps the world, has ever witnessed.”
An anti-Square manifesto from food critic Robert Sietsema.
Famous modernist homes depicted in strange Thomas Kinkade landscapes. It works.