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.
#63: Air from Another Planet
#63: Air from Another Planet
#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.