Air conditioning brought buildings to new heights, but did it also made architects lazy?
In a 2012 piece honoring the 110th anniversary of Willis Carrier's invention of air conditioning, Architecture magazine honored the invention, but sounded a bit contrite about what Carter wrought. The piece featured an interview with The Land Institute's Stan Cox, who had recently written a book highlighting the technology's failings. Also included was this passage:
We have become conditioned to air conditioning, to manufactured weather, and have abandoned the strategies that undeveloped and developing countries in hot climates still use. This is for good, certainly, or mostly: air conditioning makes for better economic productivity, and certainly helps preserve lives during heat waves. But in forgetting the ways that we used to cope with high temperatures, we may now be dependent on Carrier.
There's a lot of good that came out of the ability to regulate the temperature of a room. We wouldn't have skyscrapers, clean rooms for building advanced computer chips, shopping malls, or multiplexes without air conditioning. But on the other hand, we might've had a little more creativity in our home and office design had we not kept it around.
See, prior to the air conditioner reaching homes around the country, architects had to think more creatively about keeping people cool when options were more limited. This meant taking advantage of breezes, room design, and dimensional layout in a way that maximized the heat when it was necessary kept things cool when it wasn't.
And it meant taking advantage of foliage around the home to build in some natural shade, as well as to build porches, which were often much cooler than the insides of homes during warm days.
A good example of architectural strategy in action is Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, perhaps the world's most famous building forged on passive cooling techniques. Built on a hilltop, the building took advantage of the natural breezes the location offered by having large windows and an open floor plan. And while the heat of the Virginia summer might have been sweltering, the building's brick design helped to keep the heat out of the home until the latter part of the day, when things were starting to cool down.
The American Institute of Architects, in a 1979 article published in its quarterly magazine, cited Jefferson's work as inspiring for modern architects, who essentially needed to be reintroduced to Jefferson's ideas a scant 35 years after air conditioning became common in homes.
"What is most remarkable about Monticello, though, is not that Jefferson's cooling strategies worked but the fact that they stand up so well today," author Kevin Green wrote. "Jefferson came by his cooling intuitively, not scientifically."
The fact that passive cooling needed to be reintroduced to architects in the first place sticks in the craw of some critics of modern air conditioning. Lloyd Alter, who has become perhaps one of the most famous critics of air conditioning as TreeHugger's managing editor, frequently pulls out a quote from Cameron Tonkinwise of Carnegie Mellon's School of Design that takes architects to task for this legacy of simplistic thinking.
"The window air conditioner allows architects to be lazy," Tonkinwise is quoted as saying. "We don't have to think about making a building work, because you can just buy a box."
Tonkinwise, and by extension Alter, have a point on this matter, and it can largely be seen in the design of modern homes compared to those from earlier generations. In the era of the McMansion, high ceilings, porches, and ample plantlife ultimately lose out.
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