An uncomfortable truth: air-conditioning and sustainability in Asia

Environment and Planning A 2013, volume 45, pages 517 – 531 doi:10.1068/a45128 An uncomfortable truth: air-conditioning and sustainability in Asia Tim Winter Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Building EM, Parramatta, Penrith South DC, NSW 1797, Australia; e-mail: [email protected] Received 16 March 2012; in revised form 29 June 2012 Abstract. Over the coming two decades Asia will be the main driver of a 40% increase in global energy consumption. Ambitions for a more sustainable future in the region are severely compromised by the widespread and rapid take-up of energy-intensive methods for cooling the built environment. For the majority of Asia’s countries buildings account for more than 50% of all national greenhouse gas emissions. With around half that energy consumption typically associated with cooling or heating interior spaces, national carbon footprints have increased dramatically in recent decades through the introduction of electronic airconditioning. This paper argues such trends are unsustainable and low-carbon alternatives for environmental comfort are required urgently. It traces shifts in how air has been ‘materially imagined’ over the last century or so in Asia and how this bears upon the future of sustainable urbanism. Air-conditioning is seen as pivotal to transformations in urban design and living, such that two phases of modernity are identified: preconditioned and conditioned. By foregrounding the need for low-carbon alternatives, the paper advocates for an alternative, low-carbon regime of thermal governance. Keywords: air-conditioning, Asia built environment, modernity, sustainability An uncomfortable truth Any claims and ambitions for more sustainable futures in Asia are severely compromised by the widespread and rapid take-up of energy-intensive methods for cooling interior spaces. Over the coming two decades Asia will be the main driver of a 40% increase in global energy consumption, more than three quarters of which will continue to come from fossil fuels (Fernando et al, 2008). As elsewhere in the world, for the majority of Asia’s countries the built environment, through its construction, operation, deconstruction, and demolition, accounts for more than 50% of all national greenhouse gas emissions (Carroon, 2010). Given that around half of that energy consumption is typically associated with the cooling or heating of interior spaces, in the case of tropical Asia—much of which experiences extended periods of hot and humid weather—carbon emissions have increased dramatically in recent decades through the introduction of electronic air-conditioning (AC) (Li and Yao, 2009). Where once AC was regarded as a luxury, in a few short decades it has become a highly common technology for regulating the temperature and humidity levels of interior spaces throughout the region’s tropical and subtropical zones, particularly in cities. With this trend set to continue, in Southeast Asia the mechanical cooling (and drying) of the built environment will be a significant factor contributing to a demand in energy that is outpacing much of the world, increasing from current levels by around 75% by 2030 (IEA, 2009). Examining the rapid adoption of AC technologies in India, China, and Indonesia, Harold Wilhite (2009, page 87) notes “changes that took place over many decades in the US and Japan are happening at a rapid tempo.” If we carry these trajectories forward, their significance becomes starkly apparent in places like China where it is expected that more than 70% of the population will live in cities by 2050. Asia’s population will grow by 1.25 billion by 2025, and more than half will live in cities (UN-HABITAT, 2008). By situating the recent adoption 518 T Winter of AC in these wider social contexts and trajectories, in this paper I argue that an alternative, less energy-intensive, climate-control paradigm is urgently needed, one that will contribute to more sustainable urban futures and forms of socioeconomic development. As Wolfgang Lauber et al (2005, page 198) state in their contemplations on the future of architecture for tropical regions: “ The intensive use of building sites, the stacking of living and work spaces and the increased density of traffic leads to urban spaces and building structures that are based on American models from the 1940s and ᾿50s … . The invention of air-conditioning has ensured that large buildings and high-rises can be supplied with fresh air as well as sufficient cooling and heating energy. From an environmental viewpoint, the use of 300–400KWh/sqm per year to provide this technically produced comfort is simply too high.” Paradigms of built environment sustainability Before proceeding with this line of argument, it is first helpful to reflect upon the approaches and responses which currently prevail within, and thus primarily inform, public debates about built environment sustainability in Asia today. Three key themes are identified: ‘the component approach’; ‘eco’ or ‘green’ architecture; and ‘sustainability through preservation’. It will be seen that, whilst these three approaches are highly valuable to debates around urban sustainability, they are, in themselves, inadequate for dealing with the sociopolitical challenges which enmesh the rapidly changing built environment of many Asian countries. Within the fast-growing discourse of sustainable design, efficient and alternative have been two guiding mantras for reducing the carbon footprint of construction. Accordingly, much attention has been given to the question of energy production and saving (Russek and Zimm 2006). The component-based approach to this, largely advanced through the professions of building sciences and mechanical engineering, has focused on the constituent parts of building infrastructure such as water treatment systems, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) systems, and so forth (Atthajariyakul and Lertsatittanakorn, 2008; Hwang et al, 2009; Mui, 2006; Mui and Wong, 2007). In the case of AC a highly technical field of expertise has emerged, advancing highly scientific, physiological standards of built environment comfort (Hindrichs and Daniels, 2007; Yik et al, 2001). This has led to prescriptive proclamations about ‘optimum’ temperature and humidity ranges for indoor spaces (Lam, 2000; Tuohy et al, 2010). And while much attention has been given to making HVAC technologies more efficient in using existing grid-based power supplies, the search for alternative cleaner, greener energy has primarily been advanced in tropical and subtropical Asia via solar panel technology. In the case of both domestic and commercial architecture, this has typically involved introducing in situ installations, whereby grid-supply electricity is supplemented, or in some cases even replaced. Equally important have been recent advances in the area of material technologies, with glazing, concrete, foam, and plastics all being branded as ‘high-tech’, ‘thermally responsive’, or even ‘intelligent’. Mathematical modelling in this area has grown in its level of sophistication, but it is a paradigm of human comfort analysis that has been critiqued heavily for inadequately acknowledging a host of social, geographic, and microcontextual variables. Building on the insights offered by Lisa Heschong in her 1979 book Thermal Delight in Architecture, authors like Richard de Dear (2006; see also Brager and de Dear, 2007) and Stephen Healy (2008) are among those who have critiqued what they observe as the new regime of ‘thermal monotony’, which has spread rapidly across building types and between countries with very different climatic conditions. Alongside, and often operating in tandem with this component-based approach has been the field of ‘eco’ or ‘green’ architecture, which has attempted to forge a more holistic conceptualisation of design and construction for environmentally responsible and responsive buildings. The rallying cry of sustainability has given new impetus to the vocabulary of Air-conditioning and sustainability in Asia 519 ‘tropical architecture’, whereby climate-sensitive materials and designs inherited from the past are combined with new ideas and construction technologies to create structures that require less energy in their provision of occupant comfort. In their 2006 volume Tropical Sustainable Architecture, Joo Hwa Bay and Boan Lay Ong (2006) identified both the importance and the challenge of creating a culture of architectural design appropriate for high-rise, high density in tropical urban spaces. In the context of Southeast Asia, the ‘eco-skyscraper’ has given the language of tropical architecture its most spectacular and grandiose form. Architects like Ken Yeang are among the pioneers in this field, whose ‘bio-climatic’ high-rise designs seek to offer a solution to an inescapable future of densely populated urban spaces. A philosophy of ecological design is made manifest through a mix of natural ventilation of spaces, sunshading, wind-scoops, vertical landscaping, natural lighting systems, and building orientation and material (re)usage considerations (Yeang, 1994; 2009; Yeang and Richards, 2007). The third strand of sustainability that can be identified here is one oriented by the philosophy of conservation, and the maintenance and reuse of the existing building stock. The US-based architect Carl Elefante is widely given credit for the aphorism “the greenest building is one that is already built” (2007). What he and other preservation-oriented architects point to is the need for proper life-cycle assessment models which more realistically consider the ‘cradle-to-grave’ energy properties of the built environment. Indeed, in her notable volume, Sustainable Preservation: Greening Existing Buildings, Jean Carroon (2010) highlights the importance of calculating the ‘embodied energy’ of a building in relation to its lifespan. This notion of embodied energy seeks to capture the environmental debt incurred from the resource depletion and energy used in construction (page 7). As the service life of a structure increases, the ratio of embodied to operating energy decreases proportionately. Early research conducted by organisations like the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation in the USA in 1979 through to more recent United Nations Development Programme studies point unequivocally to the significant economic and energy savings that can be made from the adaptive reuse of buildings. To date the majority of these studies have been conducted in Western developed countries like Australia, France, Germany, the UK, or the United States. Given the accelerated speed of construction, destruction, and redevelopment in regions like Asia—such that buildings often have significantly shorter lifespans than they do in the urban economies of North America or Europe—locally conducted studies demonstrating the environmental merits of building conservation and adaptive reuse would offer an important contribution to the conceptualisation of urban sustainability. The questions about energyintensive electronic cooling methods raised here mean the potential benefits of extending the lifespan of the existing building stock extend far beyond a reduction in the ‘embodied energy’, to include sizeable reductions in their ‘operating energy’ too. More specifically and, as will be detailed here, 20th-century buildings constructed prior to the widespread use of AC have the potential for making an important contribution to countering or mitigating the prevailing trends towards increased energy consumption. In order to achieve such goals, however, in this paper I argue that the questions and challenges highlighted earlier extend far beyond themes of architectural preservation, or urban planning and legislation. While the value and urgency of the different approaches outlined here are readily accepted, I argue that, in themselves, they are not enough. As we have seen, responses to the challenges of built environment sustainability vis à vis energy in Asia have focused largely on issues of design, technology, and the materiality of construction. The account of young people in Singapore by Russell Hitchings and Shu Jun Lee (2008) is among the few studies of AC conducted in the region oriented by a cultural analysis. Their study productively reveals connections between cultural and manufacturing shifts in clothing, the transformation of public spaces such as shopping malls, and the increasing affordability of AC in the home, to suggest Singaporeans now experience “interlocking layers of human encasement” (page 262). 520 T Winter Hitchings (2011) also provides an overview of some recent studies in Japan and China that indicate how the outdoors is now subject to shifting attitudes and habits. As the author notes, data on such themes are patchy, but there is much to suggest that not only do displays of cool comfort act as an articulator of class and wealth status, but also “tap into deeper colonial ideas about forms of embodied civilization and the degenerative effects of living somewhere hot” (page 175). The approach adopted here builds on these studies by historically locating both contemporary practices and norms, and recent debates around architectural thermal comfort. It does so by attending to the wider social, political, and cultural contexts within which buildings have evolved, and the ways in which that emplacement has shifted over time. While many of the examples cited here are cities, the analysis pertains to the built environment of tropical and subtropical across Asia more generally. The paper is directly informed by critiques of scientistic comfort prescriptions in other parts of the world by Gail Brager and Richard de Dear (2007), John Crowley (1999), Simon Guy and Elizabeth Shove (2000), or Shove et al (2008), all of which are highly pertinent to discussions about the future of thermal governance of indoor spaces in Asia. However, in aiming to chart such futures more broadly, the focus here is the various sociocultural shifts that come to bear upon, and in so doing reshape, the built environment over time; in the making of history. Implicit here then is the influence of those that have taken similar analytical paths, most notably Gail Cooper (1998), Elizabeth Shove (2003), and Marsha Ackermann (2002) in their historicisation of comfort, cooling, and indoor living in regions like Europe and North America over the course of the 20th century. More specifically, though, I wish to pursue a reading of history that foregrounds air and its shifting material economies, in order to offset the scientistic, technical approach to built environment thermal governance, which remains prevalent in Asia today (Hitchings, 2011, page 180). As such, I draw upon what Gaston Bachelard (1998) and Steven Connor (2010) have referred to as ‘the material imagination of air’. The propensity of the longue durée to render change invisible is well understood, but in this context imperceptibility is reinforced by the very immateriality, the ethereality of that which has now become unsustainable: cool, dry air. The aim here is to give focus to this immaterial, and to that which very often remains invisible, unseen, and as such beyond the realm of critical discussion and scrutiny. In his recent volume The Matter of Air (2010), Connor argues the material-centrism of both philosophy and science has been matched by an equal unease and discomfort with the seemingly unpredictably and unreliable immaterial. His work thus seeks to both expose and address this imbalance through a focus on air and its relation with the material world. In laying out the analytical approach for making sense of the key shifts in the way air has been perceived, valued, understood, and materially fashioned, Connor argues we need to attend to: “ the ways in which new understandings of the air entered social experience and altered human experiences of their ways of inhabiting the world … [this is] … not isolating the air as a specific subject of concern, but with following through some of the ways in which new apprehensions of the air entered into composition with forms of social life and imagining” (2010, page 14). Connor’s historicising of air traces changes in Europe that took place between the 17th and 20th centuries. But it is the technological and social developments of the 19th century that he looks to as particularly significant moments in the reimagining of air and its materiality. The invention of gas lighting is cited as a case in point. Connor argues that, in superseding candles and lamps, gas lighting represented a technology which transformed the human relationship with light. The illuminating flame and its fuel were now less intimate, of a greater distance and more abstract. Gas piped underground and behind walls was also Air-conditioning and sustainability in Asia 521 burnt behind panes of frosted glass that diffused flames into panes of light. Light became predictable, uniform, and less prone to localised fluctuations. As Connor notes “what had previously been proximate, iterative and particular was to become remote, absolute and general” (page 9). In the introduction of electronic AC in Asia over the course of the 20th century we can excavate a parallel transition. As we shall see, important conceptual and empirical insights are revealed if we adopt Connor’s analytical frame in accounting for the various ways in which air has been cooled and dried over the last century or so, a hi/story he surprisingly passes over. Preconditioned modernity To render the invisible more visible it is helpful to differentiate between two distinct, albeit overlapping, phases of a modernity in Asia, what I want to refer to here as the preconditioned and conditioned. In their conceptualisation and historical dating, modernity, modernism, and the even more circumspect notion of the ‘modern world’ are inherently contentious and evasive terms. Different fields of scholarship have considered a wide variety of historical trends, ruptures, and turns—in manufacturing, architecture, literature, art, technology, religion, or philosophy—in order to proclaim the arrival (and subsequent death) of modernity and the modern. A detailed exploration of modernity in Asia is beyond the scope of this discussion. It does, however, form an important backdrop to the emergence of a ‘modern’ built environment and architectural form in the region. Greater attention is now being paid to the complex processes by which modernism and modern modes of construction and design ideas emerged in Asia (Lim and Chang 2012; Lu, 2011). A more detailed picture is emerging of how the modern emerges in different ways in different places and over different timespans. The arrival of new technologies, shifts in political systems, economic transitions, freak encounters, the incorporation of new ideas, and so forth all mean the history of a modern idiom for the built environment, and what might be identified as modernism, is chaotic, haphazard, and largely incoherent. Nonetheless, some key patterns and milestones provide greater clarity to the story of particular countries and regions. Jeffrey Cody (2003) and Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren (2008) are among those that trace key transformations in the built environment and the arrival of Modernism in China from the mid–late 19th century onwards. Together they highlight a series of external influences that would have a catalytic affect on Chinese society, creating a series of political, social, and intellectual shifts which would bear upon architecture and the planning of cities. Throughout much of China traditional forms of construction relied heavily on wood. Although masonry and brick were used extensively, they were primarily the material of walls, bridges, ceremonial sites, and monumental structures. Tradition-based architecture was, in the main, designed around load-bearing wooden columns and beams. Interior spaces were created by linking together units ( jian) of four columns with interlocking horizontal beams. As Denison and Ren state, “timber was abundant, cheap, easy to work, flexible, strong, pleasing to the eye, and tactile. The one thing it lacked was permanence” (page 19). They suggest, however, that, as the 19th century progressed, the construction and design of buildings began to alter in significant ways. Engineers would lead the way through the incorporation of metal, concrete, and glass. Ideas would arrive from Europe and, as Cody (2003) highlights in substantive detail, from the United States. China’s Treaty Ports would undergo the greatest changes, as engineers, both foreign and domestic, set about building roads, railways, bridges, power stations, and transforming their urban centres with cement.(1) At the beginning of the 20th century the American skyscraper ‘invaded’ countries across Europe, Central America, Africa, and East Asia. It was a form of construction that came to increasingly rely upon the marriage of steel and concrete. At first steel skeletons would be clad with concrete walls. (1) See Denison and Ren (2008, page 47) for further details. 522 T Winter Subsequently, though, the idea of steel ‘reinforced’ concrete delivered significant advances in strength and load-bearing capacity. The first architects in China came from engineering backgrounds. But equally important was the boom in factory construction, the development of such large-scale, industrial designs, and the mass production of the technologies and materials required to build them. The country’s first cement factory was established in 1882 in the town of Qinzhou, near Macau, with others following shortly afterwards (Denison and Ren, 2008, page 59). The arrival of foreign architects and engineers would greatly accelerate the speed and scale of industrialised urbanism, a landscape characterised by multistoried reinforced concrete and great expanses of glass. Shanghai’s first office building constructed entirely from reinforced concrete was completed in 1908. The Shanghai Mutual Telephone Company Ltd would rise six stories, but the take up of steel frame, reinforced concrete designs in the years thereafter would lead to skylines of taller, lighter and ever more efficient buildings across a number of Chinese cities (page 64).(2) Crucially, with all such construction taking place in a pre-AC era, designs continued to incorporate ideas about natural ventilation and shaded interiors wherever possible. Fans and clothing also continued to be important variables in the maintenance of thermal comfort. Traditional forms of clothing remained prominent in the workplace; reflecting seasonal and climatic fluctuations, with natural, lightweight fabrics being the common attire of hot and humid office spaces (Tsang, 2002). Throughout much of Asia there is also a long tradition of fanning, which remained prevalent through the early decades of the 20th century. China and Japan in particular have long traditions of hand fans, with frames made from bamboo, wood, or ivory supporting blades of feathers, paper, and silk (Iröns, 1982a; Tsang, 2002). Although China is credited with designing the earliest hand fans, the invention of the folding fan, somewhere between the 2nd and 6th century AD in Japan, brought about a revolution in how they were carried and used as everyday, personal items (Iröns, 1982b, page 40). The personal fan would also be accompanied by the ceiling fan. While the spread of such technologies is difficult to historicise, we do know the punkah—a term denoting a swinging blade system attached to the ceiling—is associated with Arab culture. At some point in the 18th century the Indian subcontinent adopted the technology, with the punkahwallah becoming a feature of colonial rule. The wallah, or servant of the house, would operate a pulley system to maintain the flow of air in the room.(3) While the arrival of electricity enabled ceiling and desk fans to become more efficient and regular, cooling throughout the first half of the 20th century was still a process of moving air, rather than introducing new cooler, dryer air into the room. Fanning, both electric and manual, thus remained localised, directional, momentary, and a perceptively sensorial experience. As a parallel to China, transformations in India’s built environment at the beginning of the 20th century were also heavily shaped by the ideas and technologies of foreign engineers and architects. British rule played a definitive role in defining the styles, designs, and construction methods, which together constituted modernism in cities like Delhi, Calcutta, and Bombay. The formation of an Anglo-Indian architecture was most monumentally realised in Edwin Lutyen’s designs for New Delhi. Characterised by their neoclassicist style, parliament buildings and government offices for the new capital incorporated various features from traditional Indian architecture. Although built on an altogether different scale, the colonial bungalow offered another example of the Anglo-Indian style of architecture that emerged under the British. As Anthony King (1984) highlighted, the constant reinvention and reproduction of (2) Also see Cody (2003, chapters 1 and 2) for further details. A less technologically advanced, hand-held version of this involved the wallah holding a fan of large feathers bound to a handle. (3) Air-conditioning and sustainability in Asia 523 the bungalow in different contexts meant it became one of the most recognisable examples of what latterly came to be known as ‘tropical architecture’. Accordingly, Margaret Purser (2003, page 295) notes: “ From these early roots, the bungalow as colonial administrative form moved out to encircle the globe … its evolution continued to exhibit the simultaneous expression of British cultural identity, and of a rapidly expanding body of adaptive knowledge about how to build and live in structures in tropical climates … . The buildings were raised on posts to avoid insects, disease, and rot; rooflines were modified to alleviate the oppressive heat of the metal roofs; ceilings rose, and interior rooms themselves became larger.” It took some time for European architects to learn how to build and design for the cultural and climatic conditions of tropical and subtropical Asia. Indeed, considerable scholarship has been dedicated to the ‘evolution’ of the ‘tropical architecture’ typology, one that came to be increasingly oriented around verandahs, overhanging rooflines, perforated screens, as well as an accumulated knowledge of the need to design in accordance with orientation, shade, cooling breezes and water (Coles and Jackson, 2006; Fathy et al, 1986; Ford et al, 1998; Fry and Drew, 1964). More recently, however, by attending to the connections between politics, governmentality, and technological advances that existed across great distances, authors like Jiat Hwee Chang (2011) have offered new insights for interpreting this form of colonial and tropical architecture as an unfolding ‘situated knowledge’. At the beginning of the 20th century in India this vocabulary for building in the tropics was infused with the design motifs of Art Deco. Houses, apartment buildings, and civic structures all included flat roofs, cylindrical external staircases, curved verandahs, pastel colours, and various decorative motifs familiar to the Art Deco movement elsewhere. But as Jon Lang (2002) points out, experimentation and the importation of new design themes and ideas were not merely dependent upon foreign architects and engineers. Between the two world wars cities like Mumbai and Delhi were transformed by avant-garde Indian designers, who playfully incorporated decorative motifs popular in the United States and Europe. Interestingly, by the 1930s Art Deco increasingly expressed a sense of Indian Modernism, through the incorporation of local cultural themes and traditional design elements. For the country’s more strident nationalists, however, it was an architectural trajectory that represented yet another form of cultural imperialism. An important response was The Modern Indian Architectural Movement, which took hold across a number of regions and cities. Tradition and past architectural styles were explicitly referenced in the creation of a new, present Indianness, such that the modern built landscapes of cities would be the source of pride and identity (Lang, 2002, page 25). In cities like Hyderabad the symbolism of tradition drew heavily from an Islamic architectural heritage. However, under the guidance of the architect Sris Chandra Chatterjee, The Modern Indian Architectural Movement was clearly Hindu; influenced heavily by the principles of the swadeshi movement of the early 20th century and the canonical texts it referenced. The language of revivalism and ‘Indian principles’ did not, however, negate the incorporation of new construction ideas and technologies. Chatterjee extensively used modern materials such as concrete in his buildings. Nonetheless, his ideas steadily came to be seen as retrogressive and out of step with the directions of mainstream modernism, and, crucially, the political ambitions of figures like Nehru, who in the 1950s gave his support to a radically different form of architecture, that of the steel, glass, and reinforced concrete of Le Corbusier. Indeed, during those mid-century years of Independence across South and Southeast Asia architecture and urban planning were the vanguards of ambitious claims of national sovereignty and progress. In Cambodia, for example, from 1953 onwards Norodom Sihanouk channelled his vision of a modern, independent nation into a particular style of urbanism, coined ‘New Khmer Architecture’ (Grant Ross and Collins, 2006; Lim and Chang, 2012). 524 T Winter Conceived at a time when air-conditioning was prohibitively expensive to install and run, this predominantly public and commercial architecture was designed to facilitate airflow and natural cooling to counteract the tropical heat. The chief architect of this movement, Vann Molyvann, undertook carefully planned, well-considered research, referencing the various Cambodian urban centres of the past 2000 years (Vann, 2003). The heritage of these longlasting, structured societies was one of the reference points for the development of a style of architecture and planning that would form the physical environment for new urban centres intended to be of comparable greatness. Cooling features such as the iconic, fanned concrete roof tops, and double-brick walls shielded Vann Molyvann’s buildings from the tropical heat. Many buildings were raised on stilts, consistent with Cambodia’s premodern vernacular architecture. Windows were positioned in order to avoid the path of the sun. The use of stilts, also demonstrated his regard for the practical heritage of cooling found in the Cambodian vernacular. These implementations of local knowledge were combined with innovations enabled by modern scientific research: techniques gained by Vann Molyvann, along with a modern aesthetic, while studying under Le Corbusier in Paris. Lai traces a similar story for postindependence Malaysia, where a nascent national architecture was energised by architects and engineers returning home from training and employment overseas. Lai (2005; 2007) sees concrete—narrated as both metaphor and construction material—as pivotal in Malay proclamations of freedom and independence (merdeka). The construction of large buildings, civil engineering projects, and monuments enabled the state, the nation, its territory, and its ideals to take on an embodied, tangible form. But, as Lai points out, it was the very physical properties of concrete that were instrumental in realising a bold, radically new statement of political intent. Panning back out then, what we see across Asia in the first half of the 20th century is a steady shift towards the adoption of new technologies and facilities for large-scale construction, new idea(l)s about architecture, urban planning and the role of cities, as well as the uptake of new building materials that dramatically transformed the scale and form of the built environment. As the decades advanced, a modern construction industry was also increasingly defined as such through the standardisation and modularisation of its systems and resources: a process Sigfreed Giedion (1970) so eloquently documented in 1948. But it was only from around the 1930s onwards that such processes began to shift in accordance with the exciting possibilities afforded by electronic AC. At first, and right through to the 1950s and 1960s, the uptake of AC was slow and it remained a rare technology due in large part to its extremely high installation, operational, and maintenance costs. The real beginning of the end of the preconditioned modernity as outlined above, however, came in the 1950s with the arrival of a more technoscientific language of climatic design in the United States. Chang (2011, pages 224–225) argues the development of reliable, sciencebased climatological and meteorological data at that time provided a basis for a new paradigm of architectural practice. It would be some years before the instruments for collecting the indices of climate—like wind speed or effective temperature—would be in common usage across different parts of the world. Nonetheless, a new science of thermal comfort was now filtering outwards from the US, one that divided the world into certain ‘zones’, with the tropics being subcategorised into three principal climatic types: warm and humid; hot and dry; and upland (page 226). Design guidelines for a new science of architecture for these regions would soon follow. Air-conditioning and sustainability in Asia 525 Conditioned modernity “ Air-conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air-conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.” Lee Kuan Yew (2009, page 120) The precise origins of electronic AC in Asia are difficult to trace. As an emergent technology in the decades of the mid-20th century, its high costs meant it was frequently associated with spaces of luxury. International hotels were among its early proponents, creating temporary respites of comfort from the heat and humidity of the tropical climes. In marked contrast to fanning instruments, the electronic conditioning of air moved the provision of comfort to the background, whereby its technologies were removed from view, hidden behind surfaces; and in cases where whole buildings, rather than just individual rooms, came to be cooled, comfort was ‘plumbed’ in via channels and ducts that led back to a central source. For the first time, then, the ability to chill and dry the air of an entire, enclosed interior meant bodies were able to dwell in and move about spaces of evenly distributed, nondirectional thermal regulation. But the effect of AC was far more than merely an act of disappearance. Its transformative properties become manifest if we look at the ways in which it enabled new social practices and rhythms. In the case of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew’s admiration of the technology as one of the “signal inventions of history” related to the benefits it delivered in workplace efficiency. Quotidian and annual routines such as siestas and hill-station retreats were interruptions in the Southeast Asian work-day that could be removed through electronic cooling. The maintenance of ‘optimum’ temperature and humidity levels throughout the day was also linked to productivity gains, and a marked increase in the attractiveness of cities like Singapore to expatriates originating from temperate climates. But, as with laptops, the penetration of AC into the home also meant these became sites of efficiency gains, wherein uninterrupted sleep was the backbone for a more productive workforce (Rijal et al, 2009; Wyon, 2004). It was a powerful logic that saw the work, leisure, and homely environs of daily life increasingly move indoors, and the widespread emergence of what Connor has referred to as “the many enclosures of the air, artificial atmospheres and sealed environments” (2010, page 19). In this respect, what we begin to see in the second half of the 20th century is a series of sociocultural changes in how air, and associated notions of climate, atmosphere, or environment, were understood and materially fashioned. As both the equipment and cost of electricity decreased in relative terms, HVAC systems and domestic AC units became an increasingly common feature of commercial and domestic buildings across the tropical regions of South and Southeast Asia from the 1960s onwards. Right across the Asia region conditioned modernity gave a new legitimacy to glass as a construction material. The mechanical cooling of interiors enabled glass to evolve from merely being used for windows to being the material of entire walls, and most significantly the facades of office and retail architecture. The adoption of this new ‘light’ architecture was most apparent in the design of Asia’s skyscrapers, where glass began to replace concrete for their outer skins from around the 1970s onwards. Indeed, in the case of many high-rise towers, glazed facades involved the removal of window openings as interiors were hermetically sealed in the name of ever more precise climatic regulation. In effect, glass had become a pivotal construction material of a conditioned modernity, at once bringing nature indoors in a visual sense, yet simultaneously withholding it in other ways. As studies of modern architecture in Asia have shown, the adoption of glazed facades and roofs to visually ‘open up’ otherwise dark interiors by architects closed in their inhabitants by separating atmospheres, dividing the 526 T Winter controllable from the uncontrollable (Cody, 2003; Grant Ross and Collins, 2006; Zhaoye and Yaodong, 2000). Interestingly, where AC has enabled a ‘lighter’ architecture it has also made possible a culture of heavier furniture and furnishings. AC has underpinned a transformation in interior design in regions like Southeast Asia, in that previously climate-sensitive furniture designs and materials employed to allow ventilation and the dissipation of heat away from the body have been replaced by deep-pile cushions and heat-retaining textiles. In the last thirty years or so, the adoption of AC has been closely followed by a style of furnishing more familiar to the temperate climates of Europe and North America. More specifically, with the ‘West’ continuing to act as the principle point of reference in the material culture of ‘modern’ living in Asia, items like duvets, mattresses, and living room seats filled with insulating feathers and foams are symbolically coded and circulate and often act as the focal point of desires and aspirations. Indeed if we recall Shove’s (2003) arguments concerning the historical trajectories of comfort and luxury, we are reminded how sinking and snuggling into the soft, malleable fabrics of home furnishings become the embodied practices through which modern, middleclass urban life is marked, felt, and lived; a symbolic, sensory dyad enabled by and dependent upon electronic AC. It is now common practice for residential property developers across Asia to foreground such furnishings, together with thick window curtains and carpeting, as the signifiers of ‘luxury’ or ‘contemporary living’. Lifestyle and home magazines like Dwell Asia or Home and Style offer a very similar aesthetic, gently conditioning their readers to hold certain aspirations and ideals (see, for example, http://www.homeandstyle.com.sg/ index.php/home-decor/163-river-valley-apartment; see also http://dwellasiamag.com). In a few short decades AC has also had a profound transformative affect on the clothes of Asia. Across the region the history of clothing is one deeply rooted in local climatic conditions. AC not only removed the logic for such forms of dress, but also facilitated the introduction of new forms of clothing, most notably the Western business suit. In thousands of offices across Asia the standard business attire for both men and women has become the dark-coloured suit made from heavy cotton or wool. In keeping with international business attire, men wear the polyester shirts and ties more suitable to temperate climes. But perhaps most intriguingly, AC has also transformed the material imagination of the body itself in such contexts. As Gwyn Prins (1992) identified in the case of the United States, the modern, professional body is one free of perspiration and odour. Water, excreted from the skin, is now out of place in the modern workplace in cities like Phnom Penh, Beijing, and Mumbai; sweating after all clearly signals losing one’s cool. Despite the year round temperatures of cities like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, AC has deemed the productive human body of postindustrial, knowledge economies to be clean, dry, and free of any signs of climatic response. The issue of clothing points towards a larger cultural history of the body under the conditions of late modernity, and various threads related to this—beyond the scope of this paper—warrant pursuing. The climatic inflections of food in Asia, for example, is particularly intriguing. Many countries have long classified fruits, vegetables, and other food items according to their ‘heating’ and ‘cooling’ properties. Papaya and mango are typically regarded as hot, with most other fruits, particularly juicy and sour ones, considered cold (Van Esterik, 2008). The degree to which this food heritage will fade in the face of eating habits that increasingly take place in climate-controlled interiors remains to be seen. Stepping back from these various examples, I wish to suggest then that, together, they add up to two broad trends—what might provocatively be referred to as ‘epidemics’—which have now secured a firm hold across many of Asia’s societies, particular in the hot and humid countries of Southeast Asia. The first is the widespread, and somewhat viral like, emergence of electronic AC as a powerful socioeconomic and technological complex, one that now both breeds and sustains itself as a seemingly vital component of contemporary life. Many Air-conditioning and sustainability in Asia 527 activities still take place outdoors, and architectural features like the shaded courtyard and terrace remain part of the modern built environment idiom (Chang, 2007). The outdoor foodcourt, for example, remains a vital space of urban sociality in Southeast Asia. However, as the 20th century came to a close, it was apparent that modernity was increasingly becoming enclosed, whereby many of the aspirations, desires, ideals, and activities of modern urban life and urban culture had shifted indoors. In many cities, ideas of public space underwent a transformation, and the contemporaneous rise of consumer economies meant the indoor shopping mall came to the fore as the rarified ecosphere of modernity. In the creation of the other ‘modern’ spaces of public leisure—cinemas, restaurants, hotels, and galleries— designers and architects created a new world of indoor capitalism predicated on comfort and convenience. Today, the amount of networked, seamlessly cooled space is continuing to expand rapidly, meaning that, if desired, residents of Bangkok, Shanghai, Bangalore, and Singapore can now move between the office, classroom, home, restaurant, shopping mall, and other climate-controlled environments with minimal exposure to the ‘outdoors’. In the region’s less developed countries, public trains, buses, and taxis all signal their status and affordability through a classificatory system of ‘non-AC’ and ‘AC’. Such trends also speak of a second, and closely related, phenomenon that has emerged in recent decades, that of a subtle, yet discernible, form of agoraphobia. As a term, ‘the outdoors’ has always had somewhat vague connotations, but in recent times it has come to be increasingly burdened by anxieties of its vagary. Like elsewhere in the world, in Asia there is a growing fear about the outdoor environment (see Hitchings, 2011). For many, the outdoors has become a space of contamination and risk, whereby science and associated cultural shifts have rendered air pregnant with concerns about pollution, crime, vector-borne diseases, skin cancer, ageing, and bodily discomfort and impurity. The menace of the mosquito endures, for example, with stories of Dengue Fever or Malaria outbreaks continuing to give a seasonal rhythm to news reporting. Fears and anxieties are often particularly acute in Asia’s cities, where industrial-scale air-borne pollutants mix with dense populations to create a concoction of deadly haze, smog, and disease carrying water droplets. The cultural and etymological lineage of today’s crowded streets in Shanghai, Jakarta, and Hanoi brings us back to the Agora, or ‘places of assembly’, of ancient Greek city states. They all share the chaos of densely packed open spaces, and the squeezing and bumping of bodies in confined gathering places. Inhabiting public space is to be walking, commuting, dwelling in the crowd, and whilst many in Asia today continue to live and work in densely occupied indoor spaces as well, a sense of privacy, security and comfort therein arises from the proximity of the familial and familiar. Of course, this is not to say that in cities as diverse as Singapore, Chennai, or Osaka public and private life is now practised entirely indoors; restaurants continue to offer outdoor dining facilities, outdoor sports remain popular and sitting on the balcony or terrace is still a popular way to keep cool on a hot, humid evening. Many people continue to move back and forth between indoor and outdoor spaces in their day-to-day movements across the urban landscape. My argument here is not that the conditioned modernity is a totalising one. It is, like all modernities: incomplete, always in a state of becoming, and a process that inherently produces countermovements and the interstitial spaces that foster alternatives to the dominant paradigm. But it is to this broader trend that I wish to point, a process where an increasing number of daily activities in Asia are moving indoors; a rapid and broad-based shift towards ‘hermetic’ interior spaces, ones that are both conceived and perceived as safer, more hygienic, more convenient, and of course more comfortable than the outside world. 528 T Winter Conclusion: towards an unconditioned modernity The possibilities and limitations for a more sustainable built environment thus need to be seen through this prism of inhabited spaces. Indeed, what I have suggested here is that the electronic cooling of interiors in Asia in recent decades has been far more significant than merely a feature of building technology, and instead should be read as the catalyst for a new form of built environment modernity. Little research has been done historicising the transformative effect of AC in Asia vis à vis everyday norms of comfort, the transformation of public–private spaces, or the popular practices and rhythms associated with maintaining bodily comfort. This situation lies in contrast to regions like Europe and North America, wherein such histories have been traced more fully in recent years and the sociotechnical assemblies insightfully analysed (Ackerman, 2002; Arsenault, 1984; Cooper, 1998; Gissen, 2006). In considering the global rise of AC, authors like Shove and Wilhite assert the need for approaches to thermal comfort that unlock us from the AC paradigm, and the urgency of less energy-intensive approaches that respond to, and build on, local climatic and cultural conditions. Nowhere is this more urgent than in Asia, where the speed and scale of socioeconomic development continue to outpace much of the rest of the world. The wholesale transformation of the material imagination, and the material experiences of air in the region presents major obstacles for extending the lifespan of buildings that fail to comply with the demands of today’s AC paradigm. If a more sustainable built environment is to be developed in Asia, we need to move towards a more unconditioned modernity. By unconditioned I am not advocating a position of abolishing AC, a proposal that would be rightly met by a rebuttal of naivety. Rather it is a proposition concerning its decentring in the name of creating alternative, low-carbon trajectories of thermal governance. To be clear, by unconditioned (rather than non), I am arguing for a questioning of AC as a (pre)condition of modern urban life, rather than proposing its exclusion. An unconditioned modernity seeks to unhook AC as the axial technology and culture of indoor living. It gives greater attention to AC as a highly pervasive sociotechnical system, which, much like the car, ‘locks in’ everyday path dependencies that have unforeseen and unpredictable influences and impacts (Abbott, 2001; Dennis and Urry, 2009). The invisibility and intangibility of air is a significant factor in its absence from public debates about climate change and sustainability. Air too often remains in the unconscious background, far beyond the robust, critical debates about the material world. An unconditioned modernity is one where this imbalance is better addressed, where understandings of the climate of the everyday, quotidian are pursued much more rigorously. Following Hitchings (2010), it is a move towards reflecting upon those routines and social practices that can easily become unthinking. The themes explored here illustrate how the discussion of cooled interiors also extends out to questions about furniture, clothing, furnishings, and the politics of the body. Certain assumptions and norms about these now have to be reassessed and destabilised, in ways that open up alternatives to electronically conditioned interiors. To achieve this we need to revisit the prevailing thermal governance paradigm which has now taken hold across many of Asia’s cities, exploring where and when less energy-intensive alternatives to AC might be implemented. This means, more specifically, attending to the institutions and social mechanisms by which expectations and norms of bodily thermal comfort are created, and harnessing the opportunities for the introduction of low-carbon, tradition-based alternatives to electronic AC. Indeed, there is real benefit in gathering together and highlighting the material culture of tradition-based, low-energy thermal cooling and comfort in a way that reveals the interconnections and mutual dependencies of different histories of tropical architecture and passive cooling design (including vernacular, colonial, and early-modern architectures), hot climate furniture and clothing, low-energy environmental technologies (sun shading and Air-conditioning and sustainability in Asia 529 ventilating devices, such as blinds, ventilators, and fans), the fabric and design of outdoor spaces, and traditional uses of nature as an agent of cooling (eg, water and vegetation). Moreover, such histories can be combined with a more rigorous understanding of traditional non-AC comfort practices, habits, and rhythms, whereby histories of bathing, working, resting, shopping, or the quotidian rhythms of movement around the cooler spaces of home, and between home and other urban spaces, are seen in relation to one another and material culture. Of critical importance, though, is constructing a conceptual frame for critically appraising the possibilities and obstacles for maintaining and reinserting such tradition-based alternatives within the current energy-intensive, climate control paradigm. Understanding the technical, architectural, political, legal, financial, and cultural factors, which together bear upon built environment sustainability vis à vis thermal comfort, is vital if we are to better anticipate where and when less energy-intensive alternatives to AC might be implemented. As John Urry has recently argued, to address the challenges of climate change we need to look to the possibilities and unlikely sources of “low carbon innovation” that overcome today’s “governance catastrophes” (2011, pages 106–138). An unconditioned modernity probes such questions and possibilities. It is a modernity that revisits the fan, allows the air to move again, and questions our rising phobia about the outdoors. Put simply, if we are to alter the current path of electronic conditioning we need to open up a new material imagination of air, and redefine how the air is imagined in material terms. Built environment sustainability is much more than the technical questions of design and engineering. Indeed, what has been revealed here is that, while it is recognised that efforts towards sustainable building design and ‘green’ architecture have clear environmental benefits, if the ambitions of architects, designers, and visionary bureaucrats are to be realised a much wider debate is required, one that takes us back and forth, in and out of the material and social, the tangible and the intangible. Only then can more critically engaged, multivector discussions about built environment sustainability have the air they need to breathe. Acknowledgments. This research was supported under Australian Research Council’s Discovery scheme, “Cool Living Heritage in Southeast Asia: sustainable alternatives to air-conditioned cities”, DP120102448. The author would also like to acknowledge the Asia Research Institute, NUS, Singapore, which kindly supported an earlier version of this paper for a workshop on ‘Recycling Cities’, August 2011, and the three reviewers who offered very helpful feedback on the paper. 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