Last week, we toured the enigmatic A-school basement to get a look at the systems that create the building we all know and love. In our conceptual studio projects it is hard to imagine incorporating the complex web of ducts and machinery that carry water and conditioned air throughout our abstract designs. The tour reaffirmed my aspirations toward designing only at small scales at which these massive technological interventions can be avoided. It seems slightly ridiculous to have this large scale operation going on in the basement when the building temperatures aren’t even comfortable for most of the year. But it is reflective of what we have come to expect in terms of comfort. As Bill mentioned in class, we have a narrow range of adaptability when in comes to temperature and that has influenced the design of public buildings like the A-school for the last half-century.
I found this New York Times article which talks about the U.S. demand for air conditioning in comparison to other countries and how we got here in the first place. Another article I found on ArchDaily talks about the increasing size and population of cities and the resultant disconnect from nature that began as far back as the Agricultural Revolution and significantly increased with the Industrial Revolution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/sunday-review/oh-to-be-warm-in-summers-heat.html
http://www.archdaily.com/182923/7-billion-and-counting-homo-sensus-in-an-urban-world/
We have grown comfortable in our defiance of nature and also less resilient. It is difficult to imagine returning to a world without air conditioning. Instead, it should be thought of as progressing to a higher level of adaptability. Some of the evidence in these articles offers hope that this is possible. Some disasters like a nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan have reduced the amount of energy available which has forced major buildings to reduce their use of air conditioning. It is unfortunate to think that it always takes a disaster to invoke change, especially since we tend to revert back to the old ways once the disaster is forgotten. But these incidents do show that we can overcome the conditions to which we have become accustomed.
Because these conditions have arisen through the built world, the solution is in design. It’s interesting to see a building like the A-school that seems to be stuck between two eras. Designed in the middle of the 20th century, the school seems to be trying to be modern but is held back by the plastering of red brick on the face. It is also held back by the conventional use of air conditioning systems that create seal the building off from the outside world. We often open the windows year round to try to balance the indoor temperature with the outdoor. One of the items mentioned in the article was that often buildings cannot even operate without their air conditioning systems because of the poor air quality and need for circulation or because windows are not operable. As the New York Times article mentions, just as the mantra for light was “the more the better,” so it is for air conditioning. However, that idea is changing for light and therefore it can change for air conditioning as well. The approaches we have seen in class towards using the natural systems will be the solution. The Earthship projects that I studied in my research project use no air conditioning systems at all, only the natural wind and sun patterns channeled by the desin.
These are design issues that we will be addressing in our future projects. If for no other reason, we should address them so we don’t have to answer a critic by saying “Oh, I did that because I needed the HVAC system to fit.”
My Life in Systems 