Climate unchanging
The Thermal Monotony of heating and cooling
Imagine if you ate the same thing all the time — meal after meal, snack after snack, day after day.
It would get very boring, very fast. Our taste bud and senses would get inured to eating the same ingredients. We’d rob ourselves of the enjoyment of all the variety and pleasures of different foods.
Gail Brager, professor at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, thinks we might be doing something like that with climate controlled spaces.
In our modern lives, we spend about 90% of our time indoors. And we heat and cool those spaces within a range of a few narrow degrees.
Brager and others spoke on 99% Invisible about the rise of air conditioning, and its rapid and wide-ranging impact on society.
Among other effects, air conditioning allowed for the summer blockbuster movie in theatres, mass migration to states like Arizona and Florida, powerful Republican voting blocks among aging snow birds, and mass-produced architecture that didn’t need to rely on geographic-specific design for seasonal temperatures.
