The Tyranny of AC

a piece I wrote for a professional writing workshop:


Every summer I put an air conditioner in our bedroom window.  Most of the time it's off.  I hate using it.  But, a few days each summer it gets so hot that our window fan just can’t cut it any more.  So I turn the AC on before we go to bed.  


When I wake up in the morning, I always feel much more tired than on other days. 


I can’t figure out why, but I feel it every time.  My theory is that I sleep in some kind of coma while it’s on.  The AC makes a humming noise that drowns out all other sounds (even my snoring) and the temperature is perfectly constant.  The whole world disappears.  You’d think it would be great for sleeping – and maybe it is.  It’s just not so great for waking up.

AC is one of the great transformative elements of modern architecture.  It’s allowed us to build bigger and more consistently.  It’s let us build in hostile climates.  And it’s helped us make hospitals cleaner and manufacturing more precise. 

After a half century of universal AC, we expect that buildings (any building, every building) should be unchangingly comfortable.  They should have uniform lighting, constant temperature, no breeze, no humidity, no smell.  They should be like goldilocks’ bed: not too cold, not too hot, but juuust right.  And they should be that way no matter what's happing outside.

Think about that.  Think about your office.  Has the AC ever broken in the summer?  Have you ever thought about opening a window then realized that you couldn’t?  Were you surprised that you didn’t know you couldn’t?  Have you ever looked out the window, then gone outside for lunch and realized it was much hotter or colder than you thought – or that it was raining?  Were you surprised?

Of course, stability can be good; in some situations, it’s absolutely necessary.  If the temperature varied dramatically in a hospital, people could die.  If an office were so humid that dew formed on the desks in the morning, the office computers wouldn’t last very long.  But it’s easy to take it too far.

Because we expect buildings to be perfect, architects design offices and homes as if they were hospitals.  We install complex HVAC machines to keep our indoor environment at the perfect temperature.  We lock the windows so nobody can defeat the careful environmental control.  This is important in some settings (like microchip manufacturing and operating rooms). But rarely.  It has no place in our offices, our schools, or our homes.

A building should breathe.  It should acknowledge the seasons and celebrate the weather.  It should have variable lighting, temperature, humidity, even smell that changes with the day, the seasons, and the years.  A building should reflect its place and time.  It should have natural materials that are durable, but that age gracefully.  Most of all, a building should challenge us to feel the world around us.