Air Conditioning

When the British first came to India, they travelled across the country and many of them hated the place because of the weather.

The Massachusetts-born David Ochterlony represented the East India Company in the Delhi court in 1803 and he spent a lot of his time underground just to beat the heat.

Even today if you visit the homes built by the British in Lodhi Colony, New Delhi, which are used as government quarters, you find 20-foot-high ceilings. This was to defend against the heat. High ceilings allow hot air to rise. The rooms are ventilated at the top to allow the hot air to escape. Such architecture is hard to find these days because of air-conditioning.

In 1902, Willis Haviland Carrier discovered that printing presses used to struggle with curled sheets of paper because the air was far too humid. He came up with the idea of an air-conditioner which was essentially an amped-up refrigerator to regulate the humidity in the air evenly. For most of the early 20th century, air-conditioning was primarily used in factories where the air needed to be humidified.

After the Second World War, a new construction boom started in the US.

Between 1946 and 1965, 31 million new homes were constructed in the US, and for the people building those houses, air conditioning was a godsend. Architects and construction companies no longer had to worry much about differences in climate – they could sell the same style of home just as easily in New Mexico as in Delaware. The prevailing mentality was that just about any problems caused by hot climates, cheap building materials, shoddy design or poor city planning could be overcome, as the American Institute of Architects wrote in 1973, “by the brute application of more air conditioning”. As Cooper writes, “Architects, builders and bankers accepted air conditioning first, and consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they merely had to ratify.”

The glass and concrete towers that we are used to seeing across the world now was also the result of air-conditioning. Imagine the stupidity of building a greenhouse and then trying make sure that the air inside is comfortable. This trend has been taken to such extremes that today in many of these buildings there isn’t a thing called Windows.

In India, a technique later known as Brise-Soleil or Sun Breakers was used since the times of the Mughals to cool buildings.

Source: Study.com

It was later used by Le Corbusier when designing Delhi as well as Chandigarh.

Source: Medium

These are perfectly capable of keeping the interiors of buildings cool while deflecting the heat outside.

Unfortunately, new developments from India to Namibia are designed by international architects who consider air-conditioning a standard prerequisite in “modern” buildings. The architecture makes it impossible for people to survive in these buildings without air-conditioning.

New York uses about 10,000 MW of energy per second, during a heatwave this demand rises to 13,000 MW. This difference is almost entirely the result of air conditioning. The US uses as much electricity on air-conditioning as is used by all of the United Kingdom.

Today there are an estimated 1 Billion units of air-conditioning installed across the planet and it is anticipated that this number will go up to 4.5 billion by 2050. This is being forced to happen by poor design and terrible standard architectural practices.

The use of air-conditioners pushes up energy demand which still predominantly comes from fossil fuels. The use of fossil fuel increases the temperature further necessitating the need for air-conditioners. That is the vicious cycle the world is caught up in.