ecs final reflection paper

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7 The Unnecessary, Unhealthy Luxury(That No One Would Give Up) The U.S. government gave an unintended endorsement of air condition- ing in 1959 when the U.S. Weather Bureau announced the creation of its Discomfort Index, a calculation of heat-and-humidity that was meant to provide an easy guide to the climates of various American cities. In response, Chambers of Commerce in a number of locations objected strenuously to the term ‘‘Discomfort’’; that word could scare off tourists. Almost immediately, it was renamed the Temperature-Humidity Index. As that was too long a name for the public tongue, it soon abbreviated itself to the pure-and-simple Heat Index. Whatever it was called, members of the air conditioning industry could be (privately) overjoyed. It put people in mind of cooled air.

The industry could be delighted for another reason—if the universal adoption of air conditioning had been a battle, by the 1960s one could say that it had been won. To a great extent, people had been trained to expect it; for the first time in history, if John Q. Public turned into a doorway from the hot street and found that the air inside wasn’t cool, he would very likely wonder why. And rightfully so. Now, it was a rare public building that wasn’t cooled in summer. Places of amusement found that air conditioning was essential if they were to stay competitive, and so did major businesses. Even small-town stores were displaying the front-door decal that the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company had first offered to air-conditioned shops in August 1953, featuring the Kool Cigarettes penguin along with a cheery invitation: ‘‘Come in—It’s kool Inside.’’*

*On the other hand, the decade would see the slow demise of an institution—the frozen candy bar. As chocolate had been virtually unsaleable in hot weather, the notion of a frozen ‘‘summertime treat’’ had been dreamed up by manufacturers, as soon as freezers made it into stores, as something of a Hail Mary marketing move. Even though writer Joel M. Vance remembered the frozen Milky Way as having the consistency of ‘‘a sweetened bar of iron,’’ the public enthusiastically responded, keep- ing candy companies humming through the hot months . . . until store air condition-

Basile, Salvatore. Cool : How Air Conditioning Changed Everything, Fordham University Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/miami/detail.action?docID=3239912. Created from miami on 2017-08-14 13:43:46.

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A steadily rising number of householders went along with the trend. Some of them might have been helped by air conditioning’s Hollywoodi- zation in films like The Seven Year Itch, in which a man’s attraction to neighbor Marilyn Monroe is matched only by her attraction to his air conditioner. The 1960 census showed that close to 13 percent of Ameri- can homes had air conditioning in at least one room, with the number climbing all the time (it would jump to nearly 37 percent by 1970). Even cars were catching up. And there was still another indicator, more casual but nonetheless powerful; the abbreviation ‘‘a/c,’’ once a technicians’ term, was entering the national vocabulary. Anyone in the business could say it was a foregone conclusion—conditioned air was making the whole world happy.

But there were detractors, and they had existed when air was first being cooled. Steele MacKaye, proud of his ice-and-fan system at the Mad- ison Square Theatre back in 1880, had received the occasional complaint from audience members who found the theater too chilly for their liking. Alfred Wolff, fine-tuning the refrigeration equipment at the New York Stock Exchange in 1903, would be told that too-cool temperatures could kill off the city’s stockbrokers. Ever since the 1920s, there probably had been no movie theater, anywhere, whose air conditioning hadn’t come in for criticism: A story had it that one long-ago exhibitor, anxious to prove that his theater was indeed a frosty retreat in hot weather, proudly ran a full-page ad consisting of nothing but angry letters from patrons who had caught colds from his cooling system.

A major reason for such clashes was comfort—which, no matter what any engineer said, was very much an individual feeling. It was an undeni- able fact that air conditioning had made some uninhabitably hot places wonderfully comfortable. It was also undeniable that the technology had been abused by many users, making some of those places colder in the summer than they ever might be in the dead of winter (all that icy ‘‘adver- tising air’’ spilling out the doors of those movie houses . . .). The spread of conditioned air had forced temperature-sensitive people to carry wool- lies with them in July. Many of them didn’t like it.

And, as was still the case for a number of puritanical souls, air condi- tioning was unnatural. It even looked strange, with machinery that often made it conspicuous. New buildings were crowned not with elegant spires but with cooling towers. Older buildings, even some of the most

ing made frigid chocolate obsolete. Ever after, sentimental summertime gourmets would be forced to freeze their own.

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architecturally notable, were disfigured by rows of hastily-plopped-in win- dow units. This was understandable; sometimes the estimate to cool a building centrally was higher than its initial construction cost. One 1920s- vintage courthouse in New York boasted a painstakingly detailed Art Deco lobby. Its window had been casually chopped out to hold two air conditioners, one balanced a bit crookedly above the other.

Absolutely, this would create some bad PR. People who really despised mechanical cooling could point to the title of Henry Miller’s 1945 harangue on the soulless mechanized commercialism of America, The Air- Conditioned Nightmare—inaccurately; other than its title, the book never did get around to discussing the subject of air conditioning. (And Marcia Ackermann pointed out that, once Miller’s writings took off, he moved to a large California house that ‘‘almost certainly’’ had air conditioning.) Nevertheless, Miller’s bad-boy intellectualism was shared by The New Yorker, which throughout its history seemed to have viewed air condition- ing with amused disdain. This implied scorn finally crystallized into open hostility in the summer of 1959:

How useless now to argue that in the old days electric fans blowing across

cakes of ice kept saloons at a temperature that was one of the pleasures

of summer instead of a simulacrum of winter. . . . The dodges for coping

with the heat that New Yorkers learned in three centuries of summers

have become superfluous, and in some cases hazardous. The long drink

is an irrelevancy; if you arrive in a bar, after a few steps in the street,

longing for a Tom Collins, half a minute of the temperature inside influ-

ences you to change to a hot toddy. Cold foods lose their charm as

quickly; at the first blast of frozen air, the customer decides to stick to

steak. . . . It was a fine city until they started improving it.1

An impassioned indictment, but a sharp-eyed reader might have found it laughable considering that the rest of the issue featured an advertisement for Carrier (the copy cooed, ‘‘We’ll take the basement apartment. Carrier can air condition anything!’’), along with other ads scattered throughout that stressed the air-conditioned comfort waiting at the Roseland Ball- room; the Waldorf-Astoria, Pierre, St. Regis and Plaza hotels; the Beau Soir and Maison Pepi restaurants; and five different Broadway theaters.

Not that The New Yorker was alone. Whether as a result of genuine dislike or natural human perversity, by the time that air conditioning was becoming ubiquitous, plenty of observers had decided to hate it, and to somehow link it with the place where it was usually found, the office

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building, as a dark symbol of The Decline of the City. Life now com- plained of ‘‘unimaginative boxes of air-conditioned office space which increasingly dominate U.S. urban architecture’’ and sneered at those boxes as ‘‘air-conditioned merry-go-rounds.’’ The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada condemned ‘‘the sterile ideal of the completely air conditioned box.’’ The American Machinist wrote, ‘‘People tend to go a bit stir crazy in today’s highly touted sealed-in (all air-conditioned, no win- dows that open) office buildings.’’ And a conference involving Columbia University, along with the American Institute of Architects, described a scenario in which

it would be possible to go from an air-conditioned train to air-conditioned

office and back again without coming into contact with ordinary unpro-

cessed air. . . . [We might] yawn our way through a totally artificial life

within the city proper, with the air-conditioned taxi taking the place of

the air-conditioned commuter train. We might, that is, if there were more

to the notion that we have succeeded in producing ideal conditions

indoors. As a matter of fact, we have not. The sealed office building is a

pretty good place to work, better than an old-fashioned one most of the

time, especially under urban conditions of dirt and noise. But anyone

who has worked in such a building soon learns that it is far from ideal.2

Even Frank Lloyd Wright—who had spent decades claiming that he had started the whole thing with his completely sealed and air- conditioned Larkin Building and had then gone even further with his completely sealed and air-conditioned Johnson Wax Administration Building—blithely and unapologetically reversed himself. In his 1954 book The Natural House, he stated, ‘‘To me air conditioning is a dangerous circumstance. The extreme changes in temperature that tear down a building also tear down the human body. . . . I can sit in my shirt sleeves at eighty degrees, or seventy-five, and be cool; then go outside to 118 degrees, take a guarded breath or two around and soon get accustomed to the change.’’ Then there was the day he sat down for a drink at the Plaza Hotel with a New Yorker reporter, found the atmosphere unpleas- ant, and berated the waiter for the temperature: ‘‘Air-conditioning! Too cold! You know, this air-conditioning has killed more good men than can be accounted for.’’

The most interesting thing about such potshots was that the general public ignored them. It was all well and good to complain about the ‘‘artificiality’’ of air conditioning if one had the financial resources to skip

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town when it became too hot, but the average citizen, who had to work throughout the summer, and whose bedroom received no nighttime breeze, could not have cared less about Mr. Wright’s directions for learn- ing to love the heat. And the comfort provided by a $150 air conditioner was just too logical to pass up. Popular Science spoke for many people in 1966 when it wrote, ‘‘Home air conditioning, once a sure sign of plush living, has suddenly become a way of life for practically everybody.’’

Not only homes were affected by this new standard of comfort. As early as 1957, Manhattan’s Lincoln Center for the Arts had issued a flat confession of the outmoded state of the Metropolitan Opera House— interestingly, leading off not with the lack of space or the antiquated stage facilities but with the futility of trying to make its air comfortable. ‘‘The Metropolitan Opera House, although nostalgic, is obsolete. It cannot be air-conditioned, hence its economic use is limited. . . .’’ Sure enough, by 1966 there was a new, air-conditioned Met, joining the other new, air- conditioned performance spaces at Lincoln Center. And the Old Met was rubble.

When even the new elephant house at the London Zoo was climate- controlled, it was probably no surprise that the cooling of the 1964–65 World’s Fair—the most extensively air-conditioned fair ever, down to the cars of the Monorail—was no longer newsworthy. (A more appropriate sign of the times might have been the discovery, just before the Fair opened, that a motor belonging to one of the Maryland Pavilion’s air conditioning units had been stolen.) Rather than the Fair, the public was fascinated by the 1965 opening of the Harris County Domed Stadium, otherwise known as the Houston Astrodome. Houston had once been touted as ‘‘one of the most air-conditioned cities in the world,’’ even boast- ing a network of air-conditioned tunnels connecting major buildings; now that slogan was spectacularly demonstrated in the world’s first air- conditioned baseball diamond. The eighteen-story-tall structure was equipped not only with a transparent roof but with a system that would bring in 250,000 cubic feet of fresh air each minute, cool it to 72 degrees, and keep it there, thereby setting a record for ‘‘the world’s largest air- conditioned room.’’ If sport itself wasn’t revolutionized by the Astro- dome, attending games was. Even though Sports Illustrated worried that fans would be ‘‘coddled’’ by such surroundings, domed stadiums began to spring up all over the world.*

*Even Carrier would get involved, teaming with Syracuse University to erect the Carrier Dome in 1980 . . . a structure that had no air conditioning. In response to the

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The Houston Astrodome, ‘‘The Eighth Wonder of the World.’’ The air conditioning obviously worked well; spectators could buy not only cold beer

but also hot toddies. (Photo: Jet Lowe, Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey)

Things went even further in 1968 when the Astrodome was joined by the huge amusement park Astroworld. Taking into account the Texas heat, it treated visitors not only to the Alpine Sled, which propelled them through a snowstorm that provided real snow, and the Lost World, which took them on an African river voyage in open-sided boats that provided cooled comfort—but outdoor waiting areas and picnicking sites were air-conditioned, along with ‘‘air relief’’ stations spotted throughout the park. Fred Hofheinz, Houston’s mayor, later said that ‘‘without air- conditioning, Houston would not have been built at all. It just wouldn’t exist, that’s all.’’

However, there was a problem on the horizon. All over the world, but particularly in America, the electric grid wasn’t prepared to handle such

inevitable snickers, it was explained that the Dome was used only during the aca- demic year.

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demand. Ever since the postwar years, utility companies had eagerly anticipated a growth in power usage, spurred on by a new and tempting variety of electric appliances—including air conditioning. The Edison Electric Institute and General Electric had even turned consumption into its own reward in 1957 when a clutch of media celebrities headed by TV spokesman Ronald Reagan introduced the Gold Medallion Home. It was simple to qualify for this accolade: A homeowner needed only to install enough extra wiring and appliances to use electricity for every household function, from cooking to dishwashing to heating and cooling. For his pains, a Gold Medallion Home owner would get a small bronze plaque mounted on the outside of his home, assuring neighbors that the inmates were going to live better electrically. In return, utility companies delightedly estimated that they would get an additional $300 per year in electric billings from the homeowner.

But once customers had become used to the idea of ‘‘electric living,’’ the power supply wasn’t able to keep up with the exploding market. The 1960s saw a whole series of blackouts and brownouts that affected Ameri- can cities—many of them in the Northeast (and particularly New York City), most of them in the summer months, nearly all of them blamed on people using cooling equipment: ‘‘The growing use of air conditioners was reported also to be contributing to the higher demands.’’ ‘‘The police blamed widespread use of air-conditioners for the blackout.’’ After highly publicized blackouts in 1959, 1960, and 1961, New York’s Consolidated Edison gave a press conference in late June 1963, stating that the chances of another major blackout were ‘‘minuscule.’’

Less than a month later, there was another blackout. The situation was only going to deteriorate with time, as was demon-

strated in November 1965 when a gigantic power failure resulted in a blackout that stretched from New Jersey to Ontario and left 30 million people in the dark. With that debacle still a sour memory, there was worse to come the following July when 100 degree temperatures stretch- ing across much of America caused blackouts and brownouts in a number of cities, including Omaha, St. Louis, Boston, and New York.

The New York Times commented, ‘‘The heavy drain of air-conditioners was said to be a major cause of these local failures.’’

Washington’s Hot Air (Part VIII)

By this time, so many Americans had air conditioning that there was no longer any real titillation factor offered by knowing that it was used by Washington politicians. A number of those politicos made up for this,

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however, by treating air conditioning with what could only be called eccentricity.

As the 1960 presidential contest between John F. Kennedy and Rich- ard Nixon was enlivened by a series of four televised debates, the debates themselves were enlivened by reports of the candidates’ clashing opin- ions about the most pleasant temperature for debating. Their reactions to the hot lights were very different, a fact that showed plainly during their first encounter; Kennedy appeared comfortably relaxed, while viewers saw a copiously perspiring Nixon, mopping off in view of television cam- eras when he thought no one noticed.

A week later, the second debate was held in a studio that had been cooled to 64 degrees. Nixon might have been happy about it, but Kennedy wasn’t; a Kennedy aide was dispatched to the basement to find a Nixon aide standing guard over a dialed-down thermostat, which resulted in the Kennedy aide’s threatening to bring in the police. The Nixon aide retreated, and by air time the temperature had climbed back up to 70 degrees. The third debate found the candidates on opposite coasts and debating by split-screen: a good thing for Nixon, as it gave him a Los Angeles studio all to himself and he was able to have it cooled to the temperature he found ideal, 60 degrees. He perspired anyway. Kennedy won the election.

When the Kennedy family moved into the White House, they discov- ered that the Truman-era central system ‘‘emitted blasts of either frigid or torrid air.’’ Worse, it seemed to fold under crowd pressure. When the President gave a televised address to the nation in July 1961 from the Oval Office, part of the nationwide reaction was surprise at his uncharac- teristically sweaty look. It had been caused by the TV lighting, along with the body heat of nearly fifty people who were crammed into the room behind the cameras, overwhelming the cooling. After that night, Kennedy banned extra guests from White House telecasts and insisted on having a fan at floor level to blow up at his face.

While Kennedy was a Massachusetts native who seemed relatively comfortable with the Washington climate, Lyndon B. Johnson was a Texan who did everything possible to stave it off no matter where he was. His hometown retreat, the ‘‘Texas White House,’’ was air-conditioned, and so was its airplane hangar. Even the nearby Johnson City Christian Church (the President’s own congregation) received a $4,000 gift from LBJ, specifically earmarked for the installation of cooling equipment. In nearby Austin, presidential offices in the Federal Building were thor- oughly air conditioned; as Johnson was told at move-in time, ‘‘You’ll be

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able to freeze oranges on your desk, Mr. President.’’ And in Washington, it became common knowledge that LBJ had a clear set of priorities. He would be seen walking around the Executive Mansion, turning off unneeded lights—but at the same time, extra cooling power had been added to the White House system as soon as the Johnson family had moved in. The First Family’s quarters were kept chilly enough that the President was rumored to sleep under an electric blanket in summer.

An even greater fan of air conditioning was Johnson’s successor, Rich- ard Nixon. As his own feelings about heat had already been reported in the media years before, no one was surprised when Mrs. Nixon showed a reporter his newly renovated White House ‘‘hideaway’’ in 1969 and said, ‘‘He has a fire in here every night and plays classical music on the phono- graph. We always have a fire, even in summer. Air-conditioning, you know.’’

At an earlier time Nixon’s addiction to chilled air, like Johnson’s, might have been seen as a charming quirk. But when Nixon entered the presidency, air conditioning was already commonplace, and the big news angle wasn’t its oddity. Utilities were beginning to raise prices, brownouts were becoming an unhappy summertime norm, the Gold Medallion Home had turned into a power-gobbling albatross, and the 1950s predic- tion of too-cheap-to-be-metered electricity was recognized as an impossi- ble dream. The political viewpoint on air conditioning quickly pivoted away from snickers at its fat-cat luxury to a much more practical angle: worries about its rising operating cost. And there were those who pointed at it as a drain on the country’s resources.

With worries about the national energy supply first being voiced to the public, the words ‘‘environmentalism’’ and ‘‘ecology’’ began to pop up, even though they were used primarily as cocktail-party chatter. The first Earth Day took place in April 1970; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began its work only four months later with a strong tilt toward energy conservation. And when it came to energy supply, air condition- ers, famous for their big electrical appetites, were the first appliances to be examined. In 1972 the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers announced the creation of the Energy Efficiency Ratio (EER), a ‘‘volun- tary’’ rating that would be applied specifically to air conditioners. Measur- ing energy drain against cooling power, units were rated on a scale from 1 to 10 (that initial batch of air conditioners justified the concern, as not one got a rating better than 8.6). That spring, New York City stores dis- played the first EER ratings on air conditioner hang-tags. They confused

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customers and annoyed salesmen, some of whom were caught impa- tiently telling buyers that the ratings ‘‘weren’t important.’’ Even so, the idea spread across the country, and it was so successful that it was soon applied to other home appliances.

Nixon tried to do his bit during the summer of 1973 by making an Energy Policy Statement that announced some conservation measures, Washington-style. One of them was ‘‘reduction in the level of air- conditioning of all Federal office buildings throughout the summer.’’ He also recommended to the American homeowner, ‘‘Raising the thermostat of an air conditioner by just 4 degrees, for instance, will result in a saving of an estimated 15–20 percent in its use of electricity.’’ Considering his own extensively publicized habit of air-conditioned roaring fires, how- ever, that particular recommendation drew little more than jeers from the public.*

That October, the situation deteriorated when Middle East oil produc- ers abruptly decided on an embargo. With oil shipments seriously cur- tailed and shortages at gas stations, the United States faced a full-blown energy crisis. The electronic and print media responded with great relish. And air conditioning suddenly became a handy bogeyman for the coun- try’s wastefulness; one report pointed out that the nation used only 4 percent of its energy for air conditioning, but American air conditioning represented more than half of all the air conditioning used in the world. Everyone lined up to say something about it. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader railed against home units for their ‘‘inefficiency.’’ So did Consumer Reports. The Federal Energy Office recommended that home thermostats be set to 78 degrees. Authorities ranging from politicians to popular writ- ers lined up for interviews, many suggesting that air conditioning be seriously curtailed or even eliminated. As some of them were nonchalan- tly suggesting that it be curtailed even in sealed buildings—a stupid sug- gestion, as occupants would have been not only overheated but also

*This President had another connection with air conditioning, more tenuous but more fateful. During Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, surrogate G. Gordon Liddy proposed that the GOP stack the deck with a bit of guerrilla warfare. He came up with ‘‘Operation Gemstone,’’ a series of acts (including wiretapping, blackmail, and kidnapping) designed to discredit Democrats and their supporters. One component would be ‘‘Turquoise’’—described as a ‘‘commando raid to destroy the air condition- ing’’ at the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami Beach. ‘‘Turquoise’’ was ruled out as being a trifle far-fetched. The White House settled for something they felt would be more practical: a burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters, the discovery of which kicked off the entire Watergate probe and ended in Nixon’s resignation.

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asphyxiated—and as virtually none of these authorities went on the record as stating that they were going to curtail their own air conditioning use, the public gave those ideas short shrift.

The oil embargo ended by March 1974, with a few lasting effects. At one end of the nonsense spectrum, the Federal Energy Office suggested that offices save money with higher summer temperatures and business- men deal with the extra warmth by going without neckties; this resulted in a grim delegation from the Men’s Tie Foundation’s immediately being dispatched to Washington for an urgent meeting, after which the Energy Office sheepishly reversed itself and re-recommended that gents just go ahead and loosen their collars. More seriously, electric rates went sharply up and didn’t come back down. And all the negative attention finally resulted in a new crop of air conditioners that were indeed more energy- efficient, some of them using half the power of their predecessors.

Nixon’s replacement, Gerald Ford, continued the message by asking the nation for a 5 percent reduction in energy usage, part of which could come from less air conditioning. This kicked off a flurry of press coverage, including a National Science Foundation survey that asked 602 house- holds for their reactions. It found that more than half of them ‘‘saw no connection between the energy shortage and their own households,’’ only 7.6 percent of them knew that a higher EER meant a more efficient air conditioner, and 36 of the households felt there was really no energy crisis at all.

Americans got a truly conservation-minded president in Jimmy Car- ter, even if they didn’t quite know what to make of him. As one story went, he had an early run-in with home comfort technology when he was Governor of Georgia and decided to conserve energy by turning down the executive mansion’s wintertime thermostat. In response, heating bills went up instead of down. Discovering that the heating system was elec- tronically linked to its air conditioning, would self-adjust if it were tam- pered with by the human element, and that it would cost more to remove the system than it would to pay the higher utility bills, he gave up on the idea.

Once Carter assumed the presidency, though, he was determined to prove the benefits not only of conservation but also of alternative energy sources. At his January 1977 inauguration, the nation learned that base- board heaters in the presidential reviewing stand were powered by solar energy. The very next day, he gave a statement in which he recommended that home thermostats be turned down to 65 degrees to save fuel, announced that this would be mandatory in federal buildings, and said,

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‘‘Today’s crisis is a painful reminder that our energy problems are real and cannot be ignored.’’ Less than two weeks later he repeated this in a televised address to the nation, emphasizing the idea of pitching in by wearing a cardigan sweater.

But the 1970s had been dubbed the Me Decade, disco fever was in, and selflessness was distinctly out. Carter’s address resulted in a short- lived fad for cardigan sweaters among the executive set, but otherwise not many people cared about his message, or for that matter even trusted it. A New York Times/CBS poll taken in late 1977 ‘‘shows that 51 percent of the public does not believe Mr. Carter’s assertions that there is a real shortage.’’ There were few other visible reactions to the news, except for a sudden burst of interest in ceiling fans; they might have been old- fashioned technology, but they used a fraction of the electricity of air conditioning. There was even a Wall Street Journal interview with a dealer who was capitalizing on the upscale market for refurbished antique speci- mens. ‘‘They’re novel, they’re efficient, and where can you find an air conditioner with the character of a fan?’’

Undaunted, the President tried other ways to set an example. Six wood stoves appeared in the White House and the presidential retreat Camp David; Carter even had $28,000 worth of solar panels installed on the White House roof to provide energy for water heating, showing them off in an al fresco news conference. Not only did they not serve as a model for other installations, but they became punch-lines for late-night comics and the Republican opposition. One right-wing commentator sug- gested that Carter campaign literature would make perfect firestarters for the wood stoves.

Up until now, Carter’s sights had been trained on heating, but air conditioning got involved in May 1979 when he pushed through an initia- tive to ‘‘order public and commercial building thermostats set no lower than 80 degrees in summer.’’ The public revolted, as did two federal judges in Albuquerque and Beaumont, Texas, who had their courtrooms set to 74 degrees and 70 degrees, respectively, and made sure that every- one in the country knew it. By the end of June, the initiative was ‘‘modi- fied’’ to allow buildings to be cooled to 78 degrees. Even so, it went unenforced and basically unnoticed.

Carter continued to have bad luck, much of it centered on energy policy. When a repeat oil embargo hit the nation in 1979, it was received with impotent anger by citizens who didn’t want to hear that they had been warned about it. A 1980 heat wave lasted for most of the summer, centering on the Midwest and the South and breaking innumerable

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President Jimmy Carter, demonstrating the new solar panels to reporters. At the time, he said that the energy crisis required ‘‘the moral equivalent of war.’’ Critics snickered and responded with the acronym MEOW. (Courtesy:

Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)

records; Dallas alone experienced 42 consecutive days of 100-plus– degrees temperatures. The public was helplessly transfixed by the heat, the inevitable brownouts, and the $20 billion loss from destroyed crops and livestock. Worst of all was the rising death toll, which would eventu- ally reach more than 1,200. There was bitterness, some of it unreasonably directed toward Carter as a doomsayer whose prediction had happened to come true.

In the end, air conditioning got to Carter in another way. Throughout the 1970s and before, the country had been experiencing a major popula- tion shift, with millions of people moving to the ‘‘Sunbelt’’ states of the South and Southwest. Scientists, sociologists, even pop historians agreed that one of the major reasons for the migration was the rise of air condi- tioning, which had made those states attractively livable—and attractive particularly to older, more conservative voters. This population shift redrew the political map of the nation, making it no surprise that former Gold Medallion TV spokesman Ronald Reagan handily trounced Carter in the 1980 election.

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An allergy sufferer, Reagan was an enthusiastic fan of air condition- ing. A good thing, too; by the summer of 1986, the White House system was being completely overhauled once again, having been deemed ‘‘inad- equate’’ by the National Park Service.

As to Carter’s solar panels, they had been languishing on the roof since Reagan’s election. During the overhaul, they were unceremoniously taken down.

Problems . . .

Anyone who had thought during those years that comfort cooling would somehow disappear for the good of humankind was mistaken; the 1980 census showed that 57 percent of American homes had air conditioning, a significant jump from previous indicators. The energy crisis and its belt- tightening created a lull in the industry, but it vanished as the world economy rebounded during the bonanza of the following decade, a period so spectacularly excessive that it was nicknamed the Roaring Eighties. But even though HVAC (for Heating/Ventilating/Air Conditioning) had been around for three-quarters of a century and was an absolute necessity for most buildings, at the same time it was receiving more criticism, including outright calls for its abandonment, than ever before. And not for its cost.

At the beginning of the 1970s a few lone researchers had been shocked to notice changes in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, in particular a thinning of its ozone layer. At first these changes were thought to be the result of exhaust vapor coming from supersonic planes. Then the magazine Nature suggested that methane was to blame; one expert claimed that ‘‘the flatulence of domesticated cattle is a major contributor.’’ Threatening as gassy livestock might be, it turned out that chlorofluoro- carbons, CFCs, were an even greater culprit. And one of the most widely used CFCs was that ‘‘outstanding scientific achievement’’ of 1928, ‘‘Refrig- erant R-12,’’ alias Freon. Ever since Thomas Midgley had first wowed the audience at the American Chemical Society with his blow-out-a-candle- with-the-gas trick, Freon had virtually locked up the market not only as an aerosol propellant but as the go-to refrigerant for air conditioners everywhere. However, that good fortune had a nasty side effect. Sprayed from aerosol cans, leaking from auto air conditioners, and escaping from damaged or junked cooling coils, Freon was drifting straight up into the stratosphere. There it would stay, maddeningly stable for up to a century, ever so slowly degrading into chlorine . . . and, ultimately, eating away at

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ozone. One report estimated that the atmosphere was playing host to 2.5 billion pounds of Freon.

The story hit the mainstream press in late 1974, electrifying the scien- tific community. As to consumers, they didn’t know what to think. The initial focus was on all the Freon being sprayed directly into the air from millions of spray cans (the Minneapolis Star jolted its readers to attention with the headline ‘‘Can Dry Armpits Mean World Crisis?’’); air condition- ers were assumed to be less of a problem, as the Freon sealed inside cooling coils was meant to stay put.

By 1978, manufacturers had removed Freon from aerosol cans. But the air conditioning industry was forced to move more slowly. With roughly 60 percent of Americans using some form of air conditioning in their homes, and all of them using Freon, an outright ban would put every one of those units under a death sentence. A new crop of refriger- ants was developed, but their own chemical idiosyncrasies meant that they couldn’t be injected into existing systems. Compromise was the key. Truth was, Freon wouldn’t ever be able to disappear completely from the marketplace.

From the early 1990s on, air conditioners of all types used other refrig- erants, but Freon had to be available to service older machinery. Its pro- duction was slated Absolutely to End in 1994, a deadline that was then stretched to 1995. And as it couldn’t be released into the atmosphere, from then on it would be extracted from defunct units, as cautiously as any biohazard, and recycled for reuse. Because of the fuss, its price-per- pound shot up from $1.00 to $15.00. Many auto air conditioning shops (which dealt with three-quarters of the Freon being used) stockpiled as much as they could handle—not an easy task, as the cans tended to leak— and there was even a black market for bootleg Freon. In 1995, the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed a U.S. Customs official who said, ‘‘Freon is right behind drugs as the fastest growing area of crime.’’

At the same time the Freon story was ramping up, there was another, more ominous problem. In the summer of 1976, Philadelphia hosted an American Legion convention at the grand Bellevue-Stratford Hotel: a spectacular turn-of-the-century architectural confection, a favorite of Main Line society, and, since the 1960s, completely air-conditioned. Start- ing two days after the convention began, some Legionnaires developed flu-like symptoms that escalated to full-blown pneumonia. Within a few weeks, more than 200 of those people would be sick enough to need medical treatment, and 34 of them would die. In the panic to find a cause, theories abounded that the Legionnaires had been felled by pesticides,

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biowarfare, nickel poisoning, parrot fever, ‘‘Refrigerant F-11,’’ and even ‘‘the fatal disease pantosomatitis’’ (which turned out not to exist).

After nearly six months of morbid press coverage and frantic search, the answer was found: Legionella pneumophilia, a previously undiscov- ered organism that was breeding in the cooling water of the hotel’s air conditioning system. Guests, employees, and even passersby on the street were routinely exposed to the conditioned air, which meant that they were inhaling microscopic droplets of the water along with a dose of Legionella.

Air conditioning installations the world over were quickly tested for bacteria, with frightening results; it turned out that 40 to 60 percent of them harbored Legionella. Worse, investigators dug up the information that there had been other cases of epidemic pneumonia starting in air- conditioned buildings, cases that went back to the 1950s.

People might not have given much thought to the fastidiousness of air conditioning machinery in days past, but they did now. Especially when they read interviews with public health experts that disgusted them: ‘‘After 10 or 20 years, almost all these systems have an accumula- tion of slime, fungi or bacteria . . . a prescription for trouble.’’ Another consultant told of inspecting ducts that were completely choked with years of dust, along with an occasional discarded lunch bag or beer can: ‘‘Ductwork is out of sight, and usually built without simple ways to gain access, so people just ignore it.’’ Aggravating the problem was the fact that, in the face of the energy crisis, building managers were trying to save money by bringing in less fresh air (which had to be heated/cooled) and recycling more of the inside air—a process that concentrated what- ever was contaminating the air in the first place. By the early 1980s, a specific term was being used to describe the problems that came with a building whose air was coming in too mechanically: Sick Building Syndrome.

In 1986, Consumers Union named air conditioning as one of the top fifty inventions ‘‘that have most influenced our lives.’’ Even so, it was becoming obvious that the decades-old fantasy of a tightly sealed build- ing, improving on the outside air by replacing every breath with ‘‘manu- factured weather,’’ wasn’t practical. Or healthy.

Washington’s Hot Air (Part IX, Green Edition)

Despite the crackle of bad press, air conditioning was still viewed with applause, as well as an occasional spark of surprise at the tricks it could pull. When the huger-than-huge 8,000-seat Basilica of Our Lady of Peace

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of Yamoussoukro was being built in the Ivory Coast in 1989, the New York Times reported, ‘‘To save electricity, engineers will cool only a 15- foot-high cushion of air, leaving the 380-foot-high dome to warm to tropi- cal levels.’’ In 1993, after the Sistine Chapel had its Michelangelo frescoes restored, they were protected by air conditioning that provided some of the most sophisticated climate control outside of a laboratory; Pope John Paul II declared that the engineers ‘‘have become co-workers with the painters in preserving these creations.’’ The following year, the Britain-to- France railroad tunnel that traversed the English Channel—the Chun- nel—was air-conditioned. Not merely the trains: the tunnel itself.

There was a persistent drumbeat of media information on all these topics, and the George H.W. Bush administration wasn’t immune; this was the President who called for the recycling and eventual phase-out of Freon, and for that matter Bush had the White House cooling system ‘‘renovated’’ in 1991. But it was his successor, Bill Clinton—with an assist from Vice President Al Gore, an aggressive environmentalist—who made more of an impact. On Earth Day 1993 Clinton announced the ‘‘Greening of the White House,’’ a project to shape up the Executive Mansion’s envi- ronmental performance. The project saved $300,000 each year in house- hold-running costs, and part of it was yet another retrofitting of the air conditioning system that aimed for 20 percent more efficiency. (From a personal standpoint, this was a good idea. Even when Clinton was a newly elected President, the Washington Post reported that he was allergic to a host of irritants, among them ragweed, pollen, and the family cat, Socks—and the paper helpfully suggested that he use air conditioning as much as possible.) But ordinary citizens who didn’t have high-level government access weren’t left out; in 1995 the Energy Star rating, origi- nally designed to reward the most energy-efficient electronic equipment, was expanded to take in air conditioners. And the EER had been not only improved but also expanded into the SEER, the Seasonal Energy Effi- ciency Ratio.

True to Washington form, those ratings became a political football. Three days before the end of Clinton’s term, the Energy Department announced a rule to begin in 2006 that would raise the efficiency of cen- tral systems by 30 percent. Less than four months later, the George W. Bush administration scaled back the efficiency mark to 20 percent.

This wasn’t to say that Bush was completely averse to environmental causes. When his home was built in Crawford, Texas, its heat and air conditioning came from a ‘‘geothermal’’ installation that used the laws of physics, aided by a web of underground piping, to extract heat from a

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building and move it into the ground; he called the system ‘‘environmen- tally hip.’’ As well, during his administration 167 solar panels were installed on the White House roof, generating power for an outbuilding and heating his swimming pool.

Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009 with an avowed com- mitment to greening; an idea, and a word, that finally had become chic. He pushed the idea of conservation via green home remodeling—telling an audience, ‘‘Insulation is sexy stuff’’—and rebates for energy-conscious remodeling (the program was nicknamed ‘‘Cash for Caulkers’’). The White House joined in the updating, and more solar panels appeared on the roof.

It was generous of the President to take an interest, as air conditioning evidently wasn’t important to him. The Daily Telegraph reported that he was ‘‘known to keep his Oval Office at temperatures reminiscent of his native Hawaii.’’ In fact, his personal aide Reggie Love told ABC-TV, ‘‘The thing that used to kill me is that the guy loves to ride around with the AC off in the summertime. And I get hot. And I’m sweating. And I’m like, it’s 80 degrees in this car. I’m going to pass out.’’

. . . and Possible Solutions

Around 1979, American businessman/traveler Christopher Hyland was organizing a lengthy vacation that would include some railroad travel through India. Discovering that the Maharaja of Jodhpur owned a spectac- ularly outfitted parlor car, he asked to charter it for his party. Not only was the Maharaja willing, but he threw in a stay at his palace.

When the Hyland party arrived, they discovered that the palace had its own way of keeping cool—a tatty for each guest room. In a concession to the twentieth century, there were no servants stationed to wet the tatties; they were automatically sprinkled with water that came from an arrangement of pipes running above each window.

After a surprisingly comfortable night’s sleep, they were told, ‘‘Don’t worry—the train will be very cool. It has air conditioning.’’ Sort of. Each sleeping compartment was equipped with a large porcelain vat, filled with chunks of ice, and an electric fan blowing on it.

‘‘I got into bed,’’ recalled Hyland, ‘‘looked at that fan, and thought, ‘This could be 1905.’’’

While the Maharaja’s household was simply doing for its guests what it had always done, in another way this was significant. Throughout India, and everywhere else in the world, mechanical cooling had been

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growing in leaps and bounds; but at the same, there was a growing feel- ing that standard air conditioning was no longer the best way of dealing with heat. In the effort to find an alternative system, perhaps older meth- ods, or extremely uncommon ones, would be worth another look.

As with earlier years, when Carrier’s Apparatus for Treating Air had to share the limelight with the Modine Ice-Fan and the Nevo, by the turn of the twenty-first century there had already been a string of other inventors with ideas of their own for cold-making. Some of those ideas were so cutting-edge that they couldn’t make it into the average house- hold. David Sarnoff’s 1950s-era prediction of ‘‘noiseless’’ air conditioning ‘‘with no moving parts’’—‘‘thermoelectric cooling,’’ using only the move- ment of electrical current to carry away heat—turned out to devour even more electricity than standard air conditioning; in the consumer market it never could get any further than the novelty stage, a single-tray ice cube maker that was installed in a few Chicago hotel rooms. But if it was too expensive to consider in a large form, it would prove invaluable in miniature. Once computers became universal, tiny thermoelectric air con- ditioners proved to be just the thing to cool their entrails.

Even more ahead of the curve was the idea of ‘‘thermoacoustic’’ refrigeration, which used high-intensity sound waves to ‘‘drive pressure changes that result in cooling.’’ Discovered in the nineteenth century, it became extraordinarily popular in the 1990s as a research subject, studied at universities from Canada to Australia. While the verdict at first was that ‘‘experimental thermoacoustic systems are not nearly as efficient as conventional air conditioners,’’ in 2004 the technology had come far enough that a thermoacoustic freezer was demonstrated in Ben and Jerry’s ice cream shops all over New York City. And Appliance Design in 2008 mentioned tests of ‘‘a commercial rooftop A/C unit.’’

With literally hundreds of refrigerants showing up to replace Freon, it was only a matter of time before their own drawbacks would become apparent; there was the much-publicized example of ‘‘Refrigerant HFC- 134a,’’ the standard replacement for Freon in automobile air conditioners, which turned out to be kind to the ozone layer but less than kind when it came to contributing to the ‘‘greenhouse effect’’ and global warming. When it became known that the same could be said for HFC-410a, R-125, R-32, R-143a, and a whole host of their cousins, some old-fashioned com- pounds were recommended as alternatives. Carbon dioxide hadn’t been a serious contender for decades, but it received another look, if only because it had no potential for harming the ozone layer. There was still

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more nostalgia when the International Institute of Ammonia Refrigera- tion, which had been marking time since the early 1970s, bounded to the forefront with publications such as ‘‘Ammonia: The Natural Refrigerant of Choice,’’ which made a virtue out of everything that everyone had ever hated about ammonia, including its knock-’em-dead pungency: ‘‘[I]t has an ozone depletion potential of zero. . . . Ammonia refrigeration has a proven safety record, in part because of the physical properties of ammo- nia, not the least of which is ammonia’s well-recognizable and easily- detectable odor. . . .’’

Then there was the substance that had been classified as ‘‘Refrigerant R-718’’—water. Even though the thoroughgoing chill of standard air con- ditioning had long since invaded the Southwest, evaporative (swamp) cooling never completely vanished from the scene. With its attractively low operating cost, during the last decades of the twentieth century it began to make something of a comeback and even to spread to other continents. Manufacturers from the United States to China offered cool- ers in every variety, including small-scale portables, large portables for outdoor use (one Indian company recommended its portables ‘‘for wed- ding parties’’), even gigantic units that could cool entire factories. But while they were cheap to buy and cheap to run, they were still at the mercy of outdoor humidity; not-dry-enough meant not-cool-enough.

That problem was mitigated when several companies played around with the evaporative cooling concept, formulating ways to chill the air while wringing moisture from it at the same time. One of the most prom- ising efforts, sponsored by the U.S. government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, made news in the summer of 2010 with the unveiling of the Dessicant Enhanced eVaporative air conditioner, or DEVap. Rather than cooling coils or refrigerant, the DEVap relies on a special polymer membrane, water, a desiccant solution to absorb moisture, and two sepa- rate streams of air to produce its coolth. The best news about this extraor- dinary system—at this writing, still in the testing stage and three to five years away from production—was that it will be able to cool and dry air while using up to 90 percent less energy than the most efficient standard air conditioner.

But there were systems that could, in theory, use little or no electric energy at all. Solar energy had been researched for decades, at venues ranging from the University of Florida to the government of Saudi Ara- bia, and some of this work had borne fruit; the United States Pavilion at the 1982 Knoxville World’s Fair was outfitted with 5,000 square feet of solar collectors to power the building’s air conditioning and hot water

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The heart of a DEVap. Left, a closeup view of the ‘‘membrane based heat mass exchanger’’; right, a prototype DEVap being laboratory-tested for

effectiveness and energy consumption. (Photo: Dennis Schroeder/NREL)

systems. Even more intriguing were other solar-based systems that substi- tuted a ‘‘thermal compressor,’’ which operated without any of the usual refrigerants, for the electrically driven model.

Many of these ideas were prototypes or untried concepts, and without serious financial backing they remained for years little more than curiosi- ties. Things changed, though, when the concept of ‘‘green architecture’’ moved from discussion into reality. In 1992, the National Audubon Soci- ety moved its New York headquarters to an abandoned 1891 building on Lower Broadway. As the Society had for several decades been concentrat- ing on the country’s ecological situation, the building would set an exam- ple with environmentally conscious remodeling: low-toxicity paints, reclaimed woods, and subflooring made from recycled newspapers. But the job went further with features that not only saved energy but also boosted the indoor comfort quotient: heat-blocking windows, ventilation that completely changed the indoor air six times more often than city regulations demanded—and, as a crowning touch, the Christian Sci- ence Monitor reported ‘‘a natural-gas, heat-transfer system for its air- conditioning system, instead of Freon.’’ The public was fascinated and the real estate community even more so, as the renovation was projected

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to save $100,000 each year in energy costs. Within a year, it was pro- nounced ‘‘one of the lowest energy-consuming office buildings in the country.’’*

By the time the World Congress of Architects met in Chicago in mid- 1993, 5,000 attendees discussed the situation thoroughly and came to an uneasy consensus; ‘‘glass energy hogs’’ around the globe might be stun- ning design statements, but they were economic as well as ecological disasters. If anyone needed persuasion, there was a perfect example within walking distance: Chicago’s own State of Illinois Center. The circu- lar 17-story steel-and-glass colossus had been designed in 1985 with double-glazed insulating windows that were vetoed—ignoring the lessons of Le Corbusier—because of budget problems. Instead, the building was constructed with single glazing, which meant that tenants had nothing other than the air conditioning to shield them from Chicago’s summer heat. It didn’t help. Even with the system running full blast, indoor tem- peratures occasionally reached 95 degrees. Management added $10 mil- lion in extra cooling machinery and installed 1,671 sets of Venetian blinds, but tenants still referred to parts of the building as ‘‘Death Valley’’ and ‘‘The Tropical Zone.’’

With more than 40 percent of the energy consumption of some build- ings going for air conditioning, developers and architects realized that some crucial changes had to be made. If for no other reason than the savings potential, the business community fell into line with this way of thinking.

A particularly imaginative solution to the problem was erected in 1996: Eastgate Centre, a combination office block and shopping mall in Harare, Zimbabwe. Even though the city has its own share of glass energy hogs, architect Mick Pearce moved resolutely away from that ideal in every aspect of the project from design to construction. Significantly, he considered Harare’s high elevation, which gave it comparatively temper- ate summers along with cool nights, and concluded that a building designed with the help of twentieth-century computer models could take advantage of some nineteenth-century climate control ideas, in particular thermo-ventilation. Eastgate Centre consists of two side-by-side buildings

*By happy coincidence, the building had been designed by George B. Post, the selfsame architect who had the New York Stock Exchange to his credit. As Post had been there for one of history’s very first large-scale air conditioning jobs, it was fitting that his name was now connected to a project that tried to modify the process to suit modern society’s new ecological needs.

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The State of Illinois Center—or, as one writer dubbed it, ‘‘a vast greenhouse filled with overheated bureaucrats.’’ (Photo: Primeromundo)

with a breeze-gathering space between them; thick concrete walls, which deeply shade windows and avoid direct glare; and an extraordinarily sophisticated ‘‘natural cooling’’ system that operates twenty-four hours a day to shunt the air upward through each floor and out through a series of chimneys. The system is so carefully planned that it keeps the complex at a uniform temperature while using only 10 percent of the energy spent in standard air conditioning.

These ideas worked well enough that they were adapted for use in London’s 2001 Portcullis House, which was built as additional office space for Members of Parliament as an across-the-road neighbor to the Palace of Westminster—and appropriately enough, in sight of its Central Tower, that nineteenth-century monument to thermo-ventilation. Indeed, Portcullis House has no conventional air conditioning; it relies instead on a combination of sun-shading construction, triple-glazed insulating windows, fourteen chimney-like ventilation stacks, and a system of fans. Fresh air is drawn in at the roof, routed to the lowest level of the building, cooled if necessary by being blown over pipes containing water pumped up from deep wells, then directed up through the building before exiting

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through the stacks. In practice this system has functioned efficiently in some ways but not in others, with uncomfortable humidity levels show- ing up as a recurring problem. And the building surprised its admirers when it was placed on a ‘‘Dirty Dozen’’ list of distinguished London build- ings that failed to hold their heat during the cold months. Still, it was viewed as a possible step in the right direction.

In the meantime, the steel-and-glass building proved that it could use its resources more efficiently when Frankfurt’s Commerzbank Tower opened in 1997. This ‘‘ecological skyscraper’’ was a remarkably sensitive one in terms of its energy use. It even had windows that could open.

‘‘The tallest naturally ventilated building in the world’’ was designed to take full advantage of the outside atmosphere. For maximum airflow, it was designed with an atrium running up its entire fifty-six stories. And in a surprising reversal of usual procedures, its windows worked. Of course it couldn’t be a complete return to the old days; to coordinate the times at which air conditioning would and wouldn’t be operating, and

An aerial view of Portcullis House, highlighting its ventilation stacks. (Author’s collection)

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windows could and couldn’t be opened, each room had its own ‘‘control panel’’ (red light, please don’t touch; green light, go right ahead). As to its cooling, the Tower’s brochure described the arrangement: ‘‘The building is cooled by a water-filled chilled ceiling system instead of the normal, problematic air-conditioning system. . . . Employees are able to control the temperature in their office[s] individually within a given range. . . . On roughly three-quarters of the days in a year, employees can regulate ventilation themselves by opening or closing the windows individually.’’

Even though Frankfurt’s moderate summers didn’t make for the most rigorous test of a building’s comfort capabilities, architects and critics from around the globe visited Commerzbank to see how well the Tower worked. While the Chicago Tribune wasn’t bowled over, either by the architecture or by the temperature control (and it snickered that the designers had perhaps gone overboard on the ecology, as the restroom washbasins supplied only cold water), it admitted that the Tower ‘‘demon- strates, as only a major monument built by a major corporation can, that the fledgling movement known as Green Architecture has moved deci- sively into the mainstream.’’

Before the Commerzbank Tower had even opened, it was being one- upped in New York by Four Times Square. When it opened in 1999, neither its 48-story height nor its steel-and-glass modernism was out of the ordinary; but as ‘‘the world’s first green skyscraper,’’ it was an abso- lute sensation. The exterior was clad in high-performance glazing that ‘‘let in light without affecting inside air temperature’’; the top 19 stories contained solar panels to generate electricity; and when it came to air comfort, Four Times Square, which would have to contend with far hotter summer weather than any building in Frankfurt, went the distance. The building provided tenants 50 percent more fresh air than city codes required, super-filtered and taken from 700 feet above the street. And cooling came from ‘‘gas-fired absorption chillers,’’ no CFCs needed.

With the construction of Four Times Square and the publicity that surrounded it, and then the worldwide introduction in 2000 of LEED Certification (for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) to reward energy-conscious construction, it became fashionable—hence urgent—for a skyscraper, and particularly its climate control, to be green. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, ecologically friendly build- ings arose everywhere, some of them gigantic, many with ingenious air conditioning schemes. ‘‘The London Gherkin,’’ 30 St Mary Axe, might have been whimsically shaped like a glass pickle, but its cooling plan was absolutely serious, with windows that opened automatically to ‘‘augment

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the air conditioning system with natural ventilation, an occurrence antici- pated to save energy for up to 40% of the year.’’* In the African desert– dry climate of Windhoek, Namibia, developers of the 21-story Mutual Tower realized that evaporative cooling would not only cost a fraction of standard air conditioning but would also make for healthier air, one of the touches that earned it the nickname ‘‘Namibia’s Tallest, Greenest Building.’’ And in the Middle East, where 70 percent of the region’s energy usage went for air conditioning, the Bahrain World Trade Center worked into its design three 95-foot-diameter wind turbines that could generate 15 percent of its electricity; better still, it tapped into Bahrain’s ‘‘district cooling’’ system, which took advantage of the island locale by using seawater as the source of cold that provided air conditioning to a whole series of buildings. Even super-skyscrapers became green; in 2001, Taiwan’s 101-story Taipei 101, for a few years the world’s tallest building, installed an immense plant that manufactured ice during overnight hours, when electricity was cheapest, and used the ice throughout the day as a cold source that allowed the building to use a fraction of the air conditioning equipment it would otherwise have needed. This gambit was popular in other places; buildings from San Francisco to New York to Barcelona have updated their systems and slashed their energy usage with stored-ice cooling.

Perhaps the ultimate example of corporate cooling with an environ- mental twist would be found outside of Abu Dhabi—Masdar City, the planned community that was announced in 2006 and had its first build- ings ready for occupancy three years later. Its six square kilometers were intended as the last word in green construction and green living: sustain- able building materials, electricity from solar panels, and cars replaced by battery-powered ‘‘Personal Rapid Transit’’ vehicles. And to cope with the desert heat there was a mix of ancient and ultra-modern strategies: High fencing around the city’s perimeter (to block hot breezes), narrow streets (to provide maximum shade), and ‘‘wind towers’’ (to shunt cooler air down to street level) were partnered with ‘‘solar umbrellas’’ in the city center that automatically opened during the day and closed at night, solar- powered air conditioning, continuing work on geothermal cooling . . . and

*In 2012, this author visited the Gherkin to get a first-hand look at the system and discovered, when an elevator got stuck between floors for an hour, that the sys- tem wasn’t quite universal throughout the building. During that hour, the occupants learned that the cars had been built without any cooling—or, for that matter, any ventilation at all.

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30 St Mary Axe, at a moment when its windows are closed. (Photo: Aurelien Guichard)

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The Unnecessary, Unhealthy Luxury (That No One Would Give Up) | 249

sometimes the ancient and the modern were combined; one of the central wind towers displayed an LED ‘‘beacon,’’ actually a tattletale electric sign that glowed red to inform city residents that someone’s energy consump- tion was too high.

As Masdar City headed toward its estimated completion date of 2016, proponents were ecstatic, while at the same time skeptics called it a ‘‘walled green Utopia,’’ ‘‘the ultimate gated community,’’ and ‘‘a green Dis- neyland.’’ Furthermore, they wondered if it could possibly happen any- where but in a monarchy with plenty of unused real estate.

The greening of commercial buildings, specifically the greening of their temperature control, was a very encouraging trend. But at the begin- ning of the 2010s, it hadn’t yet shown up in a home version. No doubt the problem is exactly the same one that bothered the air conditioning industry in the 1920s—new technology is money-saving only when it comes in a giant economy size.

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