Afflicting the Comfortable

We tend to notice infrastructure most when it’s not cooperating with our plans. On my way to e-flux last Saturday, the C train wasn’t operating, so I took the B25 bus. The bus cooperated with me, but at about half the expected pace, so I was glad I had (unsuccessfully) planned to stop for another errand en route and left home an hour early. I would never have made it to the panel on time otherwise.

When I finally arrived, I might have not noticed the slightly uneven white noise of the heater, had I not been primed to tune into its presence—and not just because of the subject matter of the event, the New York launch of After Comfort: A User’s Guide, presented by e-flux Architecture. Recently, I went to a guided group meditation where several of us noted in the debrief that we mistook the sound of the radiator for that of a person dozing off. When I meditate at home, I sometimes notice my own radiator’s erratic hissing. During the peaks of the COVID-19 pandemic, I learned that many of NYC’s radiators are designed to operate with the windows open. HVAC systems, perhaps, are the respiratory systems of our built environment—we take them for granted until things go wrong.

At e-flux, Daniel A. Barber, co-editor of the User’s Guide, introduced the panelists, a group that had not participated in the publication but instead expanded on its topics. Barber pointed out the heating device in the room, visible only to him, and noted that we are only able to inhabit many of the spaces we do because of systems like it, most of which depend on fossil fuels.

Dorit Aviv (UPenn) noted that cooling is the fastest growing use of energy in buildings, expected to triple within the next thirty years. This isn’t just because of global warming, but also because air conditioning is becoming accessible in countries where it was previously inaccessible. Aviv posited that we can’t simply say that “we don’t want cooling anymore” —given recent deadly heat waves like the one that hit the western U.S. and Canada in June 2021.

Alternative cooling methods are necessary, but building codes make them difficult to implement. Bobby Johnston and Ruth Mandl said that their architecture firm, Co-Adaptive, has addressed this problem by expanding into construction to take greater control of the entire material lifecycle. Florian Idenburg (SO-IL) spoke of three types of building envelope: regulatory, physical, and economic. He suggested more permeable barriers might replace the typical hermetic building exterior, thus shifting the relationship of a home to the space around it.

“Do we hermetically seal everything?” Idenburg asked. According to building code, yes, we do. Only clear delineations of “inside” and “outside” are permitted. Today’s spaces were built to these standards, and for specific conditions—think again of those radiators meant to be operated with the windows open. As we move beyond comfort, codes might change, as might infrastructure. We might learn to cooperate with our environment more, instead of expecting it to cooperate with us.