Ventopenings: Conditioning in Pandemic Times. Part 1—Built In
This is the first post in a three-part series.
Ventilation
Many underlying social patterns have been revealed and intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic. Alongside dramatic health inequities, ballooning wealth gaps, and systemic racism sits the seemingly more quotidian problem of mechanical ventilation. In the United States, and especially in urban areas, we have become vitally reliant on fossil-fuel powered heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, not only for comfort but for the viability of life in interior spaces. Life in our conditioned interiors has become even more precious and precise over the past few months as the pandemic forces many to spend even more time at home. As schools, universities, and workplaces open up, re-inhabitation of the spaces fled in March brings with it heightened attention to the ventilated conditions of the spaces in which we live.
While ventilation and conditioning have, of course, long been the concern of building scientists, the pandemic has brought these issues into public discourse. Zeynep Tufekci, in The Atlantic, carefully explained the debate around the aerosol nature of viral spread in “We Need to Talk About Ventilation.” Transmission of Covid-19, as Tufekci explains, is due to at least in part to the small, aerosol nature of the viral particles. It operates like a mist sprayed into the air, though invisible and often without moisture. Interior spaces, in other words, are more threatening than we had previously understood them to be. Another recent article in the New York Times confirms that this aerosol mist can, indeed, carry enough virus to infect someone when inhaled in, and can often be suspended far past the six feet of distance that has become a collective mantra. The characteristics of air in interior spaces, already the subject of much analysis for optimizing HVAC systems, have taken on a new layer of public health resonance. Induced movement of air, mechanical or otherwise, can mitigate or exacerbate the risks of collective life in interior space.
Tufekci’s central concern is the return to school. She is, in effect, describing a classroom when detailing the dangers of “super spreader events.” As she writes: “The super-spreader–event triad seems to rely on three V’s: venue, ventilation, and vocalization. Most super-spreader events occur at an indoor venue, especially a poorly ventilated one (meaning air is not being exchanged, diluted, or filtered), where lots of people are talking, chanting, or singing.” She expanded in a recent interview on NPR, emphasizing a dastardly characteristic of the virus: that in the majority of infected cases, spread is, in effect, relatively rare, and it is easy to let down one’s guard (or mask). However, some cases are very infectious, and when such a case is in the right conditions (the three V’s), spread can be catastrophic—super spreader events leading to numerous infections, that then inevitably lead to more infections, and on. Feeling like we are in control, and then not being at all, is how this disease propagates.
Figure 1. Suo Yang, Classroom Scenarios, 2020. From Siyao Shao, Dezhi Zhou, et. al., “Risk Assessment of Airborne Transmissions of Covid-19 by Asymptomatic Individuals Under Different Practical Settings” (2020). Courtesy Suo Yang, Richard and Barbara Nelson Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota.
Mechanical HVAC systems, left in an unadjusted, pre-pandemic state, can be both a problem and a solution. A study by Jiarong Hong and Suo Wang of the University of Minnesota found that the placement of air conditioning units or ventilation registers is essential, as forced air can produce “circulations zones called vortexes, and the aerosols keep rotating in this vortex . . . they are basically trapped” (Figure 1). This is not good. Hong’s and Wang’s research shows that well-intentioned turning up of the ventilation system can lead to unwanted results: only 10 percent of the particles is vented out, the rest either stay suspended or attached to surfaces. “Ten percent,” the researchers note, “is really a small number.”[1] To be clear, mechanical HVAC can help dilute or ventilate out the aerosol particles, but units may have to be rearranged or otherwise targeted to do so. Without careful study they risk making the problem worse; further complicating the terms and inputs of the already mentioned growth industry in the analysis of thermal interiors. As with so many things in our pandemic world, the issues and the terms have changed, and we need to adjust our standards and expectations accordingly.
“The building industry settled into a cultural and mechanical infrastructure that made air conditioning a necessary fact of contemporary life.”
Air Conditioning
Talking about ventilation; thinking about our dependence on machines for ventilation brings up a longer history of our collective reliance in air conditioning (Figure 2). Such a reliance was not inevitable. Over the last seventy years or so, the building industry settled into a cultural and mechanical infrastructure that made air conditioning a necessary fact of contemporary life. A huge carbon budget, as a result, is quite literally built in to our buildings and ways of life; the situation is more extreme in the United States but is relevant in cities and suburbs around the world (Figure 3). Air conditioning developed alongside the rise of the curtain-walled skyscraper and the spread of the suburban mansion after World War II; it lays beneath the debates of architectural theory and styles of the last few decades; it presumes and supports the more general imperative towards increasing economic growth.
Figure 2. Advertisement for the Anemostat Corporation’s “High Velocity Under-the-Window” ventilating unit. Published in Architectural Forum, December 1957.
Figure 3. Office in the Equitable Tower, designed by Pietro Belluschi, Portland, Oregon, 1947. This is the first fully sealed, conditioned building. ©Ezra Stoller/ESTO.
Air conditioning, and HVAC systems more generally, are intensely carbon dependent. The sealed office tower or mid-rise luxury apartment building, the great room in the suburban manse—a mechanical system for heating, cooling, and ventilation is necessary to make these spaces liveable, viable. In many cases, for example in hotels where HVAC costs are carefully optimized, windows are made so that they don’t even open. Contemporary building practices also tend towards materials that depend, to varying extents, on a narrow range of acceptable humidity and temperature variation—without a robust HVAC system, mold or decay would render such spaces unliveable.[2] I’ve taught a course on the history and theory of architecture and climate in a windowless basement room of the University of Pennsylvania’s Meyerson Hall; the student’s first assignment was to analyze the mechanical systems that made our very presence there possible (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Air handling unit, Meyerson Hall, University of Pennsylvania, photo, 2018. Photograph by William Braham, used with permission.
HVAC systems are powered by mechanical plants that usually draw directly from electrical or gas feeds into the building, and as such they connect both the most distant house or office in a city center to the penetrating, globalized regime of fossil-fuel extraction, processing, and delivery. It is not only the case that this fossil-fuel regime is rooted in labor exploitation, devastation of ecosystems, and profit-motivated corporate control; it is also a primary source of carbon emissions. Energy consumed for the operation of buildings accounts for at least 40 percent of the U.S. carbon budget; When we, here in the relatively placid United States, turn on the “air-co,” we are increasing inequities around the world; we are supporting corporate dominance over millions of lives and livelihoods; we are encouraging further exploitation and environmental degradation—all in addition to the accumulating carbon in the atmosphere. This embedded, infrastructural condition of collective reliance on carbon has led to, as Graeme MacDonald puts it, “acculturation to its hierarchy of material (and, increasingly, immaterial) forms and the manner in which [fossil fuels] dictate fundamental aspects of social life and organization.”[3]
Even before the virus, air in interiors was, however slowly and abstractly, killing us; or, at least, compromising opportunity and equity in the name of optimization and endless economic growth. And yet, to paraphrase Frederic Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of air conditioning. Comfort has come to define the parameters of a collective sense of civilization, or aspiration for it. This summer, stuck inside my house in the midst of an ongoing heat wave—maybe not a wave, just near-one hundred degrees Fahrenheit (thirty-eight degrees Celsius) every day for weeks—I have sweated, complained, sprayed myself with a hose. I have struggled to come to terms with a stark reduction of scholarly productivity, to accept the lethargy and discomfort of my teenage children. The pandemic has exacerbated these effects, this constant discomfort that has resulted from a refusal to air condition the small townhouse I share with my family in northwestern Philadelphia. Occasional rain has provided some relief, as we adjusted our patterns and expectations around the intensity of the heat and humidity.
“Even before the virus, air in interiors was, however slowly and abstractly, killing us; or, at least, compromising sociality and equity in the name of optimization and endless economic growth.”
In other words, a seemingly inexorable reliance on air conditioning, in the East Coast and South of the United States most intensely, has developed alongside other hallmarks of late capitalism, perhaps especially the persistent pursuit of economic growth, productivity, the optimization of interiors as spaces of work and domesticity—both in production, and in the reproduction of the conditions of production (Figure 5). The ironies, if that’s what they are, are difficult to avoid: we refuse to compromise on productivity and economic expansion even though we, or our children, and grandchildren, will be, most certainly, devastated by the atmospheric conditions that we are locking in through our daily practices (thereby threatening the productivity, economic expansion, and prospects for self-realization of current and future generations).
Figure 5. D. H. K. Lee, “Diagrammatic Analysis of Heat Exchange in Different Climates,” 1953. This drawing suggests the gendered, racial, and colonial biases embedded in the construction of normative physiological parameters to determine air conditioning standards. In Douglas H. K. Lee, Physiological Objectives in Hot Weather Housing: An Introduction to the Principles of Hot Weather Housing Design (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Housing and Home Finance Agency, 1953).
Figure 6. OMA, Rem Koolhaas, et. al., Elements of Architecture, 2014. This drop ceiling was installed in the Central Pavilion/Padiglione Centrale of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition, Fundamentals, La Biennale di Venezia. Photography by Francesco Galli. Courtesy la Bienalle di Venezia and OMA.
Without air conditioning there would be no skyscrapers as we know them; the sealed curtain wall is just the most visible of a range of design and construction parameters that rely on fossil fuel. Mechanical systems undergird the design of the built environment. I’ve demonstrated elsewhere evidence for the tightly entangled development of air-conditioning and modern architecture. The skyscraper was seen, especially in the period of economic acceleration right after the World War II, as salutary in part because it was a good way to use up the increased energy availability after the industrial war effort was stalled.[4] All of the stylistic debates around postwar modernism and postmodernism, perhaps it goes without saying, rest on an assumed foundation of air conditioning, it is the invisible center of architectural avant-gardism, the mechanical plant, hidden in the basement or screened on the roof, that makes all of the programmatic or formalist experimentation possible. At the same time ASHRAE and other regulatory bodies set out a field of pre-conditions with which architects and engineers continue to cooperate (Figure 6).[5] Even today, amidst augurs of climate doom, HVAC is not even questioned by most architects; such interrogations are not a major aspect of professional or student projects in most parts of the world, aside from exploring possibilities for efficiency and optimization, or the best use of consultants. Indeed, everyday conditioning and ventilation are even more vital, the key to opening up safely and allowing economic activity to continue in the midst of a pandemic.
Alternatives are discussed in the second part of this article.
Notes
[1] University of Minnesota Research Brief, “New Study Explores How Coronavirus Travels Indoors,” July 28, 2020.
[2] Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: Picador, 2008),18.
[3] Graeme MacDonald, “Research Note: The Resources of Fiction,” Reviews in Cultural Theory 4, no. 2 (2013): 10.
[4] See Daniel A. Barber, “Emergency Exit” posted on e-flux architecture.
[5] Susan Roaf, “A Disturbing Reason so few Buildings have Windows that Open,” Fast Company, August 12, 2020.
