Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic On a hot day in London I walk into the new entrance of the National Portrait Gallery for a moment of relief. I can recommend it. The lobby greets you with a soft, cool breeze. I walk up the stairs into a small gallery of death masks, casts used as funerary effigies or models for posthumous portraits, which includes the plaster form of Keats’s noble head and a gilded image of Francis Bacon. In the centre of the room, a likeness of William Blake looks into a humming transparent freezer containing Marc Quinn’s self-portrait made from his own frozen blood. In hot weather like this, cooler heads prevail.The chilled environment of the National Portrait Gallery on a warm day in August is a work of mechanical and architectural brilliance. The pleasant air temperature is part of a rejig of air-handling systems, now incorporating energy-efficient air conditioning and something called “heat recovery”, which means that energy from stale air is used to heat fresh air brought in from outside. The modernisation of this system, which included discreetly sliding piping between walls, has helped the gallery repurpose offices as galleries and open up 18 per cent more public space. But our comfort is not as simple as technology would have it seem. When I spoke to Professor Daniel A Barber, an architectural historian at the University of Technology in Sydney, he told me that air conditioning has given the impression that the problem of ventilation has found a technical fix and that we can simply “press a few buttons and everything’s fine”. Air conditioners are not a solution to heatwaves, however: they pump heat back into the street and add to the “heat island” effect, which makes temperatures even greater in densely populated places. And, of course, they tie us to the same fossil fuels that are causing our climate to become more sweltering. Cooling buildings, supply chains and industrial processes currently amounts to 7 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Even in the UK, where the demand is lower, it uses 10 per cent of all electricity. As early as the 1940s the American novelist Henry Miller, returning from his European exile, characterised the US as an “air-conditioned nightmare”. It’s a nightmare we are now trapped in, further heating up the environment in order to stay cool. Does it have to be like this?Modern mechanical air conditioning was born out of an innocuous need: to manage the temperature when printing on paper. Sackett & Wilhelms, a Brooklyn printing firm that specialised in humorous colour periodicals such as Judge, was the first to task the inventor of modern air conditioning with improving their air, as the historian Salvatore Basile writes in his book Cool. Colour lithography in that era required the same sheet of paper to be passed through multiple presses, and if the paper changed size due to heat and humidity by even a fraction it could cause printing errors. The engineer Willis Carrier took up the challenge, and after several failed experiments settled on a solution that would pass air over coiled pipes containing cool water, which would both help remove moisture through condensation and cool the air before recirculating it. Over the following decades, air conditioning gradually took off as technical advancements made it more effective, more compact and more affordable. But it remained a largely industrial technology until the 1920s. The success of cinemas meant that people were crowding into poorly ventilated rooms to watch movies, which in hot American summers could become unpleasant. Before long, cinemas were advertising their air temperature with almost equal billing to that of the film itself. Signs over doorways read REFRIGERATING PLANT or COOLED BY REFRIGERATION. Air conditioning quickly became “part of the total entertainment experience”, as Marsha E Ackermann writes in her book Cool Comfort. Air-conditioned cinema-going became such a strategy of summer survival in North America that Hollywood studios would make their cheapest pictures for summer showings, in the knowledge that the temperature would bring in the punters even if the movie wouldn’t. Cinemas may be the first example of an architectural form that developed in tandem with air conditioning.Those deep-freeze theatres of the 1920s launched a thousand chilly environments, first in public spaces and then in homes. In Cool Comfort, Ackermann explains how air conditioning became as much about power and cultural superiority as it was about practicality. Some theories of comfort that underpinned the growth of air conditioning in the 20th century were drawn directly from eugenicist notions that superior culture emerged from cooler climates. The growth of air conditioning in North America maps more closely to affluence and power than it does to climate.Air conditioning and mechanical ventilation have only been with us a short time, but they are addictive. Cut forward a century and we find a culture that has all but separated design from engineering. Air conditioning has made it easier to build bigger, and to build with whichever materials an architect desires. Dr Tara Hipwood, an architect and academic at Northumbria University, explained to me that “buildings have gotten much, much bigger, and there’s a much chunkier kind of grain to the city now”. These “deep-plan” buildings forgo courtyards and wings for big floor plans with great distances between windows. This makes natural ventilation nearly impossible. These buildings, Hipwood says, “are built on the premise that they will be mechanically ventilated”. In other words, ventilation and air conditioning have led architects to design without thought for the thermal qualities and air circulation of their buildings.Nowhere is this more evident than in the mammoth glass buildings that feature on the London skyline. Sometimes it seems like air conditioning is the easiest solution to overheating in what Joe Jack Williams, a partner at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, calls a “magic box”. Williams says the best approach is to design out mechanical ventilation and cooling as much as possible, but this is much harder because it relies on “design knowledge” instead of a technical fix. He explains that thermal comfort is more complex than temperature alone: air movement, surface radiation and changes in temperature can widen the range in which people are comfortable, whereas with air conditioning “we just kind of bash it into submission”.Standing in a perfectly cool supermarket on a sweltering day, it can feel hard to imagine how we could survive without air conditioning, even if it is hastening our demise. But for centuries people did just that. All around the world there are examples where architecture, and also our behaviours, were better adapted to a hot climate.These “usable pasts”, as Barber calls them, hold answers. His book Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning demonstrates how attuned Modernist architects were to building for comfort. Le Corbusier, for instance, was preoccupied by the thermal qualities of his buildings. He was a great exponent of the brise-soleil: façades designed to provide shade to help keep the interior cool. At the Palace of Assembly in Chandigarh, this takes the form of a monumental porch; at the Unité d’habitation in Marseille, it’s the deeply recessed and colourful windows that have become so iconic. Similarly, much of Le Corbusier’s domestic architecture specified a dual aspect; if you have two windows on different orientations it is possible to cross-ventilate, but a single-aspect building is much less easy to cool passively.British design is not short of thermally minded architectural solutions. Daniel Stilwell, an architectural historian and architect with Charles Holland, told me that Arts and Crafts architects Parker and Unwin, working at the beginning of the 20th century, prioritised natural ventilation. In a house in Staffordshire, they designed a small courtyard protected from the prevailing winds. On the surrounding ground floor was a corridor where the sash windows could be dropped to create what they described as a “sort of small open-air cloister”. Parker used windows in a similar way in his own house, Crabby Corner, adding a “sleeping tower”: a room set above the roofline that could be opened to create the feeling of sleeping outside. With London summer temperatures hitting 40C, we are going to have to adapt to a new normal With temperatures in London hitting 40C in recent summers, we are going to have to adapt to a new normal. Mechanical solutions will probably be needed, particularly as there is a very real risk to life in heatwaves. The UK Health Security Agency estimated that nearly 3,000 excess deaths were caused by heat in 2022, the most on record. Changing our windows, designing new kinds of housing and reintroducing brise-soleils are only part of the solution. We need to approach design not only through passive techniques for ventilation and cooling but also through the actual habits and knowledge of the people who use buildings.In southern Europe, external shutters are almost ubiquitous, and the rhythm of opening and closing them is ingrained in the daily lives of householders. Britain’s window systems, on the other hand, are not well suited to this use of shade. Sapna Halai, an engineer and researcher at University College London, explained to me that “in mainland Europe all the windows open inwards, which means you can then have shutters on the outside and you can keep the sun out whilst having your window open. We don’t have insect screens, which is another reason that people might not want their windows open in the heat, not to mention noise, security, and pollution.”Somehow, even in a country where air conditioning is rare, British householders have forgotten how to use their homes. In 2023, news stories appeared during the hot weather to tell the public about a “Victorian hack” that could help ventilate: simply opening a sash window at the top and the bottom. Designers must think not just about ventilation but also about how their designs will be used. Williams showed me a simple diagram designed for a school project. It showed at what temperature and what time to open and close the windows in the school to promote natural ventilation.Design can have a role here, too. I think, perhaps, that the shift that needs to happen is for architects and engineers to think of themselves as designers of air. Temperature is not the only way to adjust our experience of being inside a building. Air flow, light level, acoustics and the way we move around a space might all be designed to alleviate discomfort even when the temperature is higher than we might like.Since researching this article I have been doing something different to keep my house cool, known as stack ventilation. Every night, as the temperature drops outside, I open the doors at the front and back of our terraced house, and open the upstairs windows. A breeze flows through the house and alleviates both humidity and heat. We are the only people on our street who regularly have our front door open in the darkening evening (we use an empty cardboard box to prop it ajar). It feels a little scandalous to open up our private space like that, but we will all need to learn to soften the boundaries of our homes in order to keep the air flowing through. Sam Johnson-Schlee is the author of “Living Rooms”, published by Peninsula PressFollow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
