Sustaining comfort practices 23Engineering indoor comfort
As authors such as Cooper (1998), Arsenault (1984), and Cox (2010) have
demonstrated, the rise of our modern air-conditioning regime starts in the hotels
and cinemas of southern U.S. states and the creation of leisure spaces that offered
respite from hot summer afternoons. Fascinatingly, such accounts trace how air
conditioning was installed in the White House as part of the industry’s lobbying as
well as the economic and geographic directions it took in penetrating offices across
the United States and its entry into the home in the post–World War II decades.
In terms of understanding the internationalization of air-conditioned comfort,
we can point to some key markers for a history that has yet to be adequately
accounted for. Of particular importance here was the development of the first
“Comfort Chart”—based on human subject responses to different combinations
of temperature and humidity of human comfort—that proved critical in shaping
a science of indoor comfort in the early 1920s (Cooper 1998, p. 71). But the
geographical mobility of this knowledge regime was advanced most tangibly
via the research of one man in particular, Ole Fanger. An engineer by training,
Fanger undertook laboratory-based experimentation into thermal comfort and
perceptions of indoor environments at the Technical University of Denmark
from the 1960s onward, forming the highly influential International Centre for
Indoor Environment and Energy in the late 1980s (Shove 2003). Fanger’s thermal
comfort equation centered around precise ideas about mean radiant temperature,
Figure 2.2 Airport advertisement for air sanitizer
Photo by Tim Winter