24 Tim Winter
relative velocity, and air humidity in order to create “an optimal thermal comfort
for man”. Crucially, and as authors such as Shove (2003) have shown, it was
a methodology of physiological comfort measurement that would come to be
adopted and embedded in codes and standards around the world from the 1970s
onward. Perhaps most influentially, the idea of 22C as the most comfortable
temperature for human productivity became critical to the standards adopted
by the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Cooling Engineers,
which have been exported to numerous countries around the world including
those in the Asia region (Shove, Chappells, and Lutzenhiser 2009).
The science of Ole Fanger had a particular approach to perspiration and the
possibilities of banishing it and its associated smells through the conditioning of
air. Accordingly, he identified two units of measurement: the first for measuring
the scent emission of people and objects (the olf), the second for assessing the
total sensory “load” produced by such scent emissions (the decipol). As Shove,
Pantzar, and Watson explain,
In technical terms, an olf is equivalent to the scent emitted by an average
person at rest, i.e. someone who takes approximate 0.7 baths per day, has a
surface area of 1.8 meters squared, wears clean underwear, works in an office
environment, is healthy and is a non-smoker...Fanger’s decipol represents the
air pollution from 1 standard person (0.7 baths/day, 1.8m2, clean underwear
daily, 80 per cent use deodorant) ventilated by 101/s unpolluted air
(2012, p. 65)It was a laboratory-based methodology to thermal comfort that has come
to define and prescribe international norms and ideas of normality; wherein
culturally and historically blind definitions of normal bodies, normal activities,
and normal conditions have been plotted and charted for the purposes of design
and the efficient engineering of indoor space. And crucially here, it is the science
by which many indoor spaces were designed and engineered in Asia from the
mid-late twentieth century onward.
Indeed, as I have argued at length elsewhere, the issue of indoor thermal
comfort in Asia has to date primarily been considered as a domain of engineering,
technological innovation, or architectural design (Winter 2013). In both the
building science and the architectural profession, there is a growing awareness
of the need to counter the prevailing trend of energy intensive methods of
cooling by promoting alternative modes of comfort for work, leisure, and
domestic spaces. Southeast Asia has been at the forefront of the turn toward the
“greening” of city planning and development via the introduction of legislation
designed to encourage more sustainable commercial architecture, housing, and
urban landscaping. In cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong, architects have
been strongly encouraged to introduce more “green” elements into their design
processes (Figure 2.3). Not surprisingly, this new wave of “green architecture”
has introduced vegetation on, in, and around buildings in an attempt to reduce
urban heat islands and humidity, remove airborne toxins, and create a sense of