26 Tim Winter
is currently a highly inefficient and wasteful sector of building design, ongoing
research and development in the engineering, design, and technical management
of indoor comfort will deliver statistically significant efficiency gains and cost
savings. However, in support of the critiques of Strengers (2013) and others
regarding the overly deterministic optimism regarding the possibilities of smart
technologies, I would suggest design and engineering approaches to indoor comfort
will not in themselves be sufficient in curtailing the ongoing increase in air-con
energy consumption in a region experiencing rapid and uneven development.
While newly installed technologies might be heralded as offering a percentage
saving of energy consumption over previous designs (Tado 2015), this does
little to counter broader societal trends of rapidly increasing air-con usage and
dependency. In fact, it is likely efficiency dividends may well serve to contribute
to the further normalization of air-con usage in everyday life across many of Asia’s
cities. Interviews conducted with Malaysian householders in 2014, for example,
suggested that where previously only the living space was cooled on a part-daily
basis, additional units had been installed in bedrooms as well as cooking and dining
spaces, with usage extending over much longer periods of the day.
To consider the future of indoor comfort in Southeast Asia and other parts of
Asia then, we have to take a much broader perspective than that offered by design
and engineering and consider air conditioning in relation to societal trends such
as middle-class lifestyles, urban development, and how comfort relates to the
more abstract concepts of modernity and nation building. In this respect, there is
a need to excavate the broader socio-cultural and political associations of indoor
thermal comfort in the region. From as early as the 1920s, air conditioning in
Southeast Asia can be regarded as a transformative technology—with The Straits
Times newspaper even predicting “that the introduction of air conditioning and
its ‘manufactured weather’ would make the tropics more healthy and prosperous,
transforming such regions from backwardness to civilisation” (The Straits
Times 1929, p. 5). With air conditioning initially installed in the region’s most
prestigious office buildings, cinemas, and high-class hotels, it did not take long
for the concept of luxury and comfort to be associated with the new technology.
Over time, its adoption expanded substantially—workplaces, shopping centers,
public transport, and private homes all embraced electronic cooling as a means
to meet and alter thermal comfort expectations. In the case of Singapore, it
was a technology that powerfully aligned with and advanced the discourse of
productivity and efficiency that lay at the heart of the post-colonial nation-
building project. Colonial ideas about climate, the tropics, and modernization had
penetrated the thinking of key political figures, most notably Lee Kuan Yew. He
instructed for electronic air conditioning to be installed in many of the offices of
the newly formed Singapore civil service in the 1960s (Chang and Winter 2015).
The high cost of installation and its operation at that time, however, meant it
remained a privilege for a select few deemed critical to the proper functioning of
the state. As planning regimes and architecture evolved over the coming decades,
a clear inter-dependence emerged between building typology, architectural
design, constructional systems, and air conditioning. Not only deemed pivotal to