Sustaining comfort practices 27creating productive workplaces, air conditioning became integral to the creation
of leisure-scapes and environments for all-year-round shopping and consumption.
Air conditioning thus proved pivotal to both the development of the state, and
an economic development strategy dependent upon ever-increasing levels of
productivity and consumption. With Singapore far from unique in this regard, it
can be argued that the idea of a particular thermal modernity—whereby indoor
comfort has been the subject of strategic governance by the state and other
actors—has been a defining characteristic of development for various countries in
South, East, and Southeast Asia since the Second World War.
It is against this larger backdrop that I would argue the issue of thermal comfort
and energy consumption needs to be viewed and debated. To more critically
interrogate the present directions of our paradigm of air conditioning and its
reliance upon energy-intensive cooling methods, there is a need to leverage the
issue out of its current confines of engineering, architecture, or software design
and provide platforms upon which its associations with urban development,
consumption, identity, and so forth can be articulated more visibly. Complementing
this, following Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012) and others, I would also suggest
there are significant benefits of moving the focus away from the question of comfort
provision to comfort practices. It is to such themes that I now turn.
Sustainability and tradition
One significant opportunity the emergent smart technology economy promises
is its ability to offer building occupants a degree of control over their thermal
envelopes. Giving a greater level of autonomy to the individual in this way may
well open up an important space for incorporating a wider variety of comfort
envelopes and a return to the idea that users negotiate and accomplish that comfort
on an ongoing basis. In anticipating such directions, we can thus productively
look more closely at comfort practices, an emphasis that raises the possibility
of revisiting some of the ways in which people maintained thermal comfort in
different parts of Asia prior to the widespread uptake of air conditioning.
To date, tradition based approaches to thermal comfort in Asia have
overwhelmingly focused on the potential for conserving and adaptively reusing
certain forms of architecture from a pre-air-con period. Indeed, in recent years,
much has been written and discussed about the merits of the genres of “tropical
modernism” and “tropical vernacular” as offering sustainable, low-energy
alternatives to the modern regime of electronic air conditioning. Architects
such as Geoffrey Bawa, Charles Correa, Stanley Jewkes, and Vann Molyvann
have been celebrated for their approach to airflow and natural cooling features
in response to their local climates. Spanning public, commercial, and domestic
structures, these architects draw on an architectural vocabulary oriented around
natural ventilation (large openings, stilts, heat escape devices); sun shading
(overhanging rooflines, verandahs, solar orientation, greenery); and breathability
(low-heat storage materials, latticed windows, slatted floors). In Cambodia, Vann
Molyvann’s buildings of the 1950s and 1960s were shielded from harsh climatic