32 Tim Winter
colonies of Asia. Designed as a recliner with mesh seating, its key innovation
was the addition of elongated arms that would either swing out to the front or be
fixed in position, allowing the user to benefit from the circulation of air around
legs that were raised up and spread apart. Scanning archives for photographs of
these in use tends to confirm it was a design that afforded comfort and relief for
a select few. Primarily used by men, it would have no doubt caused an altogether
different form of discomfort for the Victorian English lady, fearful of the risk of
the embarrassing indiscretions the chair might pose. Equally, while photographic
records of interior scenes from the nineteenth century confirm males from both
Europe and the subcontinent adopted the convention of wearing the open lungi or
sarong, the heavily reclined design of the chair spoke of relaxation, resting, and
slumber, meaning it was appropriate only for those in charge of the household and
their guests; a position of privilege that no doubt gave license to certain indiscretions.
In both the punkah and the Planter’s Chair, then, we gain some insight into the
hierarchies and gendered practices of comfort of European colonialism. European
practices and values would also intersect with more localized and existing practices,
such as fanning noted above or the common custom of sitting on the floor, a practice
that remains common today and speaks to a complex mix of social conventions and
hierarchies and an accumulated knowledge of heat transfer and movement.
Of course, alongside these material worlds are various accompanying traditions of
thermal comfort praxis. Indeed, numerous examples could be cited regarding habits
and rhythms of bathing, working, resting, or shopping in accordance with the time of
day and local climatic conditions. Much like elsewhere in the world, comfort practices
in tropical and subtropical Asia have long involved quotidian rhythms of movement
around the cooler spaces of home, utilizing the knowledge of shade, curtaining, and
the cooling effects of vegetation to find comfortable spaces. Fergus, Humphreys, and
Roaf elaborate on this point further, suggesting such daily practices include
movement between buildings, between rooms, around rooms, out of the
sun, into the breeze, closer to the fire, with the blinds shut, with the curtains
open and so on...People who regularly occupy a particular space will have a
customary temperature that they associate with that place for a particular time
of date or year. It will be part of a thermal pathway they follow each day, a
pathway that at times may be too hot or too cold, but on average constitutes a
well-understood pattern for a generally comfortable life
(2012, p. 69)The examples of clothing and furniture are cited here as illustrative of a larger
analytical path that can be adopted to consider those comfort practices that lie
outside the current paradigm of electronic AC. Obviously, in highlighting examples
from the contexts of nineteenth-century colonialism, any idea of reviving such
cultural practices raises questions about nostalgia and the romanticization of the
past—as it should with historic architecture. The point here then is not to valorize
such nostalgia for a “golden era” of sustainable comfort but to identify the material
and social entanglements by which comfort has been historically practiced in the