This week, the Guardian published an extensive piece on how air-conditioning has changed buildings, and the ways they are used as well as the locations and shapes of cities. According to the piece, the most significant effect of air-conditioning is in the social spaces it creates: cities. In Houston, as in most southern US cities, it is possible, indeed habitual, to spend whole days and weeks in controlled weather. “The result is a form of sensory deprivation that almost everyone now accepts without question, in which the active interplay of body and atmosphere becomes homogenised and passive.”
Read the full story on theguardian.com
