courtneybolton: Urban Omnibus » A Field Guide to AC Units. It’s almost that time of year again, when respite from our hot and humid summers comes in the form of an ugly box we tend to stick out our windows. Despite its prevalence in the urban landscape — messing with the visual coherence of apartment building façades, introducing a variety of chemical refrigerants into the environment, or contributing to otherwise unsustainable cooling practices with excessive demands on water and energy — air conditioning is not an aspect of urbanism whose implications we often consider. What follows is Alison Carafa’s fresh and cheerful journey through some of the unintended uses for, hacks to and consequences of this unloved but, for many, indispensable addition to urban windows.  The broader system of environmental technologies to which air conditioning corresponds — climate and atmospheric control — was the subject of a seminar at Columbia’s GSAPP this past fall, entitled “The Artificial Cryosphere” and led by instructor Nicola Twilley, author of Edible Geography and a couple of Omnibus features that explore how the networks and flows of food determine the shape of cities. Carafa’s “Field Guide To AC Units” emerged from work she prepared for that class, alongside student projects that explored everything from ice bridges to thermoacoustic heat transfer to vending machines. The ways in which refrigeration has affected patterns of trade, industry, settlement and architecture is an under-investigated theme of urban studies, just as the sensory experience of living in a city with a lot of window AC units — humming, dripping and potentially falling on your head — is an under-observed phenomenon of urban life. Read more…
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Urban Omnibus » A Field Guide to AC Units. It’s almost that time of year again, when respite from our hot and humid summers comes in the form of an ugly box we tend to stick out our windows. Despite its prevalence in the urban landscape — messing with the visual coherence of apartment building façades, introducing a variety of chemical refrigerants into the environment, or contributing to otherwise unsustainable cooling practices with excessive demands on water and energy — air conditioning is not an aspect of urbanism whose implications we often consider. What follows is Alison Carafa’s fresh and cheerful journey through some of the unintended uses for, hacks to and consequences of this unloved but, for many, indispensable addition to urban windows. 

The broader system of environmental technologies to which air conditioning corresponds — climate and atmospheric control — was the subject of a seminar at Columbia’s GSAPP this past fall, entitled “The Artificial Cryosphere” and led by instructor Nicola Twilley, author of Edible Geography and a couple of Omnibus features that explore how the networks and flows of food determine the shape of cities. Carafa’s “Field Guide To AC Units” emerged from work she prepared for that class, alongside student projects that explored everything from ice bridges to thermoacoustic heat transfer to vending machines. The ways in which refrigeration has affected patterns of trade, industry, settlement and architecture is an under-investigated theme of urban studies, just as the sensory experience of living in a city with a lot of window AC units — humming, dripping and potentially falling on your head — is an under-observed phenomenon of urban life. Read more…

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