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Air Conditioning and Organization by Elysa Lonzano As a child in California, I remember being so hot my body could barely function; my limbs were so lethargic it seemed as if my tendons had taken a holiday. All I could think about was how to cool off. Since, in my over-heated state it was no longer possible for me to move to the bathroom for a cold shower, I had big plans for the city council. If only they would build a giant fan. Or better yet – they could put a big glass dome over the city and pump cool air throughout. Someone had actually had a similar idea. And while it did not stretch over roads, parks or my house, air-conditioning did its best to help people function in buildings across the city. With my climate control plans, the city’s layout would stay the same and only the temperature would drop. But as centralized temperature control outdated the need for windows and doors to the exterior, as noted by Sze Seung Leong in The Harvard Design School’s Guide to Shopping, larger areas of land could be contained within one building. Like with my dome plan, people could meander from place to place in an enclosed area without the discomfort of the outside weather. It was this capability that allowed for the development of the first shopping mall. The physical feasibility of cooling large areas opened the door to the mall; but the acceptance and need for air conditioning resided in convincing department store executives, architects and developers of its functional benefits. The primary manufacturers of air conditioning, the Carrier Company, conducted research into and produced advertisements linking its product to increased commercial success. With air conditioning, a body could function more effectively, increasing employee productivity and customer patronage. However, in contrast to its purported functional benefits, a shopping mall relies on a cumbersome system to provide a cool environment: a massive enclosed area of land and an entire artificial microclimate. It seems to be as unwieldy and impractical as my glass dome strategy, especially when compared with artist Michael Rakowitz’s invention for temperature control. His paraSITEs are tents or sleeping bags that attach to the outtake vents of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems (HVACs). Their inflatable skin fills with hot air, providing a warm single or double unit of residence. Economically constructed from plastic bags, they detach and fold up, allowing the user to easily carry them from place to place. Custom-made for homeless people, paraSITE seems to be a practical survival tactic for those left outside the climatic and socioeconomic system of the mall. Paradoxically, in a statement about his work, Michael Rakowitz has denied that, “any of [his] projects…do anything on the level of function or pragmatism.” By divorcing his tactic from the purely functional and social aspirations of design endemic to the mall, he draws closer to the language of art. As an artist, he uses the people, plastic merchandise bags and residue of the HVAC system to make a statement. If we took his word for it, his work could be categorized as social commentary. In Michel de Certeau’s elucidation of tactics, he describes their operation occurring within a “prescribed syntax”. A tactic, he says, “select[s] fragments taken from the vast ensembles of production in order to compose new stories with them.” By changing slightly the syntax of a sentence of his statement, that is, by making the homeless man the object of the sentence, Rakowitz uses the language of art to reconfigure the purpose of the mall. According to de Certeau tactics exist not only in linguistic structure, but between language and other “paradigmatic organizations”. Within this relationship, a tactic, he says, “boldly juxtaposes diverse elements in order suddenly to produce a flash shedding a different light on the language of a place.” Looking at the actual mall with a paraSITE attached to the outtake air vent, the homeless man is not a medium or word, but a man using the heat for his survival. The once incidental output of the HVAC system seems intentional, not just in the story of the artwork, but for the homeless man’s function. Rather than the climate control system being developed for the comfort of the consumers, the consumers are there to necessitate the system so that it will output hot air specifically for one homeless man. In this story of air conditioning
taken from its ambient existence in the environment, people and even the
air is made functional, sucked into channels, directed down corridors
and pushed through outtake vents or doors. The idea is that the system
works. Perhaps in my original daydream, I imagined something a bit more
ambient, especially for those of us who might like to wander comfortably
through the city without an express purpose. Right now I am postulating
about the possibilities created by the tactics of art language overlaid
on everyday life. But I can’t help but keep one eye out (or one
finger to the wind) for a new device to disperse ambient temperature through
all the corners of the city. References: de Certeau, Michel 1984: The Practice of Everyday Life, London, England: University of California Press Leong, Sze Tsung and Srdjan Javanovich Weiss: ‘Air Conditioning’ in The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, Köln, Germany: Taschen Rakowitz, Michael 1998: paraSITE
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