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photo credit: tripleman

Over at Inventing Green, Alexis Madrigal looks at the adoption of air-conditioners. He talks about how the rise of electrical cooling seems to have lead to a crash in regional building techniques.

“Of course, the use of air conditioning allowed homeowners to enjoy a new degree of comfort, but a goodly portion of the residential air-conditioning load simply replaced the comfort once provided — at little environmental cost — by good design,” Rome writes.

The whole thing put me in mind of three incidents that highlight the critical importance of a regional context in usable architecture.

1. Done Well

   A few years ago I went on a tour of the then under-construction Earth Rangers Wildlife Center in Ontario. It’s a very green building, LEED gold rating and all that. They were showing us the tech and how liquid running through the building kept it cool and how tall ceilings moved hot air away from employees and on and on about how they were keeping the temperature down. This is Canada, where the main problem, you’d think, is keeping warm. Judging by my utility bills, it certainly is.

   One of the students asked the project manager about that and he looked genuinely surprised. Heating was an afterthought, a solved problem – you just needed to keep the place insulated. And then he went back to explaining all the clever cooling solutions.

2. Done Badly

   I remember visiting my parents when they were house-sitting on Salt Spring Island. The proud owners had their home custom built, using a design from California. The result was an unusable disaster.

   Everything about the house had clearly been intended to keep a desert home pleasantly shaded. An overabundance of sunlight is not a problem in heavily-treed, often cloudy, British Columbia. They had to keep the indoor lights on pretty much all day long. Even so, the house felt dank, dark and dismal.

3. Done Badly, Then Fixed

   In Halifax, I used to deliver the paper to the Killam Library. The Killam had originally been designed with some warmer climate in mind (all my stories are about how miserable the weather gets in Canada, I’m realizing). Touches such as an always-dry stream bed that ran from outside the building under the edge into the open air atrium and then into the lobby itself, indicated an architect who imagined a place where water did not freeze for a good chunk of the year.

   During the winter, that open-air atrium became a terrifying safety hazard. Take a look at this photo. Surrounded on all sides by warmed glass, the whole thing became a chimney. The heating pushed an enormous volume of air out the top and sucked gale force winds through the pictured entry-way.

   In the late 90s, Dalhousie fixed the problem, sealing the top of the atrium with glass. The result was a fully usable (safe) courtyard where students now congregate.

So much depends on thoughtful design.

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.

Everywhere I go, I carry a pen and a stack of 3×5 index cards held together by a binder clip. It’s a Hipster PDA 1.0, from before all those apps got installed.

On one of these cards are the words: “Entrepreneurship is alive and well at the Anarchist Book Fair”. I wrote them last spring, during a trip to Montreal. This is kind of condescending thought that runs through my head when I see idealist-ideologues try to navigate the shoals of reality.

The book fair is annual. It’s a focal point - the anarchist social event of the year. People travel from all over Canada and the U.S. to visit friends, network, run workshops, and party. The contradictions don’t seem to bother anybody.

It’s literally an anti-capitalist marketplace, crammed to the gills with people selling books, t-shirts, pins and paraphenilia. It’s a weird, vibrant mirror of a county craft fair, complete with live music, hidden bottles of booze and a snack booth (vegan, organic and sustainable, we are told). And why not? Anarchists need to eat, same as everyone else. The clothes are fashionably ragged, instead of old and faded. The patches are silkscreened with black instead of embroidered in red white and blue. There are cupcakes. When the police stop by to let the organizers know that the skinhead rally has been broken up, they get booed.

Capitalism is on the run, have you heard? The Financial Times is running a whole series on what comes next.

I wonder what the fair will feel like this year. What will the mood be? Triumphant told-you-sos? Gleeful excitement at the opportunities for effecting change? Will there be the same cold worry that the rest of us feel, that the collapse might be real and total and we might not get back up? I’ve met them. When they aren’t writing autonomous anti-oppressive zines, they work in the service industry. They don’t have severance packages, they have 2 weeks notice. And they are living paycheque to paycheque or worse. How many anarchists will look in their wallets and decide they can’t make the trip this year, due to the impending collapse of capitalism.

Does it sound like I am making fun of these contradictions? I assure you I am not. It’s these kinds of barely held tensions that keep a movement alive and dynamic. And we need a vibrant anarchism. We need one that is not caught up in internal struggles of self-definition and specialist rhetoric. Come what may, there is a lot of work that needs doing that doesn’t necessarily get done by businesses anymore. The more people offering solutions, the more likely it is that one gets found.

Who am I kidding? The answer to the Financial Times’ question is probably “more capitalism”.

The Anarchist Bookfair collective affirms and promotes values of mutual aid, direct democracy, anti-authoritarianism, autonomy and solidarity. We reiterate our opposition to capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, colonialism, statism and all other forms of oppression; we will not accept anyone to participate in the Anarchist Bookfair that perpetuates or promotes these attitudes.

-from Montreal’s Anarchist Bookfair statement of principles
photo credit: anarchosyn

Originally published at Quiet Babylon. You can comment here or there.