Thermal comfort and climatic design in the tropics: an historical critique

This paper explores how climatic design for the tropics was socio-technically constructed at its moment of inception in the mid-twentieth century by two of its best known proponents: George Atkinson at the Tropical Building Division, Building Research Station and Otto Koenigsberger at the Department of Tropical Studies, the Architectural Association.I argue that undergirding Atkinson’s construction of climatic design for the tropics was a mechanistic and reductive understanding of thermal comfort based on the research done by the air-conditioning industry in the United States in the early twentieth century. Not only did the reductive understanding of thermal comfort ignore local cultural norms and social practices in maintaining comfort, it also indirectly helped to further metropolitan interests in the tropics. In the case of Koenigsberger’s construction of climatic design, I show that he was influenced by the mid-twentieth century researchers in hot-climate physiology. These researchers combined nineteenth-century colonial medical ideas of the tropics as a torrid zone with the early twentieth-century industrial physiologists’ understanding of the correlation between environmental conditions of thermal stress and low productivity. They assumed that labourers in the tropics worked under perpetual thermal stress and became easily fatigued, thus hindering the socio-economic development of the tropics.By foregrounding the entanglements between climate and economy, comfort and development, and nature and culture, this paper follows the Anthropocene thesis that invalidates the ontological distinction between human culture and nature. In doing so, this paper also complicates the recent call for a return to climatic design and its low-energy passive means of cooling.