AIR CONDITIONED ARCHITECTURE BETWEEN COMFORT AND CLIMATE CHANGE

OPENING: 18 NOVEMBER 2026, 7.00 P.M.

The world is warming. Rising temperatures, heat waves occurring earlier each year, and prolonged periods of drought are making thermal stress one of the defining social challenges of the 21st century. Today, heating and cooling alone constitute almost 40% of all energy-related emissions globally. While heating has long dominated energy usage, the demand for cooling is expected to triple by 2050. There is no question that we need to protect ourselves from the heat. But, the situation requires us to fundamentally reconsider how we cool and who most urgently needs it.

When we cool our homes, offices, and buildings, we, in turn, heat up our world. Architecture has become deeply implicated in this paradox. Decades of design decisions employing expansive glass façades, minimal external shading, and spaces that trap heat have created a dependency on year-round climate control. Many of these buildings are chronically over-cooled, leaving occupants with little ability to intervene.

Yet comfort is neither a universal quantity nor is access to it universally guaranteed. Modern comfort standards have been shaped by a geopolitical imagination that has long privileged the moderate climates of Europe and North America as a normative baseline, marginalizing other thermal cultures and practices.