I would argue that the elevator is at least as influential if not more. As I look around from my 9th story office, nearly every building I see and the density provided thereof, would have been impossible without the elevator or something very much like it. (A series of escalators?) How many people want to climb 20 stories of stairs every day of their life, nevermind the transportation of equipment, etc.
I heard a little nugget the other day that, at its height in the early Roman period, the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500,000 souls, with a diameter of ~4 miles); by comparison, modern day NYC has a population density of around 100 people/acre. Granted, a much higher overall population in the modern city. However, very rarely did buildings in that era reach five stories, and almost none exceeded that height.
Part of it is living standards; even the poorest of the poor in New York generally don't live in the cramped, slumlike conditions of the 1900s.
Part of it is household size; the modern household has decreased in size dramatically, now that raising children has moved from "we need as many children as possible so that at least a few of them make it to adulthood" to "giving children a quality life is expensive".
A good deal of it is transportation. In 1800 most people walked, and the rich used horses. By 1900 we had railroads and streetcars; by 1920 we had metros; by 1950 we had automobiles. The effect of the automobile has been strongest in America; a single highway interchange in Atlanta takes up as much room as the city of Florence, Italy. https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-si...
Ok, something is off with the info in that link. I just looked up Florence Italy on Google maps, and it measures about 5.5 miles across. I couldn't find that exact interchange in the article's picture, so I picked the largest one I saw by eyeballing the map of Atlanta (I85 and I20), and it appears to measure about 2000 feet across.
He's using what must be the core downtown area of Florence, Italy. Matching the picture in the post - on google maps, what is bounded by SS67 road on the north side of the Arno river: counterclockwise to Piazza della Liberta and back to the river; and on the south side the road down to Porta Romana and back to the river.
That section eyeballs to be around roughly ~1.5 mi across. Larger than 2000 ft but a lot less than 5.5 mi.
Yeah the author seems to be trying to make some point, but even using a very narrow definition of the city of Florence, and a very expansive view of the interchange, he's practically off by an order of magnitude.
The interchange image is 5x too wide, and the Florence image is more than 3x too narrow. That's more than an order of magnitude in length. And more than two orders of magnitude in area.
He appears to be defining "Florence" as "the urban core of Florence," and "Atlanta cloverleaf" as "Atlanta cloverleaf plus a Florence-sized chunk of adjacent land."
Highways create alot of dead space that can not be used for other things than really low value stuff. So it's a fair comparision, considering we are talking about walking in a city center vs. people polluting the same size of land
> Part of it is living standards; even the poorest of the poor in New York generally don't live in the cramped, slumlike conditions of the 1900s.
Living standards affect density, but they're not the reason we can't fit 190 people per acre.
Let's say you're in 1900 making 6 story apartment blocks. You could set up a residential district that's 30% road, 20% open space, and 50% building.
Make your average apartment be 600 square feet with a 20x12 living room, two 10x12 bedrooms, a 10x6 kitchenette, a 10x6 bathroom, and an occupancy of 3. Probably slightly reshaped for the sake of windows.
With some extra space for hallways and stairs, you can reach an average ground impact of 75 square feet per person.
That means it only takes a third of an acre to house 190 people, leaving the other 2/3 for businesses. For comparison NYC is currently 75% residential.
Such an apartment isn't huge but it's still twice the size of college dorm.
These days you could build 3x as high and give each person over twice that much space and have lots of elevators and still fit 200 people into a third of an acre. Rent out the bottom floor to shops too.
That's if your area only consists of apartments. What about shops? What about schools and required athletic facilities? What about playgrounds and parks? What of hospitals and clinics, or police stations and jails, or fire stations? And can all these workers get to work using the available infrastructure?
Until 1961, New York had a zoning code that was concerned with exactly none of those things, and planning for services and basic infrastructure was haphazard at best. While the current zoning code is overly restrictive, it at least prevents growth in places that would not have the services required to handle it. (It also prevents the growth in a lot of other places as well, but that's beside the point.)
>That's if your area only consists of apartments. What about shops? What about schools and required athletic facilities? [...] What of hospitals and clinics, or police stations and jails, or fire stations?
That's why I looked up how much of the city is residential right now. If you only spend 1/3 of the city on apartments, that leaves you a lot of room for everything else.
> What about playgrounds and parks?
Oops. I had a thing about making an entire block into a park out of every 3x3 but I lost it in editing. So yes there's lots of room for parks.
> And can all these workers get to work using the available infrastructure?
The base idea was set in 1900 and housing the same number of people but in better buildings, so yeah they can still get to work.
For the idea of fitting more people into the current city, I'm not sure, but it would probably work out. Have more mid-rise housing right next to jobs, and use the tax boost from having more residents to add more mass transit.
As far as zoning, the issue is not housing vs. services and infrastructure, it's the size of the housing. Detached houses have an awful use ratio.
Don't get me wrong, mixed-use zoning is great, but people rarely live next to their jobs. It's difficult to get both people in a two income household to work close to each other; where people want to live vs. where their employer wants to locate is rarely the same, etc. Tokyo, for example, is very mixed-use and very polycentric, but has some famously bad commutes.
Unfortunately NY is set up as a centralized archipelago; existing transport infrastructure is pretty much saturated, and encouraging outlying areas to gain jobs is not workable because Manhattan is the only place accessible to every single part of the metro area within one or two seats on public transport.
It's hard to use the tax boost to add more mass transit, because you'd have to bond based on projected revenues, which is fickle at best. The only places that tie redevelopment and transit together successfully seem to be in Hong Kong and Japan, but in those places the mass transit operator either already owned the land being redeveloped, or got it for pennies on the dollar as a de facto public subsidy, which would be impossible in the US due to the Just Compensation clause of the Fifth Amendment.
> the city of Antioch had a population density of about 190 people/acre (~500,000 souls, with a diameter of ~4 miles); by comparison, modern day NYC has a population density of around 100 people/acre.
Manhattan has a density of 72,000 people per square mile. If it were its own city, that would make it the 6th densest city in the world[0]. The top three are Manila and Mumbai, at 108,000, 74,000, and 74,000 people per square mile, respectively. So, regardless of levels of development, modern cities cap out under 80,000 people per square mile, with Manila being a slight outlier (but not by much).
190 people/acre - what you cite for Antioch - is 121,600 people per square mile. I'm not able to find any reputable sources that back that statistic, and estimating populations of cities from antiquity is inherently a bit tricky. 500,000 people would also put it at 50-80% of the population of Rome during the same time period, and more populous that Constantinople, though it's not included in any of the four lists of populations of large cities on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through...
[0] There are two more, at 108K and 80K, but they both have populations under 70,000, so they're not comparable.
Yes, but that technology existed before the 1900s. Banham has a great graph that illustrates the sudden mass adoption of lightbulbs/refrigerators/air conditioning within the span of 10-20 years from 1910-1930.
Steel suitable for pipes, and long-distance water pipes, really did not exist before the 1860s, and mostly arose for and from the Pennsylvania oil industry. The earlier options were generally ceramic pipe (OK for horizontal flows, but prone to breakage), and open acqueducts (dating to Roman times), with wood or bamboo used for some shorter runs (tens to 100s of meters generally).
I don't know much about skyscraper plumbing at all, though I doubt it's just scaled-up 1-4 storey kit.
And by 1931, the Empire State Building was 102 storeys tall (443m).
Ancient Rome was full of 5-7 story apartment buildings and had a population of around a million. Higher density than a whole lot of modern cities, the vast majority of which are not seas of skyscrapers.
Suprised me to learn that the top floors were the cheapest because the buildings were made of wood with no organized fire service and burned down all the time, so being upstairs was a death sentence.
Another fun fact: commoners in Rome mostly ate out at cafes all around the city - like soup kitchens. Having a kitchen and cooking was reserved for wealthier people.
Reading letters from the late 1800's and early 1900's this was true in European cities at least among some classes of people. There might be one(?) kitchen in the building.
I think every single apartment having its own kitchen and every person having their own set of cutlery/dishware/pots/pans/etc is very, very new.
> Suprised me to learn that the top floors were the cheapest because the buildings were made of wood with no organized fire service and burned down all the time, so being upstairs was a death sentence.
The top floors in most prewar walkups in NYC are the cheapest today, even though all have sturdy fire escapes. People don't want to walk up 5 flights of stairs every day, and they also get swelteringly hot on the top floors during the summer, whereas lower floors stay cooler.
>People don't want to walk up 5 flights of stairs every day, and they also get swelteringly hot on the top floors during the summer, whereas lower floors stay cooler.
Being on the top floor of a building without A/C can definitely be an issue with respect to heat.
However, while having to lug a bunch of groceries (or whatever) up multiple flights of stairs can be an pain, is "walking up 5 flights of stairs a day" really a big issue? [Obviously for some people with infirmities it will be.] I work--well, when I commute--in a 4 story office building and most people, including myself, take the stairs when we move between floors for meeting, cafeteria, etc. We at least used to have signs encouraging taking the steps.
Its much more of a hassle concern than it is a realistic inability to climb multiple flights of stairs. Manhattan would be a really, really terrible/uncomfortable place to live if you couldn't physically navigate at least a few flights of stairs at once between subway stations, split-level stores and restaurants, residential buildings, etc, etc.
Just thinking anecdotally, myself and many of my neighbors in NYC are probably dealing with a dozen or more flights or stairs up and down on a daily basis (two flights down out of the apartment building, half a flight up to the street level from the sunken entrance, another 2 flights back down into the subway station, 2 flights up on the other end of the train ride, a flight in the grocery store, two flights at the gym, etc, etc, etc). Escalators are often present, but many people walk up those anyways. I'd feel comfortable saying people living here are generally in far, far better stair-climbing-shape than most of the country.
There is a huge difference between walking several flights of stairs over the day and having to walk 5 flights of stairs in a stretch every time you want to go up to your appartment. I live on the 3rd floor, and I am very happy that I have an elevator. I try to use the stairs as often as possible. But some time back the elevator was down for 5 weeks and I for sure started planning each trip out of my appartment.
This all depends of course on the overall state of your fitness, and how heavy you are. Ideally, one never would use an elevator and hence be very fit and less overweight. And this doesn't count in any kind of medical condition which limit or even prohibit you from taking many (or any) stairs.
For all the practical benefits both elevators and cars have brought to the modern human, they certainly have a big drawback on the average fitness. I try to use stairs as much as possible, and on an average day I certainly klimb 12 flights, but would no longer consider an appartment in the 3rd floor without an elevator for when it is needed.
> most people, including myself, take the stairs when we move between floors for meeting, cafeteria, etc.
How common is this? I never see people take the stairs when there's an elevator. I always take the elevator even if it's just one floor and I have to wait a while.
The problem with escalators is, that the steps are usually higher than those of stairs, as they are not optimized for walking. If you are very tall, this makes little difference, but for not so tall people, using the steps of an escalator is a bit uncomfortable. As a consequence, I usually step them only on very short escalators or when I am in quite of a hurry.
In the early 1980s, I would routinely walk up the escalators, including stopped ones, on the deepest Washington Metro stations. In the 2010s, I take the elevator two floors. I walk several miles per day, I run varying distances each weekend, but something in one knee doesn't like stairs these days.
Maybe it's a default cultural thing at your company. Possibly
taking the steps is a "nudge" to suggest. Taking an elevator for one floor would seem almost weird where I work unless there were some physical issue.
Lots of people do it for the steps. I take the stairs pretty much anytime I know where they are. I guess I'd think about it for more than a few stories.
The stairs in your office likely are a lot less steep than the ones in those apartment buildings.
Also, if you had heating, somebody had to lug up coal, and parents (about everybody was one, at the time, and the mothers were pregnant quite often) would have to lug up small children.
And it isn’t “5 flights of stairs a day”. Chances are the toilet was at least one stair away, too.
I'd say that the difference between lots of stairs and and no stairs is enough to cause a difference in price for rent. I'd say that this is the market working as intended. Or, if you believe that it is not a big deal, you can abuse the market inefficiency ;)
That isn't my experience with the top floors of NYC prewar walkups today (and trust me, I've had a lot of that!), but I could see that being an issue in other places or in previous times.
I don't think that'd have been a driving factor in ancient Rome, though, given how different their uses of their plumbing technology were from ours. They had public toilets and baths (at ground level), so water pressure for washing and bathing wouldn't be a concern for top-floor apartments the way it would be for us today.
Water will never make it up to the 13th story of a building just with the pressure from the water mains, so those building will need to do something to increase pressure on higher floors.
In a five story building, the water can get that high just with pressure from the mains, though the pressure will be much weaker than on lower floors, so the building doesn't need to have any mechanism for increasing the pressure. It probably wouldn't be done for newer buildings, but when the older walk-ups were constructed it would have been considered acceptable as a way of keeping costs lower.
NYC municipal water pressure is guaranteed to (I believe) the 6th floor. They may do better than that depending on the elevation of the neighborhood. Any higher than that, and the building needs to have a water tank on the roof or a high floor.
My understanding is that this was fairly standard in tall buildings everywhere.
Upper floor apartments were cheaper because they were meant for working-class people. The ground level and first floor were for shops and shopkeepers. The 2nd floor (that would be the 3rd flood in American terms) was the "noble" floor for rich people, with high ceilings and big balconies. The last floor under the roof was for housekeepers and cooks of the rich people below.
Well, I think the causality is the other way. The builders had good reason not to build giant penthouse apartments with views at the top: they knew their customers' preferences!
> Ancient Rome was full of 5-7 story apartment buildings and had a population of around a million. Higher density than a whole lot of modern cities, the vast majority of which are not seas of skyscrapers.
This isn't really true - the Aurelian walls were about 14 square kilometers, but a significant portion of the city's 1 million people lived outside the Aurelian walls. We don't have a good sense of how many people lived within the Aurelian walls, but number that's often cited (1 million people/14 square km = 70,000 people/square km, 2.5 times the most dense city in the world today) is not actually representative of what ancient Rome looked like at any period in history.
7 seems like a stretch, "modern" liftless buildings (think 18/19th century European buildings) are usually around 3/4 floors, some go to 5 but it's not the majority
> How many people want to climb 20 stories
> of stairs every day of their life.
I'd guess a lot. How long does it take you to climb 20 stories if you're having to do it every single day of your life so you're used to it? Let's say a generous 10 seconds per floor, so that's around 3 and a half minutes.
Just waiting for and taking the elevator will easily take a minute at least. So we're left with just over 2 minutes.
This is on the order of time that it takes many people to walk from their parked car to the front door at work, or even just to park their car!
That would be nothing compared to the alternative of there being 1-3 floor houses everywhere, so you'd need to commute even further than that.
> nevermind the transportation of equipment.
Almost all of the tall houses in Amsterdam built in pre-elevator times have a hook on the top floor that can be used to hoist cargo up. Some similar arrangement could be worked out for modern houses if they didn't have elevators.
> How long does it take you to climb 20 stories if you're having to do it every single day of your life so you're used to it? Let's say a generous 10 seconds per floor, so that's around 3 and a half minutes.
People would certainly be more fit in such a world. In ours, climbing 20 stories is not something many people can do at all, never mind do willingly every day. But even for a fit person, 20 stories at 10sec/story is definitely not "generous", more like a great athletic achievement given how strenuous it is to climb stairs compared to walking or running on flat ground. Gravity is a bitch.
Well, I'm an old man, in not such great shape. And I can go up five floors in less than a minute. If I'm tired, I just walk up, two steps per stride, with help using the hand rail. That's actually easier for me than going up one step per stride. And going down is harder on my knees.
Climbing five floors is qualitatively different from twenty. You can do the former anaerobically easily enough, but the latter is firmly in the aerobic regime unless you're an Olympic-level 400m sprinter.
Absolutely not. Before elevators most buildings would stop at around 5 stories. Climbing 20 stories is not just time-consuming[0], it's also quite tiring, you're dragging your own mass 60m upwards on a very steep slope.
And that's basically discarding older adults entirely, according to "Functional predictors of stair-climbing speed in older adults" individuals ascend about 1.3 steps per second for 8~10 steps.
> That would be nothing compared to the alternative of there being 1-3 floor houses everywhere, so you'd need to commute even further than that.
The alternative would be necessarily rethinking the entire mess and either creating much wider buildings or going back to a much more decentralised model.
> This is on the order of time that it takes many people to walk from their parked car to the front door at work, or even just to park their car!
Walking level ground and climbing stairs is not the same effort at all.
[0] and 10 seconds per floor is absolutely not generous, it corresponds to a high-cadence stair-stepper setting (100 steps/mn, assuming 16 steps/flight which is about what you get in a residential building, an office building would be 18~20 steps/flight)
> Before elevators most buildings would stop at around 5 stories.
And before elevators housing prices and density aren't what they are now. You'd find a lot of people willing to traverse 20 stories if it meant not living a 30 minute commute away. So we really don't have any real-world data for this.
> Walking level ground and climbing stairs is not the same effort at all.
Sure. But I think my point of this comparing favorably to commutes stands. Also, given the statistics of adults who under-exercise this is a win-win, traversing stairs at every opportunity is a great way to get a workout in.
> 10 seconds per floor is absolutely not generous
Those 10 seconds per floor was probably overly optimistic. FWIW I live on the 4th floor and (I just timed it) it takes me around 35 seconds to go up from the ground floor at the pace I usually do, and would be comfortable maintaining for 5x that distance. I take every second step. That's 8.75 seconds/floor.
> which is about what you get in a residential building, an office building[...]
Keep in mind that those office buildings have more distance between floors partly because they're designed in a world where the elevator exists. If we're supposing that elevators hadn't been invented there would be a market pressure to construct buildings that made it easier to go up the stairs.
Those 10 seconds per floor was probably overly optimistic. FWIW I live on the 4th floor and (I just timed it) it takes me around 35 seconds to go up from the ground floor at the pace I usually do, and would be comfortable maintaining for 5x that distance. I take every second step. That's 8.75 seconds/floor.
In one of my previous jobs, our office was on 17th floor, and one day each week before lunch we'd all take elevator to floor level, and then climb these 17 floors back up. Let me tell you, last 4 floors are nothing like first 4 floors. Just try it for yourself one day -- find a 20 story building, climb to the top, see how tired you are, and how much time it took you, and then consider that you'd have to do it 2-4 times a day on average.
> Those 10 seconds per floor was probably overly optimistic. FWIW I live on the 4th floor and (I just timed it) it takes me around 35 seconds to go up from the ground floor at the pace I usually do, and would be comfortable maintaining for 5x that distance. I take every second step. That's 8.75 seconds/floor.
I suggest you actually try it once, it will probably be eye-opening.
And then of course you may want to consider that not everybody is a fit healthy young adult.
> Keep in mind that those office buildings have more distance between floors partly because they're designed in a world where the elevator exists. If we're supposing that elevators hadn't been invented there would be a market pressure to construct buildings that made it easier to go up the stairs.
No. Office buildings have more space between the floors for conduits and the like. You can bet your damn ass if they could pack more floors in the same vertical space they'd do so.
"How many people want to climb 20 stories... I'd guess a lot"
I'd guess very few -- I work in a 23 story office building (on the 20th floor, coindidentally), and from my desk I can see the stairway door in the hallway.
Other than maintenance staff, I don't remember seeing a single person use that door. We have another office on the 15th floor, and I know of no one that uses the stairs to travel the 5 floors from office to office.
So I think the number of people that want to climb 20 stories by stairs every day is very low.
I used to work on the 8th floor of an office building. I took the stairs. Granted, I was the only one, and 23 is 3x that. I'd still probably take the stairs and thereby skip the jogging. I'd also prefer the stairs to a long walk everywhere.
I live 270 ft up a hill, and regularly walk up. At 10 feet per story, that's 27 floors. I'm also the only one on the hill who walks up it.
Wow there must be some vacancies in that building. When I've worked in similarly-sized buildings with full offices, the wait for the elevator was such that no one would have considered using it to descend 5 floors. Most people would have taken the stairs ascending as well.
I'm guessing this building is laid out such that you never leave the floor you're based on? If I need to go up or down about 3 flights, I prefer stairs over waiting for an elevator.
Have you climbed twenty stories at once? As someone who is asthmatic it is incredibly hard for me to do this in one go without reaching for the inhaler, and I am a fairly active person. Anyone who does any amount of floors above 5 will find themselves tired. And then think about the disabled and elderly? Not having an elevator relegates them to the first floor, meaning the government will have to impose that they belong to disabled people, and likely resulting in an abnormally high rent/mortgage unless their are rent controls or the flat itself is owned by the government, which you can't always rely on. Also I wouldn't rely on a hook to hook much modern stuff upwards, for health and safety it wouldn't be allowed. In fact, why not just have an elevator? Then you wouldn't need a professional to hoist the cargo!!
I have a feeling the people who installed elevators in buildings thought it through.
Just make sure you don't leave the office for lunch, or to run an errand, or for a meeting in another building - because if you do you will be climbing more like 60-80 stories per day.
Depends on what time-period you take as "modern". NYC circa 1920 had lots of tall buildings but no AC at all (I think, from memory). But absolutely was not possible without elevators. (And steel frames for buildings, too.)
But the article seems to take modern to mean present-day Houston, and Dubai, Singapore... these were not devoid of human settlement before, of course, but could not look as they do now without AC.
Arguably, those cities are quite livable without AC - but not working a 9-5 schedule - as its almost impossible to do productive work during the hottest part of the day. Hence in hot weather climates, the siesta.
They were influential, but not critical per say. Many modern buildings, especially business building would be uninhabitable without air-conditioning. In general,food, water, and shelter are necessities for survival. If that had a modern spin, you very well might add air-conditioning onto that list.
"Energy management" can replace "Shelter", especially with climate change and space exploration.
It is necessary to move heat around to get useful work done. More people will have to become familiar with this idea personally to maintain their way of life.
I was curious about the highest walkups in NYC. Apparently, there are a few seventh-floor ones still around, and the rent for about a 15% discount relative to the third floor. Since 1929, elevators have been mandatory for buildings >6 floors.
Which constitutes a very small portion of the population. And considering many people in NYC live in apartments with pests, no windows, or whatever else, I'm not sure "want to" is necessarily the right choice to describe everything they end up doing.
A/C drive westward expansion and allowed Houston (and other cities not on the East coast) to thrive.
Galveston (where I currently live) was here long before A/C. The Storm of 1900 is what drove Houston to grow. Houston is more inland and better situated to weather the threat of hurricanes than a barrier island. The railroad allowed Houston to become a nexus of trade (in cotton shipping out of Galveston originally). The oil boom continued that growth. A/C didn't come along for many years later. It fueled the cities growth but plenty of people lived on the Gulf coast to benefit from the breezes off the water. In fact, it was those breezes that drove the University of Texas to start its medical hospital, UTMB, in Galveston.
How people managed to live further inland where there was no wind is beyond me. (There are too many mosquitoes to spend too long outside or have open windows without screens - besides, even then they'll still find a way to get through.)
A/C drove folks to move where the climates are warmer but land is more plentiful. A/C, like the railroad before it, made westward expansion more doable (bearable?).
Cities like Las Vegas and other desert metropolises sprang up as a direct result of A/C.
Not sure about more desert conditions, or office buildings, but I do know that houses used to be built a lot differently before air conditioning. For example, my parents' house was built just after 1900, and they only put in central air in the last decade (so I grew up without air conditioning). Even now, they rarely turn it on, and it is quite comfortable inside Lots of trees around, smaller windows, covered porch, air flow from the basement, etc.
Compare this to the house I bought built in 1998, it is unlivable without the air turned on. And even with it running it is still uncomfortable when the temps get into the mid 90s. It has huge windows, but even with the curtains closed it was horrible -- there was just no natural airflow in it.
One of my favorite houses was one that a relative had in Mississippi, which was one roof with three separate living areas and a T-shaped breezeway running through the house. Another design item was apartments with sun rooms, where you could open various windows to always catch a cross breeze.
- Leaky ("breathable") home constructions vs. air-tight tolerances required to code now.
- Region-specific cooling and design practices which aided in the dead of the summer (or winter!)
- More geographically-minded decisions: Mature, treed lots for shade (double points for deciduous trees in winter which let the sun radiate through), more E/W facing vs N/S.
- Architecture: Smaller, closed off rooms (shut the door to trap the heat/cold), breezeways, enclosed porches all seemed a lot more popular then vs. now when keeping cool (or warm, in the rooms' case) was a priority.
Of course, mileage will vary, but this is something interesting I've found comparing the house I grew up in (built 1952), my first home (1986), and our recent build (2018) which are all within <5 miles of each other. FWIW, if the HVAC doesn't run all day at the new home, it's a noticeable "stagnant air" when you get home.
>There are too many mosquitoes to spend too long outside or have open windows without screens - besides, even then they'll still find a way to get through.
To put this into some perspective, some 2 billion live in Asia, Africa, and Latin American regions with the same or worse conditions re: heat and mosquitoes.
Sure, but do they have freedom of movement to other regions within their country that have vastly better conditions? It's not that it's not possible to live, just that there are alternatives to move to in the US -- or simply don't move to inhospitable climates to begin with. That's not a luxury folks in (say) landlocked African nations have.
I live in Los Angeles, where the sun is often hot but the air is dry, and it cools down at night. You only need A/C during the hottest 2 or 3 months of the year, and many humbler homes don't have it. Those places are pretty unpleasant during peak summer.
It would be so easy to make every building comfortable. Design for high airflow - the air is not muggy. Include long awnings over all windows. This is obvious: even on the hottest day, it's usually comfortable under a tree. But the home builders have stubbornly ignored these old and simple solutions. Most houses are sealed boxes with no window shade at all. I don't understand it.
Disclaimer; I live in a very moderate climate. So I don't know how this would scale to hotter cities.
My home is equiped with what would translate to a "heatpump". Its a system that uses the warmth deep in the earth to help heating up the home in the winter, but also cools it down in the summer storing excess heat in the well drilled underneath the home or garden.
What it does in summer is basically run cold water through the underfloor heating system.
We've had some very hot days for our climate recently (35 to 38 degrees centigrade, which is around 95 to 100 Fahrenheit) and the temperature inside remained steady at a comfortable 23 degrees centigrade (around 74 Fahrenheit).
The system uses a lot less energy than air conditioning.
> It would be so easy to make every building comfortable.
Every time there's a thread on air conditioning, we get smug comments like this, usually from places where the climate is so comfortable to begin with that air conditioners are the least necessary. Okay, Los Angeles needs them two or three months a year. Anyone from San Francisco, on the other hand, forfeits the right to talk about air conditioners in my opinion.
I'm sitting in a major metropolitan area in Asia. The temperature right now is 39'C (102'F), and can easily go over 45'C (113'F) in the sun. The humidity fluctuates between 50% at midday and 90% at night, and the temperature remains above 30'C (86'C) through most of the night, too. I would love it if you could make every building comfortable under these constraints. Hint: increased ventilation only brings in more heat. Any cooling solution that relies on evaporating H2O does not work, either, so don't bother bringing those Kickstarter gadgets here. Most of the old world is in the same boat. Coastal California is the exception, not the norm.
I think the GP was referring to _every building in Los Angeles_, not every building in the world. You do make good points about how weather elsewhere would make it very difficult to handle without AC.
In Andalusia, Spain, the weather can get really hot and you rarely see AC in houses (it's still common in buildings such as malls and hospitals, for example). I am sure there are many features of Andalusian architecture that would be applicable in LA and other places in the US.
This summer has been far more humid than I can remember. I'm glad I had my AC repaired in April after having it not working for the last three years. The electric bill has been ugly though.
Los Angeles has very pleasant summers by East Coast standards. Many even fairly well off homes do not have air conditioners.
It's not great, but it's a lot better than lots of more northern cities like Boston. I literally cannot sleep in Boston during the summer without air conditioning.
In my only experience with the East Coast (CT), I also noticed the general lack of air conditioning, even in homes which to my Midwestern mindset surely had to have state of the art HVAC systems (they didn't). Oh how I long for 70-degree summers.
That is the general appeal of these places, for sure.
> I found myself really unsettled by this. Light a fire, and turn up the air conditioning?
You should be, I've never seen anyone in Texas do this. Many fireplaces throughout the state (that average both colder and hotter than Houston which fluctuates temp much less than other places) are used as they are in other states, just less frequently and the fireplaces are not designed to heat as well. And people don't run A/C in the winter in places like Houston unless there was a very rare situation.
Aside the inefficiency, surely it's not necessary to 'turn up' the AC in that case? I thought that you set a target temperature once and just leave it there?
Domestic AC is very rare in the UK so I may have misunderstood.
The temperature won't be consistent throughout the room if you have a big heat source like a fire in part of the room, so you would need to set it too a lower temperature to keep it comfortable near the fire.
Open fireplaces are inefficient heaters, the house probably lost more cool air due to the fireplace sucking in unconditioned air from outside than from direct heat from the fireplace.
Not sure if it is for temperature contrast or just because the aesthetic but not liking the heat that is insanely wasteful.
There are also some extraordinarily stupid out there doing stuff like opening the windows and turning on the air conditioner on full blast despite explict and clear instructions on to close all of the windows before. Or thinking that rabbit ears tv antennas were illegal - in the later half of the 20th century no less. All adults too young to be suffering dementia too.
I do the "open windows, A/C on" thing sometimes in my car. Too warm to really be comfortable with just the window down, but I really like the fresh air a lot more than the super dry cold air coming from the vents. I wonder if that's the same motivation for people who open windows in an air conditioned house.
We have awning windows at my house, and I try to open them when it's raining to get some fresh air flowing through the house without completely killing the AC system. Luckily summer is the wet season here so it works out.
> The US expends more energy on air conditioning, for example, than the whole of Africa does on everything. Then again, it expends even more energy on hot water, which doesn’t get the same rap.
I'd like to know where the author got that information from. I recently thought that a lot of homes (not apartment buildings) could be made energy neutral with a combination of geothermal hvac, solar water heating, and solar panels
The geothermal would help drive up the efficiency of the HVAC systems (considerably), and the solar heating would take care of the second highest energy user in the home. My guess is that with those two options most houses could then handle their other energy needs with a modest 3-5kw solar array and "small" battery bank
Sure, but even if that's true, new construction homes probably represent a minuscule fraction of the housing stock in the US. Not to mention what minuscule percentage of new construction is built in an energy neutral fashion.
Supposedly photovoltaics are cheap enough thanks to scale that photovoltaic plus electric water heater is more cost effective than solar water heating.
And we can't really call solar panels "energy neutral", whatever they drive is still part of our energy consumption and their electricity could have driven another load.
I was talking with my parents about what people did in New Orleans before they had air conditioning. Turns out that what they did was die. There were quite a number of heat related deaths every year before A/C came along, something like 15% of the population would die off.
In the event of the apocalypse New Orleans will be one of the first cities to go. Between losing the pumps, the oppressive heat (exacerbated by global warming), and the insects the survivors would be forced to flee the city if they wanted to survive.
I don't doubt that there were heat deaths in summer (Europe sees them every year as air conditioning is not normal for many countries) but 15% a year is insane - you'd need to be at least an order of magnitude off to have a sustainable population.
Sustaining the city required a continual influx of residents. To be fair, a lot of the deaths were from slaves, but it was something of a deathtrap between the high heat, humidity, hot nights, disease carrying insects, flooding, and hurricanes. Were it not such a valuable port the city would probably have died out.
You don't usually do heating in cases where you're worried about surplus heat. You could make the same argument for every productive activity except heating...
You could argue we should all be worried about surplus heat, all the time.
I heard an interesting argument about the efficiency of air conditioning the other day. It pointed out that, while removing heat from a room is of course not 100% efficient, it is merely shifting heat from one place to another (plus some waste).
Whereas heating is ALL "waste". So more waste heat should be generated from, and more energy used in, heating vs air conditioning.
We definitely have a bias to accept that the New Englander is virtuous in heating his or her home in the winter, but the Arizonan is wasteful in cooling their "inhospitable" house in the summer.
> while removing heat from a room is of course not 100% efficient, it is merely shifting heat from one place to another (plus some waste).
> Whereas heating is ALL "waste".
> So more waste heat should be generated from, and more energy used in, heating vs air conditioning.
This is a logical mistake. It doesn't matter whether you think the heat produced in heating is metaphysically "wasted" or not; the energy used in heating vs air conditioning is a function of the temperature differential you want to maintain. Air conditioning means you're doing work to keep a certain volume of space at an artificially low temperature, and heating means you're doing work to keep a volume of space at an artificially high temperature. The amount of energy you use in order to achieve that goal depends on the amount of work you need to do, not on whether you're doing the work in order to lower or raise the temperature.
Both result in "waste" heat (eg, added entropy) but in the case of combustion or resistive heating (covered above in the thread), the entire purpose is to generate waste heat. Whereas in air conditioning (or, as mentioned, heat pumps), the waste heat is only a side effect.
Both processes involve doing work by consuming energy. In one case, the work is moving heat, and in the other case, the work is producing heat. The term "waste" is pretty meaningless in this context; what you really have is the question "how much energy does this process consume?" The answer to that question won't change depending on how you label the products.
You have yet to advance an argument that a space heater produces more heat than an air conditioner does! In general, that is the case, but that's an artifact of the temperature range that people find comfortable (combined with the temperature range of climates where people live). It has absolutely nothing to do with whether their machines are in a state of metaphysical grace.
Imagine that people enjoy a temperature between 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and some people live in a wintery area where the outside environment is -20 degrees, while others live in a sweltering area where the outside environment is 105 degrees. The Arizonan chilling his house down to 70 is maintaining a temperature differential of 35 degrees between the house and the outdoors. The Michigander heating his house to 60 is maintaining a differential of 80 degrees. That much larger differential means much more work needs to be done to maintain it, and the Michigander will consume more energy and produce more heat in the process of keeping his house comfortable.
If the climates were the same and the human temperature target were 10 to 20 degrees, then the Arizonan would be trying to chill his house by 85 degrees, while the Michigander would be heating his by a modest 30. The Arizonan's air conditioner would still be producing "useful work" in the form of moved heat, and "waste heat" in the form of emitted heat, and the amount of emitted heat would be large because a very large amount of work is being done. The Michigander's heater would still be producing "useful work" in the form of emitted heat (or as you call it, "waste heat"), and the amount of emitted heat would be low, compared to the air conditioner, because the Michigander is willing to stay much closer to the environmental temperature than the Arizonan is.
Yet again, labeling the heat "waste" has no implications for how much of it there is.
If we're talking about electrical heating, this is only true for resistive heating, which is indeed all "waste heat". But many air conditioners can run in "reverse cycle" [0], where you're transferring outside heat back in, and is much more efficient, apparently 50% cheaper to run in electricity costs.
When you run one of these systems, your New Englander and Arizonan are virtuous to the degree of the difference between inside and outside temperatures. ;)
There's even now some combined cycle AC systems which use the extracted heat to generate your hot water [1], sadly not yet available/cost-effective for small residential installations, but they're only off by a factor of 2 now (8kW is the smallest system I've seen, my central air is 4kW).
I actually just replaced a 20-year-old AC system that had a link to the hot water system. Installers just removed the water heater link entirely. Said that the extra resistance and energy involved in the exchange cost more than just venting the heat in modern systems with high SEER ratings. No idea if that's accurate; just what I heard.
Sorry, I meant both resistive AND combustion (eg, "gas"). Now, obviously, natural gas is far cheaper than electric for heat in most of the US at least, but it's all 'generated' heat, with all of the waste heat and CO2 emissions that entails.
Heating need not be 'all waste'. An air (or ground) source heat pump heats a room, counterintuitively, by pumping heat from the colder air outside. It uses less energy than the amount it releases into the room.
I don't know that I've encountered a space heater based on a heat pump, but in my mind...
"air conditioner" - a machine which keeps one or more rooms in a house cool, powered by a heat pump.
"heater" - a machine which keeps one or more rooms in a house warm, usually not powered by a heat pump.
"refrigerator" - a machine which keeps its own interior cool, powered by a heat pump.
"freezer" - a machine which keeps its own interior below freezing, powered by a heat pump and usually attached to a refrigerator.
All of which is to say, a heat pump is a machine that moves heat. It's named after its effect. But "heaters", "refrigerators", and "air conditioners" are named after their purpose, not their mechanics, and include heat pumps--if they do--incidentally, as the mechanism by which they achieve their purpose. If somebody came up with a refrigerator that still kept your food cold but didn't use a heat pump, I wouldn't hesitate to call it a "refrigerator".
More and more Europeans have some form of AC, even if it's just at work. Even in homes portable units are becoming much more common. --In much of southern Norway stores haven't even been able to keep them in stock due to the heat wave we experienced that started in May and only recently ended.
Timely post as I sit in Seoul on holiday in the midst of their hottest summer. It's the hottest, muggiest, most sticky heat I've experienced and air conditioning is driving the majority of my experiences right now.
I live in New Delhi, India and it can get unbearably hot here during the summer. Temperatures as high as 40 degree Celsius and above are taken for granted.
Air conditioning is of immense value in a region like this. But for majority of the population, it is a luxury. Even those with air conditioning use it in moderation to keep electricity bills in check.
Having moved across three different apartments in the same locality over the past 2 years, I've experienced how even slight improvements in architecture can significantly decrease the effects of heat-wave. The author's point does hit home.
I have always been fascinated by Air conditioning. Back in highschool, I wrote a paper all about how South Florida became inhabitable as a result fo AC. After college, I started an air conditioning related startup oddly enough.
For dry, you see a fair number of examples in the US southwest. One of the things you do is take advantage of the fact that there are big temperature swings between daytime and nighttime. You can also use cooling towers. You get some idea from the design of the Zion Visitor's Center. [1] It's not hot-hot there (it's high but gives you some idea).
Wet hot is a lot harder. Utilize shade where you can. Lots of cross-ventilation. Basically very open buildings (subject to how big a problem biting insects are of course--though you can use screens in that case).
Yeah, I visited the Andrew Jackson home and there were a bunch of corridors basically designed to convey wind (though ironically they keep them shut now because the moisture would damage the home)
Swamp coolers are incredibly useful for efficiently keeping cool in 100+ degree days, but are only usable in "dry heat".
Everywhere south of about Pennsylvania, kissing bugs -- carriers for deadly Chagas disease -- become a problem. So even with screens, you're going to want a well-sealed house.
More emphasis on airflow, more earthworks, more trees, and more passive solar design. That means fewer south facing windows, open features like patios, less bare lawns, building into berms, and various forms of sunshading.
I live in such a climate, and a pergola I built specifically to shade the west-facing sliding glass door has probably made a 10 degree difference in the temperature of that room. Great example of where A/C previously let the architect be lazy.
Whole house fans for cooling at night, insulation & air sealing up the wazoo for staying cool during the day. More focus on radiation-blocking windows.
Look up traditional persian architecture, at least for dry heat.
Thick walls, emphasis on airflow (windcatcher structures and solar chimneys) and interesting canals engineering (underground canals — qanat — used as heat exchangers to cool down surface air before drawing it back up through dwellings).
Engineering around shade also becomes very important.
Plenty of houses have been built across the southern USA before AC was common. When I lived in Tennessee, my house had a big shaded porch in front, plenty of shade trees, and (best of all) a huge 3 ft diameter whole-house fan in the hallway ceiling that kept a nice breeze coming in through the windows.
It was still uncomfortably warm on hot (and humid) summer days, but tolerable.
It's quite common to not have air-conditioning in Sydney despite the temperature reaching over 40c in summer. The only really noticeable thing for me compared to Northern European housing is double glazing doesn't seem to be as prevalent.
> Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.
> Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.
Great article but I was hoping to read arguments about why we should turn off air conditioning as the headline promised yet none were provided. I guess the author couldn't think of any despite alluding to costs and a lack of public spaces. Interesting piece nonetheless.
There's no mention of cross-season heat/cold storage, in places where it's cold in the winter, and hot in the summer. I wonder why that hasn't taken off.
Apologies; I just find it rather absurd that thermal energy could be stored in what apparently are water tanks, for months at a time, without losing most of the energy to conduction/convection with whatever surrounds the tanks.
After all, if we could do that, then certainly the same materials could allow smaller houses in cold climates to maintain a comfortable temperature throughout an entire winter without needing any active heating.
For underground storage, it's basically just brute force. Or rather, a riff on geothermal.
For building-scale storage, there are two factors. One is obviously very good insulation. Both for the building, and for the heat storage. The other is storing latent heat in a medium that changes phase, usually liquid to solid.
And yes, that's the idea. In summer, store heat from solar collectors, and from air conditioning. In winter, use that heat, plus PV electricity.
the same materials could allow smaller houses in cold climates to maintain a comfortable temperature throughout an entire winter without needing any active heating.
That's the general notion behind PassivHaus.
Integral design, internal thermal storage, situational orientation appropriate to site, thermal mass, extensive insulation, minimised building penetrations, and mitigations to address resulting consequences, particularly air exchange, moisture, and condensation.
The engineering is impressive. I recommend the videos, which are long, but information-dense and detailed.
The US is full of large, leaky, poorly insulated houses designed without any mind paid to thermal performance. Until that changes, ductless simply doesn't work for many people.
I think ductless will come on its own as US houses improve.
Not just the US.. A friend of a friend moved to the UK and built a house the way we do in northern Europe. Her neighbors pitied her in the winter because the roof of her house was covered in snow...
St. Petersburg is one of the finest cities and it will be so without either air conditioning or elevators. It also has 1.5M population capacity walkable urban core so car isn't needed either.
I think the same, if not more, can be said about London or Amsterdam.
But, indeed, most of America's greatest cities are land reclaimed from heat.
St Petersburg, London and Amsterdam are not "modern cities". Obviously there are tons of large cities that have been around before AC, but the article cites the rise of cities (and population) in places that were previously undesirable because of the warm climate. AC has caused a migration of sorts towards warmer places.
> Cities have boomed in places where, previously, the climate would have held them back. In 1950, 28% of the population of the US lived in its sunbelt, 40% in 2000. The combined population of the Gulf cities went from less than 500,000 before 1950 to 20 million now. Neither the rise of Singapore, nor the exploding cities of China and India, would have happened in the same way if they had still relied on punkah fans, shady verandas and afternoon naps.
