air gabriel fries - briggs
To condition a substance is to bring it into its desired state for use. Matter, conditioned through infrastructure, is frequently categorised according to functional criteria: government funds are earmarked for transportation infrastructure, water infrastructure, telecom, waste, power generation, and so on. These categories often overlap – we need roads to get to the power plant. Or we couple infrastructures – stormwater ditches and train lines provide linear easements for bike paths. However, the infrastructure of air cuts across categories because air is and goes everywhere. With air it is difficult to distinguish between ‘natural’ and human- made infrastructure. The geologic effect of human actions (the anthropocene, the capitalocene) seen through the quality of air make this distinction particularly blurry. Air is a precondition for our ability to live in the world so the condition of that air is germane. Difficult to contain, channel or direct, infrastructures of air can be hard to see, yet they are in every pollution source, climate regulation, policy decision, and in the formation of ‘interior’ atmospheres. Air is a direct link between local conditions – weather, and global phenomena – climate change. It is also a system of scalar relations. In the multitude of designs for air tempering, one can see the infrastructures of being and cultural conditioning, of street design, public spaces, social habits, of buildings and their range of permeability – all ways of living in one’s climate. Conditioned air ranges from a respirator to the planet. In a constructed interior, systems for conditioning air trace a history of building mechanisation and the standardisation of comfort. While there are regional differences in conditioning systems, the projects of modernisation, industrialisation and globalisation work towards generic levels of temperature and humidity. Ideals of mechanically- produced comfort remain relatively stable across geographies, obscuring differing cultural relationships to comfort and climate. The ubiquity and design of air conditioning systems is symptomatic of mechanical inertia and a cultural-reliance on the technologies of comfort, despite their implication in the climate crisis: a major consumer of energy, primarily from fossil fuels, the stock of global air conditioning units is projected to double by 2040. Unlike water treatment or power generation, infrastructures of tempered air are located at the site and scale of the individual building, reducing the scope of public intervention and resulting in extreme disparities in atmospheric composition. While it may go everywhere, the quality of air is highly unequal. If the material artefacts of infrastructure elude governmental control, they can be conditioned by policy – laws and legislation that attempt to control the quality or inequality of air. In the United States, the Clean Air Act of 1963 regulates emissions from stationary and mobile sources and establishes National Ambient Air Quality Standards. These, however, have not prevented concentrations of polluting sources, legal and illegal, in under-served areas and near communities of colour, partly due to historical practices
Joshua White
such as redlining and a lack of political representation to control zoning. Poor air quality, sensed in real-time by our bodies and recorded in long-term health disparities, is scientifically monitored by networks of connected sensors. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency requires permanent air-pollution monitors in metropolitan areas with populations greater than 200,000. If sensing networks can be understood as a distributed infrastructure of air, the Air Quality Index is its central delivery system. Rendering air as a scientific object, the Air Quality Index has moved from a position at the margins of attention, guiding policy and climate modelling, to a metric governing daily habits. Over the past few years, Air Quality Index has been integrated into the weather apps for both iOS and Android mobile devices where public data is available. For smartphone users, Air Quality Index displays alongside forecasts for temperature and precipitation. Infrastructural networks for sensing airborne particulate-matter tell us when to close the windows and turn on the air conditioning, when to avoid going outside, and what to talk about when we talk about the weather.
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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