EVENTS

TERMS and CONDITIONS

In the climate-controlled interiors of buildings around the world, the costs of comfort are forgotten, and unstable futures endlessly deferred. Adjusting the thermostat has profound implications for the climate system and for the future. What have we signed up for? Did we remember to read the fine print?

Outside, air conditioning systems whirr and drip, displacing heat from optimised sealed thermal interiors. They run continuously off electrical grids that are still too often powered by fossil fuels. All this cooling requires a planetary infrastructure, a way of building and living in buildings that combust and emit, further locking in carbon, accelerating the rise in temperature and humidity, and leading to rising sea levels. This vicious cycle—cooling systems churning away and heating things up—is a familiar background hum for the world’s privileged, long accustomed to tuning out any dissonance on their way indoors.

Terms and Conditions brings the outside in: the outside-side of the air conditioner is inside, suspended all around. They are blowing waste heat in here so that the rooms in the Corderie dell’Arsenale beyond remain cool and stable. Heat is displaced, from there to here, from them to you.

Visitors’ passage through this room is a spatial allegory for the glaring global inequities of the thermal interior, expanding daily. Who gets to be comfortable, for how long, and at what cost?

That side: cool, consistent, comfortable. Normed and universalised, sealed and contained. Conditioning is based on consistency: always on, always available, always the same temperature. Consistency is costly. It requires infrastructure and reserves, resources and processing power; it requires an impenetrable membrane, isolation of the interior from the chaos outside.

This side: hot, noisy, and damp. Unpredictable and uncomfortable, porous and precarious. This is the space of thermal contestation, where luxury and survival emissions are debated, where hospitals and cooling centres stake claim to socio-thermal investments, and where public health is negotiated by minimising risk and accepting loss.

This is the thermal inequity that lifestyles of the comfortable exacerbate, almost unthinkingly. And they are supported by buildings and building systems that are not fit to purpose for rapid decarbonisation. We are at the edge, temporally and geographically displaced—but only just, only for now—from a world overwhelmed by non-compensable heat, by sweaty nights, by thermal stress that we cannot come back from. While enduring the waste heat, being resilient, consider how and for whom they can be revised or re-negotiated.

In the anteroom of the Exhibition, the background hum becomes a cacophony, an alarm, a wake up from collective unknowing. Discomfort. Thermal Stress. Externalised Costs. Non-Compensable Heat. Path Dependency. Luxury vs survival emissions. Sacrifice Zones. Sufficiency. This is the jargon of a twenty-first century intelligence, an expanding critical lexicon for architecture in the era of climate crisis. Before proceeding, please take this opportunity to familiarise yourself with the terms and conditions.

Read the climate projections on Venice in the report below by ETH, or download it here:

CREDITS

Climate engineering: Transsolar Energietechnik GmbH
Climate experience: Technische Universität München
Climate science: ETH Zürich
Design: Bilge Kobas, Daniel A. Barber, Dehlia Hannah, Alexandra Auer, Sebastian C. Koth
Installation: Massimo Ferranti, ABC Produzioni e Allestimenti
Production: Klaus Feith, boost
Supporter: DGNB (German Sustainable Building Council), Transsolar Energietechnik GmbH