Ambient Conditioning

Definition

Ambient conditioning names the conditioning of an interior's ambient features — temperature, moisture, air movement, light, smell, sound — as a sensorial design medium rather than a background service. Laura Garófalo-Khan's chapter names it one of the two registers ("sensorial manifestations of ambient conditioning and performative ornamentation") through which the grotto-model interior architecture works, framed "in terms of biophilia."

The concept's historical archive is the grotto's thermal technology: the found grotto "exploited the wet cave's ability to fabricate a distinct thermal environment. The combination of flowing water, earth as a thermal sink, and deep shadows that maintained the space cool and fresh made it a most desirable space in the Mediterranean climate." The Roman nymphae made it architectural — "complex, constructed hydraulic marvels reveling in the pneumatics of water… refuge for sensorial delights." Its contemporary forms: Peter Zumthor's Therme Baths at Vals, "programmed for relaxation and sensorial awakening," where "the earth and the water that occupants submerge themselves in define a corporeal engagement with a mass" and "the occupation of the mass has a sensual resonance employing a site strategy and thermal conditioning of the entire building, rather than an architecture focused on its own interiority"; SOL Grotto's tubes "infuse the space with cool air, provided by the Venturi effect, rather than the thermal sink of the moist earth"; and Bienvenidos al Sur's plant thicket, whose "diffused boundary modulates moisture, light, air, smell, and sound" — conditioning without a sealed envelope: "There is no continuous weather or thermal boundary."

Ambient conditioning is thus the wiki's bridge between the comfort tradition (de Wolfe's controllable heat, Baldwin's fires — see comfort) and the phenomenological atmosphere (atmosphere): the air, heat, and moisture that engineers manage are here treated as the interior's principal expressive medium — the medium that "defines a corporeal engagement with a mass" (Vals) and delivers "a mediated experience of water, coolness, and light" (SOL Grotto). Its negative pole is the McClures' hermetic-seal: air conditioning as the absolute boundary that made comfort a sealing technology and produced the deep interior's "extreme sensual disconnection from nature" (see picture-window).

A third, grid-service register appears in Gattegno and Johnson's reconstruction of Superstudio: ambient conditioning produced not by a building's systems but by plugging into a landscape of energy. Superstudio's "Description of the Microevent/Microenvironment" made the microclimate a network commodity: "All you have to do is stop and connect a plug, and the desired microclimate is immediately created (temperature, humidity, etc.); you plug into the network of information, you switch on the food and water blenders …" Here conditioning precedes and replaces the envelope altogether — "a landscape devoid of any enclosure, envelope, or environmental membrane" — and Banham's Standard of Living Package is its mechanical prototype: the "atmosphere maker… breathing out warm air along the ground" (see the-campfire, microevent-microenvironment). The register's sting is economic: Superstudio's grid presupposed "an egalitarian and all-providing energy infrastructure," while "the complex and contradictory politics of the grid we plug into today" raise "issues of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism" — the conditioned microclimate as a purchased service rather than a designed room.

A fourth, urban-stratifying register appears in Jonathan D. Solomon's chapter: ambient conditioning extended outdoors and turned into a social sorter. Hong Kong's outdoors is itself conditioned — "pungent with smells, heavy with particulate matter, buffered by light and noise, and hemmed in by walls, the 'outdoors' is no less a manufactured environment than the indoors" — so that the conditioned microclimate becomes the city's hierarchy: "Cooled, dehumidified, perfumed air distinguishes cultural and economic strata that are spatially contiguous and largely indistinct from one another." The register's instruments are retail: "a high-end shopping mall branded by Armani is distinguished from an adjacent and connected mall catering to Filipino foreign domestic workers by, among other things, prodigious scents," and "varying access to natural light affects retail rents at the Landmark Mall." Where the grotto register conditions to reconnect (biophilia) and the grid register conditions as service, Solomon's conditions to stratify — ambient quality as the visible city's invisible fence, with the teargas/perfume pairing (atmospheric-politics) as its political limit: "The clouds of teargas in Admiralty and the perfumed air of the adjacent Pacific Place shopping mall are both tools for reinforcing the hierarchies of Hong Kong's political establishment." See atmosphere, atmospheric-politics, smellscape.

Key Thinkers

• Laura Garófalo-Khan — the concept's source: ambient conditioning named as one of the two sensorial registers of the grotto-model interior.
• Peter Zumthor — the bath-scale precedent: "thermal conditioning of the entire building" as sensual resonance (Therme Vals); already tracked on the wiki's atmosphere page as atmospheric practice — ambient conditioning is that practice's technical half; not yet paged (see log).

Related Concepts

• atmosphere — the felt result: ambient conditioning is atmosphere's engineering side (Böhme's "production" of atmospheres, at building scale).
• comfort — the bodily target: warmth, coolness, and air as the occupant's provision, here promoted from service to expression.
• biophilia — the frame: ambient features of "the non-human environment" (light, temperature, moisture) as the medium of the encoded nature-connection.
• hermetic-seal — the negative technology: the sealed interior where conditioning is separated from sensation.
• sensorial-interior-landscape — the aesthetic ambient conditioning serves.
• artificial-grotto — the historical home: the wet cave's "distinct thermal environment."
• white-cube — the engineered interior's display form: purity as sensual disconnection.
• olfaction — the included sense: smell named among the modulated media ("moisture, light, air, smell, and sound").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the concept's source: "sensorial manifestations of ambient conditioning" as the chapter's first register; the wet cave's "distinct thermal environment"; Vals's "thermal conditioning of the entire building"; the Venturi-effect coolness of SOL Grotto; Bienvenidos al Sur's "no continuous weather or thermal boundary."
• From ambient environments to sentient spaces (Gattegno & Johnson 2018) — the grid-service register: Superstudio's plug-in microclimate ("All you have to do is stop and connect a plug, and the desired microclimate is immediately created (temperature, humidity, etc.)"); the membrane-free landscape ("devoid of any enclosure, envelope, or environmental membrane"); Banham's Package as "atmosphere maker… breathing out warm air along the ground"; and the politics of the pluggable microclimate ("ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism. Who owns the data?").
• Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the urban-stratifying register: the manufactured outdoors ("the 'outdoors' is no less a manufactured environment than the indoors. The city – indoors and out – is a vast and continuous interior"); conditioned air as social sorter ("Cooled, dehumidified, perfumed air distinguishes cultural and economic strata that are spatially contiguous and largely indistinct from one another"); retail atmospherics (the Armani mall's "prodigious scents" vs the domestic-workers' mall; "varying access to natural light affects retail rents"); and the register's political limit — teargas and perfume as twin administrations of air ("both tools for reinforcing the hierarchies of Hong Kong's political establishment"). See atmospheric-politics, smellscape, atmosphere.
• source-notes/brownell-2018-living-rooms-hypernaturalization

Open Questions

• Is ambient conditioning sensorial only when it is legible (the grotto's cool air, Vals's warm water) — and does the modern deep interior's perfect, invisible conditioning therefore abolish the very medium this concept names? (The picture-window diagnosis suggests the deficit is precisely conditioning without sensation.)
• The chapter's exemplars "do not address the environmental envelope" — can ambient conditioning be an expressive medium inside a conventional sealed building, or does it require porous, boundary-free construction (Bienvenidos al Sur's thicket)?
• How does ambient conditioning relate to Böhme's staged atmospheres and Borch's "subtle form of power" — is the biophilic conditioning of air, moisture, and temperature the benign face of atmospheric governance, or its most seductive form?
• Gattegno & Johnson's grid register asks whether conditioning can exist before architecture: the plug-in microclimate needs no envelope, no structure, no room — "a landscape devoid of any enclosure, envelope, or environmental membrane." Is the plug-in microclimate then ambient conditioning's fulfilment (conditioning everywhere, on demand) or its abolition (the conditioned bubble that is nobody's design)? And when the grid is capitalist ("ownership, privacy, access"), is the microclimate a utility or a commodity — and who bills for the breeze?