Selected Responses to Gail Cooper's
Air Conditioning America
I have to admit that I wasn't enthusiastic about the fact that we
were reading this book, because I was pretty sure that I had
absolutely no interest in air-conditioning. I was delighted to
discover that I was wrong. Cooper's book is fascinating from
beginning to end.
However, there is another story to be told here, a
counter-narrative to the overt discussion of socially constructed
technology, which seems to come through only briefly. This story might
best be described as Air: Conditioning Americans, for it tells of the
plasticity of the human form and the ways in which communities of
engineers remade the human form and redefined what was necessary for
it to function most effectively.
This book was written in a simple language. What I liked most
about it is how it unraveled so many stories all linked together by an
object we take for granted.
Her nuanced approach highlights how there is not just one
narrative, that control shifts depending on the actor's perspective
but that this perspective can also be greatly influenced by other
actors.
One criticism that I have about this book is that Cooper
throughout the book wrote generally about America as a whole and paid
little attention to local variations in climate and customer
desires.
I liked Cooper's book mostly because it tracked intertwined
political, scientific, and social discourses by following the
development of one kind of technology
Cooper is at her best when she shows how power relationships
shifted back and forth among engineers, management, workers,
consumers, and other interested parties.
This is an excellent piece of work, albeit too brief. I would
have liked to see teased out much more the implications of such a
gendered profession as the air-conditioning engineers constructing
devices that become ubiquitous in post-war America. I would also have
liked more discussion of the implications of air-conditioning to the
largely black South in the 50s and 60s, and to the largely black inner
cities in the 60s and 70s.
Cooper raises other interesting issues as well: the role of
science and quantification in disciplining the market, the relation
between design and actual use, the power of expertise and
professionalism in shaping a technology, the role of intermediary
channels (like theatre and media) in shaping a particular image and
pubic acceptance of a technology.
Cooper overall does an excellent job of staying on track with her
argument yet raises issues without feeling like she has to cover
everything. I am curious how much she revised her dissertation to get
this book. It is concise and interesting without bogging one down in
technicalities. My only complaint is that there could be more
illustrations of these systems or advertisements of them particularly
as she argues that their marketing played such a critical role in
their adoption and development.
If I had to find any faults I would say that I could have used a
little bit more information about the qualitative physics of air
conditioning, and would have liked to see a few simple diagrams of
standard air conditioning systems.
in a way she is doing two interesting things: one, she is bringing
out into the light an object which here in the U.S. is part of
everyday life and giving it a history and two, she shows how many
stories can be told around this technology, stories about the people
who created it, about the people who bought it, about the people who
worked in air-conditioned environments, about factories,
manufacturing, workers and employers, movie theaters, schools, houses
and ideas. This book shows that the air-conditioner is a great lens to
look at the history of technology, business history but also labor
history, the history of public health and the history of ideas.
You know, air conditioners raise many of the same provocative
issues as indoor plumbing. Am I too narrow-minded? There's a whole
wide world outside of the bathroom, and maybe I should start exploring
it.
Cooper tells a variety of stories in this work, but she is most
concerned to demonstrate the politics of the air-conditioner, a la
Langdon Winner. And she does this extremely successfully, showing the
ways in which the values of a particular community of engineers and
businessmen became incorporated into the design of air-conditioning
systems.
If I ever end up teaching construction and architecture students
about mechanical systems, this will be the first book on their reading
list!!
I would have liked to read more on how poor children and adults in
the cities viewed air-conditioning that they could not afford. I think
this would have added more color to the social pictures around the use
and development of air-conditioning.
If I had to complain about Cooper's book, I'd have to say that I
had somewhat schizophrenic experience reading it. While I appreciated
her study, I was awfully bored. I mean, I think this is an excellent
work, insofar as it tells a history of technology that is multiply
sensitive to the social, institutional, and cultural aspects of that
history. It is written concisely - and it's short, to boot (I think
this relative brevity translates into manageability). But despite
these assets, I had a tough time enjoying the process of reading the
book. It was important and well done, but never really held my
interest.
Reading Cooper's book in my steamy (hot and humid!) apartment, I
thought "what a timing to assign it as our last reading!" After a few
days later, my roommates and I decided to install a window
air-conditioner in our living room (and it's the first time I have an
A/C in my own apartment), so there was every reason this book caught
my interest.
"Rapping With Bill"
Perhaps there is a little bit of Bill in all of us.