Weijia (Lola) Deng
Unconditioning Air
ducts in the wind!
Unconditioning Air rethinks the boundaries contrived through environmental control. For more than a century, HVAC defined the boundaries of interior air. The regime and tools of mechanical conditioning promise stability and manageability of indoor air quality at the expense of external phenomena, and by extension, any complexity or fluctuation in the environment. As a result, air conditioning premises that ideal interior comfort is “bubble-like”, requiring increasingly standardized and highly regimented regulatory tools.
Yet despite the avalanche of regulations and controls, air doesn’t adhere to boundaries HVAC systems impose. Unlike conventional air conditioning, Unconditioning Air reconceptualizes air as an unconditional environmental phenomena to be marked and expressed rather than controlled. Misusing AC products, this thesis reworks their materials, designs, and representations. Through a series of air attachments varying in scale, materials, forms, and connections, Unconditioning Air explores ways to interact with internal and external air movement.
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