He nails it I reckon:
I suspect that the problem is that air conditioning is more than a utilitarian cooling device: it is a marker of luxury, of the ability to transcend the elements. That shock of cold air, so incongruous in the hot summer months, is precisely the point. It is not enough that air conditioning actually cool the air — it must draw attention to the fact that it is doing so.
The NIEA conference on materials and environments in Sydney a week or so ago had two papers that tackled this issue. The big picture here is how architecture has been designed to shunt flows around—and in an age in which “away” no longer exists (we know that the “bad air” just goes round the block and contributes to climate change, not into some radically different dimension), this game of shunting flows around more and more efficiently just won't do.
This paper by David Gissen makes the point in one way
This paper by Stephen Healy makes a related point
Both are worth the read.
