The World of Interiors

King Ludwig II of Bavaria began construction on Neuschwanstein Castle in September 1869 and died, under mysterious circumstances, seventeen years later, before his dream was complete. That hasn’t stopped some 80 million people from making the trek to the small Alpine village of Schwangau, Germany, to visit the unfinished fairy-tale palace that inspired Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle. Not long ago, on an abnormally hot afternoon, I was finally among those hiking up the steep trail to behold the landmark in person.

While I have wanted to see Neuschwanstein since I was a child and have read about it in countless books, I was not prepared for its relative modernity: the telephones, the automatic toilets, the once state-of-the-art kitchen, the conservatory’s frameless glass door, the electric bell system that Ludwig used to summon his butler. Despite those impressive amenities — and despite the fact that this remains a nineteenth-century building — tourists regularly go online to grumble about the temperature. “You don’t expect these attractions to have air conditioning, but other castles at least had fans running,” a traveller from Minnesota moaned on Tripadvisor back in 2013. “The king forgot to install air conditioning,” another American noted on a travel blog last year, “so maybe a cold day is better.” As our summers grow hotter and hotter, I suspect such complaints will continue piling up.

Ludwig didn’t forget the AC, of course. Air conditioning had not yet been invented by the time he drowned in Lake Starnberg, the term not yet coined. It was only in 1902 that Willis Carrier designed a mechanical cooling unit, to deal with excess moisture that was interfering with a Brooklyn printer’s ink. Four years later, Stuart W. Cramer, a mill owner from North Carolina, filed a patent for his humidity-control system, using the phrase “air conditioning” for the first time.

Window air conditioners arrived in 1931, though few consumers could afford one. That same year, Sheldons Limited of Galt, Ontario, installed Canada’s largest, most powerful air conditioner at the Imperial Theatre in downtown Toronto. “We Now Manufacture Weather,” an advertisement in the Saturday Globe boasted. “Our gigantic refrigerating machines have a cooling effect of 340,000 pounds of melting ice per day!” Five years later, Canadian railways were all aboard, installing air conditioning on cars running between Montreal and Chicago.

After a rather slow start, air conditioning came for the masses in 1947, with the introduction of Henry Galson’s low-cost compact window unit. Today there are roughly 2 billion air conditioners around the world, with 68 percent of Canadian households making use of one — up from 64 percent four years ago. As extreme heat events become more common and more prolonged, the International Energy Agency predicts there will be 5.6 billion units out there by 2050, which means ten new air conditioners are being sold every second.

According to the United Nations, air conditioning already accounts for roughly 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions — double the contribution of the aviation industry. An increasing share comes from the cooling of data centres for cloud computing, cryptocurrency mining, and artificial intelligence. While access to tolerable temperatures is considered an environmental justice issue, the more we turn down the dial, the more we crank up the heat — especially since two-thirds of electricity production still comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

To partially untangle the Gordian knot that is air conditioning, a coalition of agencies and foundations, initiated by the government of India and backed by Sir Richard Branson, launched the $3-million (U.S.) Global Cooling Prize in 2018, to incentivize “a breakthrough residential cooling technology that has at least 5x less climate impact when compared to a baseline unit.” Two winners were announced three years later — China’s Gree Electric Appliances and Japan’s Daikin — though subsequent iterations of the contest have yet to be announced.

The sustainability of prizes, of the literary bent anyway, has been top of mind for many in the chattering classes these past few weeks. But as the mercury here and elsewhere shows no sign of falling on its own, we should collectively call for the revival of any competition that might help solve the air conditioning paradox.

At least that’s what I thought as I hiked down the mountain after touring Ludwig’s castle, dehydrated and drenched in sweat but very satisfied. Less enthusiastic tourists will always carp about something, but let’s do what it takes to ensure that future visitors to Neuschwanstein aren’t complaining about summertime temperatures that are even hotter than today’s. Like so much of our built environment, the Swan King’s enchanting retreat just wasn’t made for this warming planet.