Meridian

04 Jul 2025 · 14 min

A brief history of thermal comfort

The 22-degree interior is a mid-century export, not a human right.

Daniel BrooksAssociate, Research

A brief history of thermal comfort

The comfort band was written for offices in the American Midwest and then sold to the planet as biology. It is neither biology nor polite.

English houses were always seasonal. You moved rooms. You opened the north door at night. You accepted a cool morning as the price of a thick wall.

Our work is not nostalgia. It is a refusal to spend the next forty years mechanically reproducing a 1950s indoor climate at the edge of a hotter ocean.

Next essay

Heat as a building material