Why I Do Not Have AC

This article is a preview of our Fall 2026 issue. To read the whole issue as soon as it is published, subscribe here. Every summer, at least once, the thermometer hits one hundred, the humidity breaks all previous records, and the message from the cosmos seems clear: you will give up and get air conditioning. Every summer, I resist. I do not eschew cooling technology for the sake of the climate, although you are welcome to tell people that if they ask. It is not the perverse need to prove that I could hack it, if suddenly dropped into various harrowing historical scenarios including but not limited to the Donner Party and the Vietnam War. It is not even for vague but strongly felt notions of seasonality and the importance of experiencing the sensory fullness of life’s offerings. It is because window air-conditioning units — the type of air conditioning to which I could, under real-life constraints, aspire — are ugly. They are squat. They are bulky. They are usually an unappealing shade of soiled-linen gray. They have plastic knobs. They have no sprezzatura, no grace, no cheeky jollity, and no formal coherence. Nothing about them cheers the eye. Nothing about them says “I am a complete and considered object, and I have a harmonious role to play in the larger aesthetic context in which I find myself.” They have nothing whatsoever to offer — except, unfortunately, a unique ability to transform the interior of your home from an infernal crockpot into a tranquil Himalayan retreat. They are, if anything, worse viewed from the outside than the inside. On the inside, units can be covered by discreetly placed chairs or curtains without losing too much functionality. On the outside, they erupt like pustules from the facade. Why does it have to be this way? Is there some iron-clad law of physics, some obscure principle of materials science, which dictates that window air-conditioning units must look exactly this drab and dispiriting? Or do air conditioners simply fall into the category of things — mostly appliances, like microwaves, televisions, and washing machines — where a certain level of hideousness is priced in, widely accepted, and therefore unlikely to change? I know part of the answer here is that many people, inexplicably, reserve their emotional investment for their families, careers, and communities, rather than the relative attractiveness of their window air-conditioning units. But I am not as alone as you might suppose. The city of Paris agrees with me. During the last catastrophic European heat wave, several outlets reported that a widespread lack of air-conditioning was due, in part, due to Parisian building codes that outright forbid (or at least inhibit via neighborly approval) any defiling of the sacred Haussmannian exteriors with repulsive-but-functional window units. I was immensely pleased when I read this. Say what you will about the ruinous prices I have paid and will continue to pay for solid oak furniture, tailor-made skirts, and over-designed mock-vintage toaster ovens: my aesthetic neuroses are just for me and have never given grandma heat stroke. At last, here were people who make me look normal. European resistance to air conditioning is often framed as a story of puritanical self-flagellation, as an insistence on managing energy crises by a regime of perpetual austerity rather than building out clean, abundant energy sources. But I think this is an over-generous framing driven by pundits who have never had a frivolous bone in their effectively altruistic bodies. Some of us just really hate looking at ugly things, and we’re willing to make you suffer so that we don’t have to. Now, you could argue that this is bad, quixotic, unreasonable, a function of radically disordered priorities, tantamount to geronticide, etc. And in fact, all through the last heat wave, there was a chorus of opinionators scolding Europe for their reluctance to get on board with the great American way of life. But this strikes me as exactly the same mistake that Europe is accused of making regarding climate change and energy use: moralizing what is fundamentally an innovation problem. Some people think climate change is going to kill lots of people, and so they tell us we have to turn off the air-conditioners for the greater good instead of building big beautiful nuclear plants that produce energy too cheap to meter and too clean to ration. Other people point to the fact that heat waves are already killing lots of people, and so they tell us we have to deface our visual commons for the greater good instead of building gorgeous little window units that we are excited to attach to our Haussmannian exteriors. Innovation doesn’t necessarily need to happen at the level of the window unit specifically, of course. Central air is invisible; it just tends to be cost-prohibitive for the cheap pre-war apartments that make up a non-trivial segment of our current housing stock (as well as almost the entirety of our attractive and graceful housing stock.) This could change. Mini-split units try to mini-split the difference between ugliness and expense and suffer the usual fate: still too ugly for the aesthetes, still too expensive for many landlords. But conditions could change here, as well. I suppose I hope we tackle the window unit because it seems like a natural first step in solving the hideous home-appliance problem more generally. America used to lead the world in designing and producing little beeping things that made your home run more comfortably and efficiently and looked cute while doing it. The space age optimism of the 1950s is behind us, and yet: MIT is still graduating engineers; Parsons is still churning out perpetually underemployed tastemakers. We could return. We could make domestic convenience great again. I do not know what the beautiful window air-conditioning unit of the future will look like. But I will know it when I see it. And I will know the golden age of temperature-controlled living is finally upon us when I see it exported by the millions to cool the city of light. May 29, 2026 Exhausted by science and tech debates that go nowhere?