photograph

promotional pamphlet

People Like to shop and eat where it’s comfortable

Unit for Small stores

By Carrier’s accounts, the very first application of air conditioning to a franchise of retail stores was to Murphy & Ragsdale in 1952. The photograph included in the records is of an entirely nondescript box of a building in the shadows of Carrier’s Newark engineering headquarters.

photograph

A demonstration of a new environmental ideal for the American home, this photograph repeats tropes of man and nature; what-is-inside and what-is-outside; machine and garden

A pair of photographs which juxtaposes back-of-house and front-of-house and enables the translation of air conditioning systems, applications, and aesthetic discretion from the warehouses of process cooling to the department store floors of comfort cooling.

Key components

Total energy plan

MAY-CO

A pair of photographs of May Co. stores which illustrates the rapid disapperance of fenestration on the exterior of the building.

The great J.L. Hudson department store in Detroit, Michigan, exemplifies the type of punch-holed shopping atmosphere impenetrable to an interior customer en derive

Sketch perspectives of the interior of Hudson’s air conditioned mega department store carry a certain optimism of space. Particularly in the second of the drawings, the multiplication of elements and one-point perspective redraw the retail world as a single conditioned limitless space. The likeness of the sketch to models and drawings later commissioned by the Florentine collective Archizoom is notable. Four decades and a half a world away, architects working under utopian directives fantasized about the very endless derive of shopping already achieved in an elementary way in 1926 by J.L. Hudson in Detroit, MI.