Air Conditions
Lisa van Heyden
Enno Pötschke and Lisa van Heyden are a spatial design duo based between Amsterdam and Berlin, combining backgrounds in visual communication and architecture. They met at the Sandberg Instituut’s Studio for Immediate Spaces in 2023, where they began a collaborative practice shaped by shared interests in spatial research, ecological urgencies and critical engagement with infrastructural space.
Enno’s work explores the material and symbolic dimensions of infrastructure, using elemental substances like sand and concrete to investigate the physical and cultural foundations of built environments. Lisa’s practice navigates the intersection of architecture and art, focusing on invisible infrastructures and the environmental narratives they carry, creating spatial interventions that reveal the ecological and social systems behind them. Together, they integrate these perspectives to question and reimagine the relationships between material, space and socio-ecological conditions.
A recent achievement includes the Pizza Table (2024), a collaborative project for the Critical Studies Department at the Sandberg Instituut. Designed as a round table to support collective learning and non-hierarchical gatherings, it accommodates the entire department in a shared space.
"I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord." – Phil Collins
Air conditioning is often perceived as a neutral technology providing comfort and stability. But conditioned air is not just air, it's engineered, modified, commodified. Globally, 2 billion AC units consume over 10% of electricity and emit more than 1 billion tons of CO₂ annually. With demand expected to triple by 2050, this infrastructure is becoming a major driver of climate change. By making interiors cooler we are heating up the planet. The result is a growing paradox: the more comfortable the interior becomes, the more uncomfortable, unstable and uninhabitable the exterior gets.
Our project Air Conditions is a spatial research initiative focussing on the infrastructures of air by tracing how air circulates through buildings, bodies and economies. The project questions the division of interior and exterior and critically explores the global expansion of cooling technologies and their ecological, geopolitical and bodily impacts in order to rethink notions of comfort, atmosphere and control.
Inspired by the “Oltre Terra” exhibition of Formafantasma at Stedelijk Museum, we envision it as a design-research installation grounded in a strong curatorial framework. Starting with the refrigerant as a material and symbolic carrier of meaning, the work opens up multiple entry points into the politics of air conditioning. It’s a deeply investigative project that brings together material research and cultural narratives through crafted and immersive spatial forms.
It visualises airflows and materialise the conditioning cycle, combining artefacts, air-moving mechanisms and constructed environments to make climate control infrastructures visible. It is accompanied by mapping and archival investigations into global and local cooling systems, a visual and textual publication and a series of performative formats such as walks and talks, developed in the context and dialogue with the LINA Members.