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Delving back into the big yellow rainslicker of Rem Koolhaas & Co.: "Perhaps the end of the twentieth century will be remembered as the point where the city could no longer be understood without shopping" (Mutations, 127). I have to read this at least partly autobiographically since my father is a heating and cooling engineer. "Shopping could not have become as effortless as breathing without air conditioning. Only air conditioning can make windowless, sealed, interiorized, and artificial environments so natural and so comfortable. Along with the escalator, mechanically engineered climates enabled an explosion of the depth of the interior, creating spaces increasingly divorced from the outside, increasingly inescapable, and increasingly able to accommodate virtually any type and scale of human activity, in any combination."