Reza Hosseini is from Iran and working on his PhD at Biomedical Engineering. He wonders why air conditioning is not a standard provision in the Netherlands. “Both at university and in other places, such as rented apartments, I have noticed that sometimes there is and other times there is no air conditioning. Why is that?”

To start with the university: Ronald van Nattem, head of management and maintenance at the Accommodation Department, has an answer to that. “Many of the buildings on campus date back to the 1960s, when the conditioning of rooms was not a standard requirement yet. The adjustment to today’s standards is not always easy, some buildings just are not fit for the installation of a central system. That explains why the choices made are based on budget, efficiency, sustainability and necessity. Still, some spaces are conditioned separately, usually on the basis of the requirements around the activities taking place there. In the new buildings all of this will be different, as all rooms will be connected to a central conditioning system.”

For other public buildings in the Netherlands the standards have changed as well. Some thirty years ago not a single building had air conditioning. The climate hardly made it necessary to provide cooling. Nowadays all new buildings are fitted with management systems for air and temperature in a standard way. (HB)