Kind of Blue: In Asia, Elite Offices Show Off With Icy Temperatures

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL August 24, 2005; Page B1

Question of the Day: How is the temperature in your office?

It is a steamy 91 degrees here in Hong Kong, but conference organizer Patricia Shiu is sitting next to a portable heater inside her modern office tower.

"It is unnaturally cold here," Ms. Shiu says of her office, which falls to a brisk 64 degrees in the summer. Every morning, the 29-year-old dons a black wool sweater, but it's never enough to protect her from the floor vents shooting up frigid air. Within an hour, she switches on the heater under her desk. "I don't think I'm a weak person," she says by way of apology.

Her colleagues would agree. They use rulers to try to hit a button deep inside the vent to close it. (Never mind that it just increases the air flow from other vents onto their colleagues.) If that fails, they drink hot soup and tea, or do yoga in the bathroom to stay warm. Their company has run out of the red corporate sweaters it sold for about $6.50, which many employees use as office sweaters.

Parts of tropical Asia are extraordinarily humid. Air conditioning helps abate the mold that grows on drapes, shoes and just about everything else that doesn't move.

But mostly, frosty air conditioning is a way for businesses and building owners to show that they're ahead of the curve on comfort. In ostentatious Asian cities, bosses like to send out the message: We are so luxurious, we're arctic.

Studies have found that 72 to 78 degrees is the optimal range of "thermal comfort" for humans indoors. But around sweltering Asia, buildings blast employees to temperatures as low as a goose-pimply 60 degrees. Cinemas and restaurants even rent out shawls to customers rather than turn down the air conditioning when it becomes fashionably, but uncomfortably, cold.

Hong Kong is just about the world's coldest city -- indoors, that is. A study by one university found that most offices here average between 70 and 72 degrees. Nightly, bespectacled workers who step from frigid lobbies into the city's humid bath find themselves temporarily blinded by a scrim of fog on their lenses.

So, Ms. Shiu and others here joined a resistance movement. It was given a voice this summer by groups such as Friends of the Earth, which contends that all that air conditioning is terrible for the environment, as the units release tons of excess carbon dioxide into the air through the electricity used. With the help of 400 "thermal crime" reporters, the group compiled a name-and-shame list of the city's coldest places. It includes the 66-degree offices of the city's tourism board. One travel guide warns visitors that riding in public buses could turn fingers blue.

Hoping to foment a revolution among Asia's office ladies, or young female workers, FOE calls the excessive air conditioning sexist. Change-resistant, tie-clad men often control offices, it says, and aren't bothered by the chill. Women, on the other hand, tend to wear lighter clothing in the summer. "We wear small dresses, so almost every office lady has an office jacket," says Mona Lim, a 31-year-old real-estate developer. "Usually, the jacket is an ugly one," she adds. Hers, a blazer messed up by a tailor, never leaves the office.

Traditionally, it seems, men have taken air conditioning very seriously. Lee Kuan Yew, founder of modern Singapore, once suggested that without air conditioning, his hermetically sealed city-state wouldn't have risen up from a swamp.

In Japan, the government was worried that suit-and-tie-clad Japanese businessmen would balk at the order in June to set thermometers at 82 degrees to save energy. To prod them, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has adopted a Miami look, with an untucked blue-linen shirt and white slacks, telling his countrymen to dress in so-called Cool Biz style.

Syed Ahmed, a manager for Nissan Motor in Tokyo, loves the Cool Biz look, but had to buy a new retro wardrobe. "It reminds me of the 1940s movies where you had offices with fans instead of air conditioning, and paperweights everywhere to keep papers from flying," he says, wearing a short-sleeve shirt and a sensible pair of cotton trousers.

Some 45% of Japanese businessmen went without ties and jackets this summer, according to a survey by the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living. But it isn't easy for the formal Japanese to kick the dress-up habit. "When you are meeting with somebody from outside, you don't know which camp he is in," admits Mr. Ahmed. "So people still want to play it safe and wear a tie."

Back in Hong Kong, hedge-fund operations manager Genevieve Verman muses that building managers must think the first blast of air conditioning in the morning makes employees think, "Aaahhh, work is a great place to be." They hope it will persuade staffers to stay in and work during lunch, she says.

Wrong! As far as the 34-year-old Hong Kong resident is concerned, "I love being blasted with hot air on the way out."

In the slightly uncomfortable 82-degree offices of Hong Kong's FOE, organizer Agnes Chen is trying to keep the resistance movement from boiling over. Since it launched the thermal crackdown, FOE has received many technical inquiries from building managers. The problem: They don't know how to adjust the climate controls.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com