In 2022, Qatar hosted the FIFA World Cup. A central challenge of the games was the question of temperature: what would it mean to play World Cup football matches—and watch them—in an open-air environment where summer temperatures often exceed 40ºC/104ºF?

The answer was to construct a series of air-conditioned stadiums. In March 2024, two years after the World Cup, we visited “Qatar 2022: Journey & Legacy,” an exhibition at the Qatar National Library commemorating the event. Two objects caught our attention. The first was a row of scale models of the eight air-conditioned stadiums built for the tournament. The second was a cooling suit designed for the migrant workers who built them. What was being celebrated in this exhibition was not just the football tournament itself, but the triumph of a certain kind of interior engineering: the art of enclosure, or putting people into bubbles.

While air-conditioning in closed stadiums is now commonplace, Qatar’s World Cup sites were open-air. The engineering challenge therefore was to construct venues that still felt enclosed. The cooling suits were integral to that project. Qatar’s hot climate makes the physical demands of construction labor potentially lethal. The suits, as the National Library display shows, made it possible for construction workers to survive these extreme conditions. What viewers are not told is how those suits made it possible for a rentier state whose economy depends upon both carbon-intensive fossil fuel extraction and low-paid migrant labor to create a bubble around the tournament—to insulate it from environmental and ethical scrutiny.

It’s no secret that artificial air conditioning is a major contributor to climate change. Air conditioning doesn’t just separate the interior from the exterior. It exacerbates the differences between the two. The vapor compression technology of air conditioning cools interiors while heating exteriors, both directly with its waste heat and indirectly with its carbon emissions. In addition to these externalities, air conditioning has socio-sensorial costs. Conditioned air lowers the capacities of bodies to cope with thermal conditions outside a narrowly defined thermal comfort range. This deepens their addiction to mechanical cooling and, like all addictions, puts users in a bubble. It physically and ethically separates them from those who do the arduous physical labor of extracting fossil fuels and building climate-controlled buildings. The bubble makes invisible the rhythmic changes in the exterior climate, making it easier to defer recognition that the planet itself is slowly overheating.¹

Qatar’s choice to air-condition stadiums has a history. In the 2000s, Qatar began leveraging the unprecedented revenues of an oil and gas price boom to make itself into a geopolitical and cultural player. In 2007, Qatar made a bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics but failed to make the shortlist. Qatar had suggested holding the games in October, arguing that this was when temperature and humidity levels would allow for optimal comfort and sporting performance. The International Olympic Committee, however, regarded the proposed shift as unacceptable.

Qatar blamed its environment for this failure. As one official remarked, “The weather was the main reason we were left off the shortlist.”² In 2008, Qatar made its bid for the 2022 World Cup, this time acceding to the international expectation to host it during summer. To combat the heat while keeping stadiums open-air, it promised to deploy cutting-edge carbon-neutral cooling systems at stadiums, training sites, and fan zones. At their final bid presentation, the Qatari team promised that “heat is not, and will not be an issue.”³

To convince FIFA of the feasibility of its techno-ambitions, in 2010, Qatar hired the engineering consultant Arup to rapidly build a five-hundred-seat prototype net-zero-carbon stadium, cooled by solar-powered air conditioning and protected from the hot sun with a double-layered roof. This prototype stadium, named “the Showcase,” demonstrated to a visiting FIFA delegation that Qatar’s promises were credible.

After Qatar was officially awarded the bid later that year, scientists from Qatar University including Dr. Saud Ghani (nicknamed “Dr. Cool”) were awarded research funding by the state to turn the prototype into actual, energy-efficient, mechanically cooled, open-air stadiums. Through computational fluid dynamics simulations and wind tunnel tests, Dr. Cool and his team provided input to architects and helped to fine-tune the geometries of the stadiums. They also tested various positions and types of diffusers to choreograph airflow patterns, as Dr. Cool explained to us, such that each building would behave aerodynamically like “a microclimatic bubble,” despite the fact that each would have a large hole in its roof. He proudly described how, during one of the preparatory events at the Khalifa Stadium, FIFA president Gianni Infantino remarked that the atmospheric conditions inside the stadium felt like “spring in Switzerland.”

Despite the extreme desert heat, in Qatar, it already feels like a temperate spring in most indoor spaces. A nearly constant air-conditioned life has become possible thanks to the state’s funneling of petrodollars from the sale of hydrocarbons into free water and electricity for all its citizens, and into luxurious climate-controlled bubbles for its affluent visitors.

The extension of air conditioning to other visitors, particularly migrant workers, has been more uneven. The award of the World Cup to Qatar drew immediate condemnation for the country’s long-standing ill-treatment of migrant workers from organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, foreign newspapers like The Guardian, and labor groups like the International Trade Union Confederation. Criticism centered on the kafala system, which gives employers who sponsor migrant laborers in the Gulf almost total control over them, with little oversight, resulting in wage theft, physical hardship, and abuse. Critics also drew attention to a track record of migrant deaths and chronic illness caused by working in Qatar’s outdoor heat.

Qatar had previously made some moves toward protecting workers from its climate. For example, in 2005, the government began requiring that employers provide adequately air-conditioned accommodations for workers. But in the wake of the backlash, the government body responsible for the World Cup, the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, released its own set of Workers’ Welfare Standards with which all contractors working on World Cup stadiums had to comply. They mandated air conditioning in every enclosed space that workers would find themselves in, including dormitory bedrooms, social rooms, dining halls, and medical facilities; all buses used to transport workers to construction sites; and all habitable buildings that workers used on construction sites. After 2021, a rule was added mandating that work must stop any time the “wet-bulb globe temperature” rose above 32.1ºC/89.8ºF.

As for open workspaces that could not be air-conditioned, Qatar introduced technological innovations to enclose the bodies of migrant workers in their own heat-modulating bubbles. In 2017, the British company Techniche worked with scientists from Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University to develop the StayQool suit. The suit incorporates chilled phase-change materials along the cuffs, collars, and groin area to target points on the body where blood runs closest to the skin. Internal studies supposedly showed that this reduces skin temperatures up to 8ºC/14ºF. In this manner, a cooling suit functions like an air-conditioned stadium. It allows the wearer (like the spectator or the football player) to be enclosed and exposed at the same time.

While activist groups lauded the improvements in occupational conditions, they drew attention to two important limitations. First, the labor reforms and technological innovations introduced to protect construction workers applied only to those workers engaged in World Cup projects—only around two percent of all migrant construction workers in Qatar. While 51,000 StayQool suits and 13,000 specially designed balaclavas were distributed, the number of migrant workers in the construction sector in 2019 was estimated to be around 850,000.

Second, Qatar still refused to include “diseases caused by exposure to extreme temperature” in its list of recognized occupational diseases, thereby refusing to take accountability for workers past and present harmed by working outdoors.⁴ As a result, deaths of workers continue to be chalked up to vague reasons such as “natural causes” or “cardiac arrest,” preventing workers’ families from receiving compensation, and deepening the precarity of those already suffering injury and bereavement.

The StayQool suits thus not only protected World Cup construction workers from the heat; they deflected attention from the structural exploitation and risk that are a feature, rather than a bug, of the Qatari system, and of a rentier economy that redistributes fossil fuel wealth into aerodynamic, air-conditioned bubbles.

The bodysuit was thus as much a spectacle as a technology of cooling. Not surprisingly, a suit—pristine, new, unsoiled, and without any signs of wear—was prominently displayed at the National Library exhibition. In fact, it took up more display space than the scale models of the stadiums. Downplaying the stadiums at the exhibition is perhaps understandable. After all, the stadiums are still in use, and their grandeur is more effectively experienced through a visit. By contrast, the protective suit is an element of the tournament’s history, and of its host country’s ethical claims, that would—like so many other pieces of engineered infrastructure—be otherwise invisible to the visitor.

In the exhibition, the migrant workers that the suit was originally intended to protect now play a supporting role. Those workers appear as nameless, smiling faces clad in protective suits on the photo panels illustrating, in the words of the exhibit, the Supreme Committee’s “strategic projects that improved workers’ daily lives and ensured their welfare.” These gleaming images provide a testament to the ethical and environmental wisdom of the Qatari authorities and the experts they hired to make the World Cup into an engineering marvel.

To showcase an object often entails enclosing it—encasing it in something transparent that allows the object to be displayed and protected. On the one hand, the display cases containing the StayQool suits did precisely this. Like the suits themselves, they kept their contents separated from the dirt, dust, and elements of the atmosphere around them. On the other hand, the cases produced another link in a chain of bubble-like enclosures that both produced the physical stadiums in which the 2022 World Cup was played and also rendered Qatar an ethical, air-conditioned steward of the event. These air-conditioned bubbles mediated interior and exterior atmospheres, both climatological and political. They thus enacted thermopolitics as an art and an aesthetics of enclosure. ⦿

1. Hsuan L. Hsu, Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024); Nicole Starosielski, Media Hot and Cold (Duke University Press, 2021). ↩︎
2. Karolos Grohmann, “Olympics-Four Cities Chosen as 2016 Games Candidates,” Reuters, June 4, 2008. ↩︎
3. Andrew England, “How the Unlikeliest World Cup Ever Came to Be,” Financial Times, November 10, 2022. ↩︎
4. “In the Prime of Their Lives”: Qatar’s Failure to Investigate, Remedy and Prevent Migrant Workers’ Deaths (Amnesty International, 2021). ↩︎