I was in Cairo a few years ago and in the old Islamic city there was a couple of big mosques. This dates back to the Islamic era (around 1359). Standing in the venue that separate the two mosques. Here is the location: https://goo.gl/maps/ibwqwb33PcUJvm1K7
It was in the Summer and Cairo was boiling hot. But interestingly the venue was pretty cool. There was two factors: The mosques shadowed each other in a way that you don't get exposed in the sun. Another factor, there was a cool air flow coming from somewhere(?). My guess would be that the two buildings where engineered to both protect from the sun and generate the airflow.
You can sit in the venue all day long and not be annoyed with the hot weather. The buildings themselves where pretty cool inside.
I think the question is: Why are we so inefficient today? It's not about looks either: We are building even uglier buildings. The building I'm living in right now is buzzing with air-conditioning units. It's wasteful and it's also an inferior solution (headaches, dry air, only inside is cool, etc...)
> I think the question is: Why are we so inefficient today? It's not about looks either: We are building even uglier buildings. The building I'm living in right now is buzzing with air-conditioning units. It's wasteful and it's also an inferior solution (headaches, dry air, only inside is cool, etc...)
I'd guess because of misguided "separation of concerns" and the ability to externalize the inefficiencies: You can either carefully analyze the surrounding climate and the usage patterns of your building, then hire architects who are able to take those into account and are willing to work with the imposed constraints - or you can have your architects go wild and imagine whatever crazy shape you want and treat climate control as an afterthought: After all, you can just slap on some air-conditioning and be done.
Of course air-conditioning will cause numerous problems: Energy usage, air pollution, additional heating of the outside environment, etc - however as long as energy is cheap, those are not the problems of the owners of the building.
Windcatchers can also be used in combination with qantas to provide more cooling capacity.
A qanat or kariz is a gently sloping underground channel to transport water from an aquifer or water well to surface for irrigation and drinking, acting as an underground aqueduct.
Qanats used in conjunction with a wind tower can provide cooling as well as a water supply.
There are lots of ways to cool large spaces passively if the air is hot and dry. Your options are much more limited if the air is hot and humid. That's why most of these innovations come from places with arid climates such as Egypt, Zimbabwe, and (parts of) California, and practically none from Japan or Singapore.
We tend to one of a few extremes: a few buildings (often for show) are ultra-green and usually stuffy, others are meticulously space-optimized to maximize residency, and still others are vehemently individualist, a project (usually a house) built on a plot of land as though it were the only plot of land in the Universe. Projects in the last two categories tend to sacrifice energy efficiency because it is too expensive, in the one case because it reduces units per square inch and in the other because owner-built SFH usually optimize for a very idiosyncratic comfort/price ratio.
In the old days, construction was often managed by the army (viz. nobility), and designed at a town scale. Today, as part of a reaction to the crushing inhumanity of feudalism, we silo off our construction projects to preserve our individuality, or we "build by any means necessary" to make optimal use of what little space we haven't yet wasted. A compromise might eventually be reached.
In particular, a lot of old-school heat management relies on having some parts of a building extend high up in to the sky or down into the ground. That sort of construction is heavily regulated these days, by height zoning -- which tends to impose the same limit for a whole parcel, eradicating towers, chimneys and steeples -- and by the great deal of infrastructure underground (sewers, wires, etc). Incidentally, these regulations rule out the construction of the building we're looking at now -- you'd waste the entire "top floor" on a chimney! It would just not be cost-effective relative to a design that fills the zoning envelope with usable space.
The building you're in was probably much cheaper to build. The trade-off between efficient thermal regulation and margins was made quite consciously, I'd guess.
Many modern buildings are indeed wasteful, maybe they could use half the AC. But comparing to traditional buildings which were grand public spaces may be a bit misleading -- that mosque in Cairo may well occupy the space of 100 apartments, and provide cool shady space where the occupants of 10 of them can sit, and zero bedrooms.
Most advanced passive cooling in traditional buildings I see seem to be in the Middle East and I don't recall every seeing any passive cooling in traditional Western architecture. The loss of passive cooling is probably a consequence of the homogenization of architectural styles we've experiencing for the past several centuries.
The ancient romans had implivium, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impluvium, to do the same sort of job. The water in the pool would cool the surrounding air and air drawn in from the opening in the roof above would circulate it through the surrounding rooms.
If western architecture means northern europe, then I think they were rather more concerned with heating than cooling. Southern europe took a lot more care (fountains, shutters, huge thick walls...). But it's still a long way from the desert climates where they did really serious wind & water cooling.
You do see it in the US southwest to some degree (e.g. Santa Fe) although there is of course lots of architecture built around air conditioning as well.
> Boy, if any of the builders from ancient times were around to see some of the monstrosities we've created.
They would probably be amazed at some of the structures we can create and others they would just shrug at... but the same can be said for structure of their time.
> Whatever happened to architecture that is actually good?
Customers and economics.
A king telling an architect to build the greatest church in the world and mass-produced materials being unavailable resulted in some of the great structures of antiquity.
Now, you have a corporation asking how a structure can look distinct while being cheap, and you get the stuff we build.
Thank god at least for LEED branding, even if it's a compromise.
True. I would guess that mechanization and cheap building materials displaced craftspeople in the marketplace.
I wonder if there's also a cultural explanation as to why movements like brutalism caught on. Even 50 years ago buildings in the US were a lot more elegant than they are today.
As an almost architecture major, most architectural styles can be better understood by thinking "What's being rejected?"
It's a pretty insular culture (less so farther back, moreso the more modern you get), so essentially everyone knows the recent and current style... and then wants their work to be different.
When someone hits something that resonates, that gets copied, becomes the new dominant style, and then the cycle repeats.
Modernism (and then brutalism) was a rejection of the florid, nature-themed, complex styles that came before. It was literally "less is more."
I'd personally say that the longer a style lasts, the more derivative hacks you get with less talent, claiming to be designing in its name.
Maybe the good stuff we see surviving is just survival bias?
I know that in southern Portugal, today, they have marble floors and keep the shutters closed all day, maybe with Windows open for circulation. Houses are nice and cool
It was in the Summer and Cairo was boiling hot. But interestingly the venue was pretty cool. There was two factors: The mosques shadowed each other in a way that you don't get exposed in the sun. Another factor, there was a cool air flow coming from somewhere(?). My guess would be that the two buildings where engineered to both protect from the sun and generate the airflow.
You can sit in the venue all day long and not be annoyed with the hot weather. The buildings themselves where pretty cool inside.
I think the question is: Why are we so inefficient today? It's not about looks either: We are building even uglier buildings. The building I'm living in right now is buzzing with air-conditioning units. It's wasteful and it's also an inferior solution (headaches, dry air, only inside is cool, etc...)