WaPo: Why these homes in the hottest places don’t need AC.
All of these technologies have their contemporary equivalents: Electric fans, swamp coolers and insulation. But throughout the Earth’s hot zones, many of them in the Global South, the new technologies are expensive, and create dependence on erratic electrical grids and networks of production, commerce and transportation that are alien, and unsustainable.
The old technologies are also a resource: They offer a way forward, architecturally, culturally and climatically, not just for torrid zones in Egypt or Turkey, but for heavily populated regions throughout the world that rely on precarious sources of power. From Cairo to California, there are architects who are already incorporating these technologies in contemporary buildings. But there are multiple challenges: overcoming skepticism among people long dependent on modern systems, recalibrating what it means and feels like to be comfortable, and recovering and preserving the wisdom of vernacular systems.
The last of these challenges — undoing erasure and forgetting — is urgent. The few remaining houses from Fathy’s original plan are crumbling in New Gourna. In the searingly hot Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, in southeast Turkey, civil unrest and oppression has led to whole swaths of the ancient town, full of historic stone homes with complex fountain systems, being demolished. And in Cairo — where some of the world’s most sophisticated passively cooled houses were built centuries ago — decay, neglect and government sponsored demolition threaten to erase invaluable heritage.
Okay Washington Post, put your reporting into action, and lead the charge to translate that into something much more local: Ban A/C for DC!
h/t Ed Driscoll