India’s Ancient Stepwell Architecture Cools Modern Building

February 28, 2012 by kris de decker Filed Under: Air conditioning, Architecture, Cooling, Pools, Water

“At the height of summer, in the sweltering industrial suburbs of Jaipur, Rajasthan in north-west India, where temperatures can hit 45C Pearl Academy of Fashion remains 20 degrees cooler inside than out, by drawing on Rajasthan’s ancient architecture. While the exterior appears very much in keeping with the trends of contemporary design, at the base of the building is a vast pool of water — a cooling concept taken directly from the stepwell structures developed locally over 1,500 years ago to provide refuge from the desert heat.”

Read more: Ancient ‘air-conditioning’ cools building sustainably.

California Coolers

February 5, 2012 by kris de decker Filed Under: Architecture, Food storage, Random, Refrigeration

california coolers“Coastal Northern California is blessed with a very moderate climate, generally on the cool side, especially at night. Before the refrigerator became common in households, denizens of this region took advantage of the cool weather by storing perishable foods in a special kitchen cabinet that brought in air from the outside – the California Cooler.

The cooler cabinets were designed to hold fruits, vegetables, and other staples that needed to be kept cool but didn’t need to take up critical space in the era’s tiny ice boxes. The coolers were open to the basement to draw in cool air, which then wafted up and out a chimney or a wall vent.

When the refrigerator came along, it seems that, over time, the vents were boarded up and the California Cooler was all but forgotten. Today, if you walk the streets of my hometown, Berkeley, where most of the houses were built in the 1920’s, you will see many homes, and even apartment buildings, with the exterior vestiges of these vents.”

Read more: Resurrecting the California Cooler. Thank you, Adriana. Previously: Saving food from the fridge.

The Greenest Building Is The One Already Standing

January 25, 2012 by kris de decker Filed Under: Architecture, Buildings, Trash

“Until now, little has been known about the climate change reductions that might be offered by reusing and retrofitting existing buildings rather than demolishing and replacing them with new construction. This groundbreaking study concludes that building reuse almost always offers environmental savings over demolition and new construction. Moreover, it can take between 10 and 80 years for a new, energy-efficient building to overcome, through more efficient operations, the negative climate change impacts that were created during the construction process.” Read more.

The Sustainable Urban Dwelling Unit (SUDU)

December 27, 2011 by kris de decker Filed Under: Architecture, Buildings, Cities, Construction, Craftsmanship, Random

sudu

The ‘Sustainable Urban Dwelling Unit’ (SUDU) in Ethiopia demonstrates that it is possible to construct multi-story buildings using only soil and stone. By combining timbrel vaults and compressed earth blocks, there is no need for steel, reinforced concrete or even wood to support floors, ceilings and roofs. The SUDU could be a game-changer for African cities, where population grows fast and building materials are scarce.

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Timbrel Vaulting Using Cardboard Formwork

December 22, 2011 by kris de decker Filed Under: Architecture, Buildings, Cardboard, Construction, Craftsmanship, Random

Lara Davis, Matthias Rippman and Philippe Block from the Swiss BLOCK Research Group at the ETH Zurich University have taken the centuries old timbrel vaulting technique one step further by incorporating high-tech design tools (software and CNC fabrication) and low-tech materials (cardboard boxes and wooden palettes).

Find pictures and the research paper here or see the summary below.

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Building with Mud and Steel Frames

October 9, 2011 by kris de decker Filed Under: Architecture, Cities, Construction, Housing


Building with mud and steel frames is an interesting hybrid between industrial and non-industrial technologies. Two examples:

Building with mud bricks and steel frames 2 “Kazakh architect and artist Saken Narynov created a superstructure able to host what we could call an adobe vertical city. In fact, the structure is used as a matrix that can be more or less densely filled with multifamily habitation units. The traditional earth based material thus hybrids with the steel structure in a very unusual and interesting way and the space resulting between the habitation units and the structure is beautifully occupied by mazes of staircases and elevated pathways.”

“The design recalls recent works by the Chilean architect Marcelo Cortes, who employs a steel meshwork onto which mud is sprayed, but on a far greater scale. Cortes has developed a “quincha metalica”, a form of traditional quincha construction (mud and straw packed between a bamboo or wood frame) that uses a steel frame work.”

[Read more…]