Archinect - News

Landlord groups and the quest to end Americans’ (un)air-conditioned nightmare

2024-08-06T11:36:00-04:00

Most often, homes with little or no air conditioning are occupied by low-income residents – often renters — and people of color, a 2022 Boston University analysis of 115 U.S. metro areas found. That leaves them vulnerable as climate change makes heatwaves more frequent, more intense and longer lasting. Heat stress now kills more people globally each year than any other weather-related cause, according to the World Health Organization — and many of these deaths occur indoors.

New York, Los Angeles, and Austin are each currently mulling aggressive cooling laws that would levy huge fines against landlords who do not provide their tenants with efficient cooling systems, joining other states and cities in a burgeoning movement. As was reported last week, 2023 saw a 20% rise in heat-related emergency room visits in America. This year is already on track to be the hottest on record, making the possibility for successful opposition bids increasingly untenable.

New York City could soon mandate air conditioning in all residential buildings

2024-07-18T18:40:00-04:00

City Councilmember Lincoln Restler of Brooklyn, who confirmed the news with Gothamist on Wednesday, said he plans to introduce his bill during Thursday’s stated meeting. The bill is intended to mimic current local law requiring landlords to provide tenants with heat during the winter months by requiring them to ensure tenants can cool their homes to at least 78 degrees when it is 82 degrees or warmer during the summer, Restler said.

Councilmember Restler, who argues that the new legislation is tantamount to requiring heating in the winter, also told the New York Times it will "save lives as we reckon with the challenges of the climate crisis." Landlords would have a maximum of four years to comply with the mandate.

The Thursday vote comes as meteorologists are saying 2024 is likely on pace to be the hottest year on record.

Paris Olympics Athlete's Village to cool without AC during summer games

2024-05-03T17:30:00-04:00

To combat the intense summer heat in France, a geothermal energy system will cool the athlete apartments in the Seine-Saint-Denis suburb. This technology utilizes natural resources and is expected to reduce carbon impact by 45 percent compared to traditional air conditioning systems. The system will maintain a temperature below 79 degrees Fahrenheit during the night, even in the event of a heatwave, according to Laurent Michaud, the director of the Olympic and Paralympic Villages.

The planned alternative system will distribute cold water from underground to cool through the floors of the apartments, which will later become home to more than 6,000 permanent residents after the more than 15,000 Olympic and Paralympics athletes vacate in September. The buildings all have green roofs and will reportedly be powered completely by renewable energy in line with Paris' 2050 principles. Their construction achieved a 30% reduction in its carbon footprint compared to other modern projects.

Other countries, meanwhile, have promised to bring their own portable systems as a backup as experts have forecasted another unusually hot summer for the continent.

The ancient ventilation method that’s still keeping Chinese homes cool

2023-07-17T11:46:00-04:00

When asked about why skywells have caught more attention of modern Chinese people, Wang [Zhengfeng] says that the courtyard is also designed to serve as a gathering space for families or communities, and comes with ritual meanings. "Perhaps changes in the way of life could also trigger vernacular nostalgia among people living in concrete and glass forests.” "It won't be easy to be sustainable by learning from the past without reflecting on our current behaviours."

Lightwells are of course, a common passive cooling method in modern Western designs, but in China, their popularity is partly driven by a budding “vernacular nostalgia” for traditional features and concepts. The government’s push towards greener building standards and a 2060 net zero carbon emissions target is also inspiring the renaissance in the face of skyrocketing energy consumption at a critical time. A 2018 report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted 85% of all homes in the country will have at least one air conditioning unit by 2030.

Inspired by desert environments, this terracotta system uses water to cool indoor spaces without electricity

2022-10-24T11:16:00-04:00

Industrial designer and illustrator Yael Issacharov has designed an air conditioning system whose terracotta tile structure is inspired by desert environments. Titled ‘Nave,’ the system takes references from the traditional Palestinian technique of hanging terracotta water containers from ceilings to provide drinking water and space cooling.

Nave Air Conditioning System by Yael Issacharov. Image by Francesco Maria Lucini.

The Nave system offers three variations: wall tiles, partitions, and a totem vertical cooling body. Each element is constructed of hollowed ceramic bodies made from local terracotta casted from plastic molds, while flexible joints are made from injection-molded recycled rubber.

Nave Air Conditioning System by Yael Issacharov. Image by Francesco Maria Lucini.

The terracotta tile system is combined with water flow to cool indoor spaces. The electricity-free method sees water flow through the internal hollow structure of the terracotta walls, absorbing heat from the sur...

MASS Design's Michael Murphy says we're failing to learn the epidemic design lessons Florence Nightingale provided 150 years ago

2021-12-29T16:39:00-05:00

At our peril, we have ignored Nightingale’s prescriptions. The history of the hospital contains clear lessons about the importance of air movement through buildings, the public health risks of poor design, and the dangers of technological reliance. Architecture professionals should look back to see what else has been forgotten or ignored in the race to merge art and technology. Whose lives might be at stake if they don’t?

Murphy is a principal at Boston-based MASS Design Group and the author of The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity, which accompanies the firm’s recent exhibition Design and Healing: Creative Responses to Epidemics on view at the Cooper Hewitt until February 23rd.

In it, Murphy argues that the COVID pandemic has affected a new paradigm in the ways architects and healthcare designers think about hospitals that are reliant on air, either cooled or circulated by mechanical systems, and failed in their attempts to mitigate the virus’ spread by fenestration that is now an impediment to the application of effective inpatient treatment.

Interior of MASS Design Group's Butaro Hospital in Ruhengeri, Rwanda. Photo: Iwan Baan.

“Like all crises that reveal cracks in the system, the pandemic has prompted a public reckoning with the role of buildings in shaping our health. Recent reporting is waking up to the crisis of breathability in buildings, raising questi...

Could reusing the condensate from air conditioners be a feasible solution to mitigating water scarcity?

2021-05-21T15:41:00-04:00

What do a handful of Microsoft Corporate offices, the Austonian in Austin, the University of Arizona's College of Architecture, Planning & Landscape Architecture building, and San Diego International Airport (SAN) have in common? Each building practices air conditioner condensate reuse for alternative irrigation methods, cooling, and water conservation efforts.

While these are a few examples of buildings around the globe adopting this practice of water reuse, professor Jonathan Bean from the University of Arizona's College of Architecture, Planning & Landscape Architecture explains the realistic outlook on condensate reuse. "Reusing condensate is important but not a critical piece in counteracting climate change," he shared with Chris Malloy of Bloomberg CityLab. Instead, Bean believes there are more effective strategies out there like "making buildings smaller and reconsidering refrigerants."

Image © har__q via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

"While the water volume from air conditioners h...

Move over air conditioners, bioclimatic design is beating the heat when it comes to regulating building temperatures

2019-07-19T13:39:00-04:00

...an approach known as bioclimatic design: using the environment around a building to passively manage the temperature and light inside, rather than mechanically heat and cool a space. Structures designed that way are energy efficient, which leaves them with a smaller carbon footprint.

Cities across the U.S. are experiencing heat waves. However, designing cities and structures for hot climates is nothing new. Early architects have developed design solutions for regulating temperatures. Yet, with this progression, a reliance has grown towards cooling systems like air conditioners creating a dependency that affects users and the environment.

In an article written by the Daily Beast, Nicole Wetsman chats with architect, professor, and sustainable design leader Pablo La Roche. As faculty at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona and sustainability consultant for CallisonRTKL, La Roche has dedicated much of his work exploring passive cooling systems, carbon-neutral architecture, and affordable housing. In his conversation with Wetsman, La Roche shares, "The building becomes the air conditioner [...] It's about understanding the mechanisms."

From improved insulation to better building facade designs, Westman goes on to elaborate on these methods of practice...

Charles Schiffner’s House of the Future predicted Smart Home technology more than 40 years ago

2019-06-13T17:18:00-04:00

Over the past several years, home automation and smart home technology have become exceedingly popular and are now more commonplace than ever before. In the not so distant past, these concepts were hard to grasp, and felt out of reach for the average homeowner. The House of the Future in Ahwatukee, Arizona, designed by former Taliesin Associated Architect Charles Schiffner, embraced these innovative concepts as early as 1978.

Frank Lloyd Wright was a visionary, but he likely couldn't have predicted the next big to have spun out of Taliesin West, the architect's winter home and school in the Arizona desert. When he passed in 1959, many of his apprentices formed an architecture firm named Taliesin Associated Architects, and in the late 1970s met with real estate developer Randall Presley to plan and build an experimental living laboratory in Ahwatukee, Arizona.

The interior of the House of the Future. Image taken from Mesa Magazine.

The project was spearheaded by Charles Schiffner, one of the firm's architects, as a home outfitted with technology never before used in a domestic setting. “I started thinking about how to practically use a computer in a home structure and I took the approach of looking at the computer as a utility, and exploring what that utility can do,” Schiffner said. “With the integration of technology and architecture, the House of the Future itself became bionic.” Five microcomputers we...

Can air conditioners be used to offset carbon emissions?

2019-05-10T17:53:00-04:00

What if we could weaponize air conditioning units to help pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere instead? According to a new paper in Nature Communications, it’s feasible. Using technology currently in development, AC units in skyscrapers and even your home could get turned into machines that not only capture CO2, but transform the stuff into a fuel for powering vehicles that are difficult to electrify, like cargo ships.

“Air conditioning,” Eva Horn once wrote, “is one of the oldest dreams of mankind. It means creating a world without heat or cold, rain or snow, without suffocating humidity or dusty winds.” However, when considering the challenges facing the current era, air conditioning yields a significant feedback loop: the hotter it is outside, the more air conditioners are put to use; the more air conditioners are put to use, the more their hydrofluorocarbons are emitted; the more their hydrofluorocarbons are emitted, the larger the seasonal hole in the ozone layer becomes, thus warming the climate. "One of the oldest dreams of mankind," in other words, exacerbates a seemingly inescapable system failure.

Air conditioners in Hong Kong.

However, a new paper from Nature Communications hints at the possibility of an air conditioning system which pulls carbon dioxide from the air, thus reversing the products have typically waged against the environment. According to CityLab, the concept is called 'cr...

Air conditioning's challenge for the built environment

2018-08-16T16:14:00-04:00

The US expends more energy on air conditioning, for example, than the whole of Africa does on everything. Then again, it expends even more energy on hot water, which doesn’t get the same rap. The question then is not whether to condition climate, but how. As long ago as the 1940s the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy demonstrated, with his village of New Gourna near Luxor, how traditional techniques of orientation, ventilation, screening and shading could be revived.

Rowan Moore dives into the history of air conditioning and how the development of this technology shaped architectural design over the years. Rather than condemn its use, Moore advocates for optimizing both old and new techniques for sustainable cooling with the current challenge to scale up for rapidly expanding cities.

Kate Murphy examines why America is so over air-conditioned

2015-07-21T00:09:00-04:00

Commercial real estate brokers and building managers say sophisticated tenants specify so-called chilling capacity in their lease agreements so they are guaranteed cold cachet...There’s also the widely held misconception that colder temperatures make workers more alert and productive

Is "Wristify" the solution for personalized heating/cooling?

2013-10-18T18:10:00-04:00

The intent is to save energy by controlling the temperature of an individual person, rather than an entire building, a goal that anyone who's ever turned on a personal space heater in a frigid office building in July can get behind. The team just won $10,000 from MIT's Making And Designing Materials Engineering Competition, which the inventors will use to improve the prototype and the algorithms that automate the pulses.

A Field Guide to AC Units

2012-05-04T19:31:00-04:00

Though it pervades the landscape of many of our cities, we rarely appreciate how window units continue to shape our homes and street walls. The basic design of a window unit has remained mostly the same since it appeared on the market in 1935 – that is to say, functional and bland. But instead of designing a more elegant object, we have allowed AC units to become visual background noise.