Archinect - News

Chief Heat Officer Eugenia Kargbo discusses extreme heat mitigation in Freetown, Sierra Leone

2022-08-09T14:30:00-04:00

Kargbo grew up to become a banker, but she has spent the last several years working in the administration of Freetown mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, a noted climate activist. Before becoming the city’s chief heat officer, she headed up the city’s sanitation department [...] Kargbo says her work is to keep climate change on the agenda, however many other things are tugging the world’s attention away.

A former aide to the noted climate activist Mayor of Freetown Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Eugenia Kargbo is one of five official Chief Heat Officers (CHOs) in the world. After being appointed in 2021, she joins fellow CHOs from Athens, Miami, Santiago, Chile, and Monterrey, Mexico in a program sponsored by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock).

Arsht-Rock, along with the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance (EHRA), developed and piloted the role of CHOs to have officials "charged with unifying the response to the challenge of heat to reduce risks and impacts of extreme heat for their residents and constituents."

For these officers appointed by local officials in their cities, much of the work entails attempting to consolidate their communities' disparate (and sometimes madcap) efforts to address climate issues that are too often spread between conflicting bureaucratic hierarchies.

Meet the current Chief Heat Officers. Image courtesy of Adr...

Glass skyscrapers need to be seriously reexamined

2019-05-21T13:40:00-04:00

Glass has always been an unlikely material for large buildings, because of how difficult it becomes to control temperature and glare indoors. In fact, the use of fully glazed exteriors only became possible with advances in air conditioning technology and access to cheap and abundant energy, which came about in the mid-20th century. And studies suggest that on average, carbon emissions from air conditioned offices are 60% higher than those from offices with natural or mechanical ventilation.

Philip Johnson, after building his own Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, had this bit of advice to offer others in the field: "Don't build a glass house if you're worried about saving money on heating."

The advancement of modern architecture was predicated on the seemingly magical properties of glass, not least for the fact that it carries the unique ability to function as a container with an optimizable level of opacity. Towards the middle of the 20th century, a style informally known as 'Corporate Modernism,' typified by floor-to-ceiling glass and thin steel construction, quickly became the design of choice for many of the world's tallest skyscrapers. The popularity of air-conditioning during this same time period meant that many of these buildings were designed independent of any passive cooling solutions.

Lever House, by SOM. Photo by Ezra Stoller

Glass architecture, Henrik Schoenfeldt argues, should be considered a thing of the past. Ever since the temperature recordings ...

Exploring Alvar Aalto's "benign errors"

2016-08-30T12:56:00-04:00

Could one of Alvar Aalto's most sublime works be the result of a mistake? And more intriguingly, did Aalto exploit error to acheive a certain aesthetic/politically pointed effect? In this thoughtful piece on Medium, Dan Hill explores the role of "benign errors" in Aalto's work, a term the architect himself coined. Hill centers his focus on the concert hall known as Finlandia, taking particular issue with (but not limiting his scope to) the building's marble facade, noting that:

"Even more remarkably, this apparently uniform and utterly wonderful bowed marble grid appears to have been a mistake, an outcome of the temperature extremes in Helsinki (I’m reminded of the Dali-esque images of failing façades from Jeffrey Inaba's talk at Postopolis regarding Kazakhstan’s -40ºC to +40ºC, though it’s not quite that bad here.)"

For more on the legacy of Alvar Aalto:

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.