Air Conditioning: The Latest Architecture and News

The climate crisis has made heatwaves more likely and more intense around the world. Record-breaking high temperatures are being reported across the world. According to international data, the first week of July 2023 was the hottest week on record, putting millions of people in danger. All throughout this summer, recurring heatwaves have been affecting large portions of Asia, Europe, and the United States, priming the land for fires in places like Greece, Spain, and Canada, triggering unhealthy air warnings, evacuations, and heat-related deaths. The increasingly threatening effects of the climate crisis are also felt in cities worldwide, as extreme heat proves to be a rapidly growing health risk to millions of urban dwellers.

Cities are on the front lines of this public health emergency. People living in urban areas are among the hardest hit when heatwaves happen, partly because of urban heat islands. This is a phenomenon that occurs when cities replace the natural land cover with dense concentrations of surfaces that absorb and retain heat, like pavements and buildings. Heat risk levels also vary by neighborhood, with less affluent and historically marginalized sectors being the most affected due to the density of the population, limited access to cooling systems, and the limited availability of green urban spaces.

+ 2

Heating and cooling buildings have always been two of the most important challenges in ensuring indoor user comfort. At a biological level, our bodies generate heat through metabolism, a physicochemical process. And although the human body has temperature regulation mechanisms, such as sweating and vasodilation, sometimes we need additional help to achieve thermal comfort. Therefore, since ancient times, traditional strategies have been sought to help achieve this, and many have been adapted to their historical and material contexts.

It’s easy to think of Modernism as inseparable from air conditioning, simply because we are surrounded by so much of it that is. A valuable reminder that this wasn’t always the case is provided in University of Pennsylvania architecture professor Daniel A. Barber’s Modern Architecture and Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning (Princeton University Press), which outlines the story of the febrile, flexible, and often-forgotten early experiments in climate control.

This installation is a bespoke attempt to simplify and reinterpret the concept of air-conditioning, understanding that standardized solutions may not be universally applicable given the constraints of cost and surrounding environment. Using computational technologies, the team at Ant Studio has reinterpreted traditional evaporative cooling techniques to build a prototype of cylindrical clay cones, each with a custom design and size.

The IAAC (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia) has developed a series of advanced materials and systems for air conditioning and passive ventilation, allowing homes to reduce interior temperatures up to 5 degrees lower while saving the electricity consumption caused by the traditional air-conditioning. The systems are made from long-lifespan materials, which lower the costs of maintenance in the long-term and can be used as low-cost alternative building technologies.

The projects highlighted are the Breathing Skin, Hydroceramics, Hydromembrane, Morphluid and Soft Robotics - all developed by students of the IAAC's Digital Matter Intelligent Constructions (conducted by Areti Markopoulou). The passive air-conditioning of spaces is investigated using a combination of new materials that mimic organic processes, adaptive structures and Robotics that help regulate temperature and create sustainable micro climates.