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When I was young, my grandmother’s house had awnings that kept the sun from heating the interior in the summer months. In the fall, those awnings got taken down and stored until the following year. On the hottest of days, she would close all the windows and pull the shades down in the morning to further reduce heat transference from the outside world. It seemed counterintuitive to me at the time. Wouldn’t you want the windows open to get whatever breeze there was available? Not if the breeze is hot, she informed me.
What my grandmother was doing was practicing a form of passive solar management she learned from her mother, who learned about such things in County Cork, Ireland, when she was a child. Today, as the heat of summer gets more intense, many are rediscovering some of those tried and true techniques to keep their homes and businesses tolerable when the temperature outside soars.
Source: English Heritage (2011: 154).
Keeping Cool In Seville
The New York Times this week is reporting that many cities in Spain spread awnings across their outdoor spaces to protect pedestrians from the sun’s rays. Many of the buildings have walls that are a foot or more thick and made of stone and masonry — materials that do not conduct the heat outside into the interior easily. As a result, they stay comfortable in summer even without air conditioning.
In Seville, people are experimenting with techniques first used by Persians 2,000 years ago and brought to Spain during the Moorish period. The technology is called qanat and involves running water beneath buildings and letting the cool air flow upward through floor grates. “Outdoors, it’s about 100 degrees; here, inside, with various summer ducts, we have 82 degrees,” María de la Paz Montero Gutiérrez, a scientist from Seville University, told the Times.
Seville’s hospital is using a similar sustainable principle of running cold water through pipes, though with updated technology, to keep patients, operating rooms, expensive equipment, and even hospital laundries cool. “We have prepared,” said the technical manager, José García Méndez, as he stood among corridors of cooling systems, which themselves are kept cool by mesh curtains sprayed with water.
In Seville and other cities in Spain, the siesta is making a comeback and people are spending more time outdoors at night. For those who have never read James Michener’s fascinating Iberia, now might be a good time to get it out your local library. It tells in loving detail how Spaniards 100 years ago would hibernate during the day, and then set forth to dine and dance after 9:00 pm until midnight or later — times when the heat of the day had faded. The siesta itself was a way of coping with the heat. As Noël Coward once told us:
In tropical climes, there are certain times of day
When all the citizens retire to tear their clothes off and perspire.
It’s one of those rules that the greatest fools obey,
Because the sun is much too sultry and one must avoid its ultry-violet ray.
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
The Japanese don’t care to.
The Chinese wouldn’t dare to.
Hindoos and Argentines sleep firmly from 12 to one,
But Englishmen detest a siesta.
In the Philippines, there are lovely screens to protect you from the glare.
In the Malay States, there are hats like plates which the Britishers won’t wear.
At 12 noon, the natives swoon and no further work is done,
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
Manuel Morales, who works in a wholesale market in Seville, told the Times the Spanish government has adopted regulations to shorten or suspend outside work based on heat alerts by the national weather service. More water breaks for workers toiling under the sun are required as well. “The climate is changing, and it’s us who have to adapt to it — not the other way around,” he said.
As an indication of how out of touch with the rest of the world the US has become, the MAGAlomaniacs are passing laws that prevent employers from giving their workers water breaks. It is sickening to see the abject cruelty to other humans that is the hallmark of the MAGA Madness.
Mean Radiative Temperature
Lloyd Alter, the sage of Toronto who maintains one of the most valuable Substack spaces called Carbon Upfront, recently posted about a study carried out by Bill Bordass, Robyn Pender, Katie Steele, and Amy Graham, in which the researchers argue for adopting old ideas in the effort to keep people comfortable in their homes and work spaces. Alter says their conclusion is that we should relearn the techniques that worked for our ancestors, which often involve simple yet effective measures.
Alter discusses something known as mean radiative temperature, which Google defines as the average temperature of all surrounding surfaces that radiate heat towards a person or object. It is a crucial factor in determining thermal comfort, as it represents the net effect of radiant heat exchange between the human body and its environment. Unlike air temperature, which only considers the surrounding air, MRT accounts for the heat radiating from walls, floors, ceilings, and other surfaces. In other words, if it is a comfortable 76 degrees in your home, you can still feel chilled if the windows are at 32 degrees.
The study is entitled “Learning to sail a building: a people-first approach to retrofit.” In it, the researchers say, “Historical sources reveal the forgotten ways people were made more comfortable in the days before space-conditioning. Together, these encourage a deeper examination of how buildings were constructed, maintained and operated prior to the Industrial Revolution. These insights can be harnessed to develop a practical new trajectory for building operation and retrofit.”
Here is a taste of the conclusions their research led them to:
“A common approach to decarbonizing buildings is a focus on ‘fabric-first’ retrofits, which tend to be disruptive, carbon-intensive, expensive and will take decades to convert the stock. Feedback is also exposing disappointing savings, and risks to both building fabric and occupant health. This approach often seeks to update buildings to ‘modern’ standards, using models that have proved problematic, and frequently ignoring in-use performance.
“Conversely, a ‘people-first’ approach can empower occupants to identify what might improve things, trial simple interventions, and make rapid, low-risk alterations to improve their health and thermal comfort. This can draw on and adapt proven, low-cost historical methods. This alternative ‘soft’ approach uses facilitators to help occupants ‘learn to sail’ (i.e. effectively operate) buildings more effectively and sustainably. The insights will also enable any capital measures to be more precisely targeted.”
Being a sailor myself, I rather like the analogy of “sailing” our buildings. For those who spend time on the water, it is easy to draw an analogy between a sailboat and a powerboat. In a sailboat, the wind changes constantly, which requires us to adjust our sails and our course. On a powerboat, we just open the throttle and bludgeon the sea into submission. That, the study suggests, is pretty much how we design our homes and commercial buildings.
If we are in shorts and shirt sleeves in the winter and feel cold, our first reaction is to turn the thermostat up. Perhaps, Alter says, we should put on more clothes to interrupt the flow of energy between our bodies and cold surfaces. In hot conditions, we may need to adjust our attire to suit the circumstances rather than relying on the A/C if we are wearing a heavy suit with a vest and tie.
There are two ways to make our way through life. We can take the position that humans were given dominion over the Earth and are free to turn it into a shithole planet if they wish to. The other is to treat our earthly home with respect and adapt our behavior to conform to the natural environment. In other words, to sail through life rather than steamroll our way forward. One way is sustainable; the other is not.
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