The Rocket Stove is the application of pure thought to solve a problem that affects the health and lives of about one third of the world’s population. Smoke from cooking fires kills two million persons per year, mostly mothers and small children. Stoves and open fires are the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly three billion people. In India, some 400,000 people die […]
Socrates disapproved of that new craze for writing things down. He thought people who used reed pens and papyrus to write things down no longer made any effort to remember. Despite Socrates’ misgivings, Plato did manage to remember a thing or two in The Republic. Xenophon was another furtive note-taker. He recalls Socrates describing the perfect house. oriented towards the south […]
Back in February 2013 I wrote about the ancient Persian yakchal buildings for making ice in winter and storing it until summer. These buildings used a combination of night sky radiant cooing in conjunction with the thermal mass and insulating properties of mud brick. I wrote Insulation: The walls of the dome were at least two metres thick at […]
Dhaka, Bangladesh is at 24.5°N, near the Tropic of Cancer. Its has 60 inches of rain, mostly in the hot and humid summer. Wind is mostly from the south-east. Wind speed is higher in summer. It’s no surprise then, that apartments are designed for natural ventilation, and for maximum cross ventilation for bedrooms. Typically, there […]
IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT BETTER THEN MAKE IT THE SAME! Uniqueness is overrated, the quest for uniqueness unjustifiable. With buildings or any other product, there’s nothing inherently wrong with making the same thing exactly the same way again if it’s good, or trying to improve it if not. Many a fine building landscape developed just […]
Speaking of gardens in the sky, I once lived in an apartment building that had one on the 25th-floor. It was just a couple of floors missing from the building and wasn’t really integrated with any other space. It had ponds and palms and even a bit of grass and, on the whole, there was […]
The Stack Effect is when air is moved into and out of buildings by means of a difference in the buoyancy of the air on the inside and on the outside – between air that is colder and air that is warmer, in other words. Buoyancy can be either positive or negative – in the […]
If ever you’ve noticed cloudless nights are colder than cloudy ones, then you’ve experienced Night Sky Radiant Cooling. The temperature of the surface of the earth is relatively constant so the amount of energy lost in the form of heat from the surface of the earth at night must be more or less the same […]
The building you see above is the oldest timber building in the world. It was built in the year 756AD. Hats off! It is the Shosoein Treasure House in Nara, Japan, built to house the treasures of the Emperor Shomu (701–756). Buildings like this are the only traditional Japanese buildings that don’t employ post and beam construction. […]
By 400BC, Persians had developed a system for making ice in winter and storing it throughout the summer and in a hot desert climate, in buildings they called yakhchal. Most of what you’ll find written about yakhchal on the internet seems to come from wikipedia. Most diagrams come from one academic paper but images are from several […]
Many architects look to Nature for inspiration for how to make their buildings look more natural even though buildings are very unnatural objects. Instead of actually growing out of the ground or landscape like plants, buildings are constructed from putting lots of building materials together and it takes a lot of people, resources and money to […]
This is part of the village of Kandovan, on the Iran side of the border with Azerbaijan. Dating from the 13th century, the original inhabitants allegedly escaped to these strange mountains of volcanic ash, to get away from invading Mongols – as one does. You can find more pictures of Kandovan here. Local residents say that the […]
