Over on Curbed, Robert Khedarian describes how houses were cooled before air conditioning, a theme we have covered on TreeHugger many times. He leads off with a photo of Greene and Greene’s Gamble House in Pasadena, noting that it has a big sleeping porch. But he misses the big lessons from that house: the massively deep roof overhangs that shade the house in summer. Note also that the windows are surprisingly small for such a large house, to minimize heat gain.
It worked in Pasedena and not so well in Buffalo, where Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Darwin Martin House; Mrs. Martin found it cold and dark. But deep overhangs on south-facing facades, calculated to let the sun in during winter and shade it in summer when the sun is high, were a basic design principle.
Cross-Ventilate Everything
Another feature in the Gamble House and almost every house designed before air conditioning, in the north or south, is that bedrooms, wherever possible, are in corners so that they have cross-ventilation. This is something that could and should still be done in houses but rarely is.
Get a Shotgun House
Then there is the shotgun house; Curbed doesn’t mention that the one they show is actually Elvis Presley’s birthplace. According to Michael Janzen of Tiny House Design, they got their nickname “from the idea that if you stood at the front door and fired a shotgun the buck would fly out the back door without hitting the house.” The small, affordable houses had rooms behind rooms with no hall, in the french enfilade style. The benefit is that without a hall, every room has cross-ventilation. Not much privacy though.
Add a Cooling Cupola
Another old trick is to add a cupola, like on Edenton, North Carolina’s famous 1758 Cupola House. Since heat rises, you get a stack effect where air is sucked in through the ground floor windows and continuously flows upward. It also provides natural light to the interior.
Tricks Learned From Southern Homes
In fact, there was a big toolbox of ideas for keeping cool in hot climates. Thomas Edison’s house in Fort Myers had alot of them. The Florida vernacular, now totally lost, was described by Dorinda Blackey:
Tricks Learned From Northern Homes
Further north, there were all kinds of tricks that could be combined; in this one photo you see purgolas and overhangs, large casements to catch the breeze, and deciduous trees that shade in summer but drop their leaves in winter. Standard practice among architects with any sense.
Celebrate Thermal Mass
In the southwest, where it is dry and there is a" high diurnal swing", where it is really hot in the daytime and cool at night, one can put thermal mass to work. It turns your home into a thermal battery, keeping it warmer at night and cooler in the daytime. Architect Larry Speck describes it:
Install External Blinds
In Europe, many people hate air conditioning; the French insist it makes you sick. But many live in buildings with thick walls, relatively small windows and external blinds that they leave up at night when it is cooler, and pull down in the daytime to keep out the sun and trap in the cool air. But it also works in newer buildings or where people have added AC; as one manufacturer of European blinds explained:
Keep Cool With Culture, Not Contraptions
Perhaps the most important lesson from the way people did things in the past is this; that we should adapt the way we live to the climate, instead of throwing money at air conditioning and hiding inside. Barbara Flanagan once explained how they do this in Barcelona:
Do These Techniques Still Work?
Alas, most of these tricks only work on detached houses on big lots, unless you are willing to live in a shotgun. And we live in a hotter world. More and more of us are living in cities. For years, I have been showing this photo of an old tenement roof, suggesting that this air shaft created a stack effect that ventilated the apartments below; in fact, they were horrible:
That’s why people would sleep in parks. And that is why air conditioning has been such a blessing; because none of these techniques worked all that well. They help, but the more important design approach today is to do everything possible to reduce the amount of air conditioning needed. That might mean a lot more insulation and smaller, but better windows. Or as I put it in an article on the subject:
