The 444 BC ancient marble temple of Poseidon is illuminated at Cape Sounion, south of Athens.
AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris
The 444 BC ancient marble temple of Poseidon is illuminated at Cape Sounion, south of Athens.
AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris
With all this talk of air conditioning today, my mind is on vernacular architecture. Before hegemony fucked the world up big time, it used to be very obvious what environment a given building was designed for and built within, even if it was in a photograph being looked at halfway across the world, or a painting from a land otherwise unknown to the viewer.
You have to have certain different roofs if there's heavy snowfall, sticky ice, or temperate winters; you get different awnings and gutters if summers are rainy or humid or dry; windows are shaped by not only the frequency of windy days, but by either the need to keep that wind out as a hazard to furniture and lung health or by the need to invite that wind in as a relief from the overall weather. There's literally ways to add ducts at the roofline to create breezes inside a building that aren't outside it. You can refrigerate two story pantry buildings that way! Just the existence of a porch tells a lot about the length of climate cycles when it's done without the hubris of wired fans, space heaters, and hydraulic shutters.
In the "poorest" parts of the world (I'll hold my tongue on the nature of wealth and what we count as wealth) many of these techniques are not lost - even the poorest parts in the richest nations. But they are disincentivized, even made illegal, in favor of the profit-making mechanical and electronic solutions from hegemony. We're coming up on a point where that needs to not only be reversed, but built upon. New weather is going to demand new vernacular.
Which is itself a worrying tragedy given how polluting demolition and building construction actually is, even with more sustainable traditional techniques. There's a lot of dwellings (and a lot more other kinds of building) that were built wrong completely on purpose, to achieve an aesthetic cohesion that has more to do with suppressing cost than it has to do with sheltering people.
Raffaella Carrà and Alberto Sordi, Tuca Tuca | Canzonissima, 1971
VS
Fra Bartolomeo, Noli me tangere, 1506