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Somehow this has been lost over the years. I can especially see this in Zürich Switzerland where new office buildings being built are awful and there seems litt

Somehow this has been lost over the years. I can especially see this in Zürich Switzerland where new office buildings being built are awful and there seems little thinking about temperature. Everything is managed by complex air systems to move air from one area to the other. On the other hand you go into a 200+ year old building and you notice it's cool in summer although there is no air conditioning. The building is positioned in such a way that it stays cool for the most of the day, the walls and windows are placed to optimized for this. It's not 100% but if you added a cooling system you would have a perfect setup. We rely to much on technology to build these ugly boxes instead of also considering the building shape and position itself.

KingOfCoders 5y ago
I would assume it's mostly the thicker walls, at least it was this case in Berlin with older buildings staying cool for a long time because it took months to heat the walls. Then those walls were warm in winter and it took months to cool them down (though it didn't work very well in the last very hot summers that were hot early on)
- theobeers 5y ago
  This is still sometimes done. The newest section of the Freie Universität Berlin campus (the “Holzlaube”) was built so that the inside remains comfortable with no A/C and minimal heating. Thick walls, as you said. I don’t know how applicable architectural cleverness will be in densely populated cities in the developing world that are threatened by global warming. That seems like an impossible situation.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    Many parts of the world the outside will be unhabitable :-(
bsedlm 5y ago
maybe i'm squinting too hard, but I see this as related to a more general attitude of imposing our will while disregarding what is already there. "why would we want to position the building according to where it is? specially when there's an alternative of putting it however we like, and then involving a sophisticated air system which will isolate the building from it's environment (which is going to shit anyways) and also, think of all the jobs, the infrastructure, electricity, generators, coal-mining, ac technicians, etc that come with an AC based building! if the building, just by virtue of where it is, can do without all this then the economy will shrink, we cannot have that."
OccamsRazr 5y ago
As someone who was in Europe for one of the heatwaves of recent years, and whose appartment was in one of these older buildings designed this ways with thick walls etc., I can attest that this only works up to a point. This design relies on there being cold air for the building to retain. However, in a heatwave it doesn't even get cold at night. The result is your apartment gradually heating over a period of days / weeks and turning into a sauna. It is not pleasant. By the end of that summer I was dreaming about moving back to north america where air conditioning is much more common in rental units.
- samatman 5y ago
  What Europe needs is heat pumps and lots of them. More efficient heating, simply run them in reverse during a heat wave for refrigeration. Most of the Continent is mild enough in winter that an air-loop heat pump will reliably heat throughout the winter, and these aren't more expensive to install than other heating systems, they're less energetically intense to operate, and they provide cooling on demand.
  - ricardobayes 5y ago
    Problem with that is electricity is expensive in Europe. Of course as you know Europe varies a lot between Portugal and Romania. While the first has a balmy 10C in winter daily low, colder areas can easily have -10C, -15C at night. That's the minimum operating range of a heat pump. That's a 30C difference to work through. That's why they have cheap (Russian) gas, it has the biggest energy density (and nuclear). Ground-source heat pumps would work better in continental Europe but they are expensive to install (I have only seen them in new build villas).
    - samatman 5y ago
      Putting the gas into electric generators and using that electricity to heat is more economical than burning it in a furnace for heat, heat pumps are just that much better. I agree that the national programme must be more detailed than just declaiming "heat pumps!" and calling it even. I gestured vaguely at the existence of parts of Europe where cheap mini-splits might not be sufficient, let's just agree I'm talking about the places where they will be.
newswasboring 5y ago
> We rely to much on technology to build these ugly boxes instead of also considering the building shape and position itself. Just to make a silly pedantic af point, those building structures are also technology
dgellow 5y ago
Older European buildings are horrible to heat in winter, they are massive waste of energy.
rpozarickij 5y ago
I'm curious whether the people who designed those old buildings back in the day really thought about cooling or it was just a welcome (as long as heatwaves don't last too long, as mentioned in other comments) side effect of making those buildings with long lasting materials (lots of large bricks and rocks) of those days.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

I would assume it's mostly the thicker walls, at least it was this case in Berlin with older buildings staying cool for a long time because it took months to heat the walls. Then those walls were warm in winter and it took months to cool them down (though it didn't work very well in the last very hot summers that were hot early on)

theobeers 5y ago
This is still sometimes done. The newest section of the Freie Universität Berlin campus (the “Holzlaube”) was built so that the inside remains comfortable with no A/C and minimal heating. Thick walls, as you said. I don’t know how applicable architectural cleverness will be in densely populated cities in the developing world that are threatened by global warming. That seems like an impossible situation.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  Many parts of the world the outside will be unhabitable :-(

bsedlm 5y ago

maybe i'm squinting too hard, but I see this as related to a more general attitude of imposing our will while disregarding what is already there. "why would we want to position the building according to where it is? specially when there's an alternative of putting it however we like, and then involving a sophisticated air system which will isolate the building from it's environment (which is going to shit anyways) and also, think of all the jobs, the infrastructure, electricity, generators, coal-mining, ac technicians, etc that come with an AC based building! if the building, just by virtue of where it is, can do without all this then the economy will shrink, we cannot have that."

OccamsRazr 5y ago

As someone who was in Europe for one of the heatwaves of recent years, and whose appartment was in one of these older buildings designed this ways with thick walls etc., I can attest that this only works up to a point. This design relies on there being cold air for the building to retain. However, in a heatwave it doesn't even get cold at night. The result is your apartment gradually heating over a period of days / weeks and turning into a sauna. It is not pleasant. By the end of that summer I was dreaming about moving back to north america where air conditioning is much more common in rental units.

samatman 5y ago
What Europe needs is heat pumps and lots of them. More efficient heating, simply run them in reverse during a heat wave for refrigeration. Most of the Continent is mild enough in winter that an air-loop heat pump will reliably heat throughout the winter, and these aren't more expensive to install than other heating systems, they're less energetically intense to operate, and they provide cooling on demand.
- ricardobayes 5y ago
  Problem with that is electricity is expensive in Europe. Of course as you know Europe varies a lot between Portugal and Romania. While the first has a balmy 10C in winter daily low, colder areas can easily have -10C, -15C at night. That's the minimum operating range of a heat pump. That's a 30C difference to work through. That's why they have cheap (Russian) gas, it has the biggest energy density (and nuclear). Ground-source heat pumps would work better in continental Europe but they are expensive to install (I have only seen them in new build villas).
  - samatman 5y ago
    Putting the gas into electric generators and using that electricity to heat is more economical than burning it in a furnace for heat, heat pumps are just that much better. I agree that the national programme must be more detailed than just declaiming "heat pumps!" and calling it even. I gestured vaguely at the existence of parts of Europe where cheap mini-splits might not be sufficient, let's just agree I'm talking about the places where they will be.

newswasboring 5y ago

> We rely to much on technology to build these ugly boxes instead of also considering the building shape and position itself. Just to make a silly pedantic af point, those building structures are also technology

dgellow 5y ago

Older European buildings are horrible to heat in winter, they are massive waste of energy.

rpozarickij 5y ago

I'm curious whether the people who designed those old buildings back in the day really thought about cooling or it was just a welcome (as long as heatwaves don't last too long, as mentioned in other comments) side effect of making those buildings with long lasting materials (lots of large bricks and rocks) of those days.