Architectural ideas against the heat

Nothing feels nicer than walking into an air-conditioned room after spending hours in the heat. But the International Energy Agency (IEA) identified the use of A/C as one the key drivers of the growth of electricity demand, accounting for 10% of all global electricity consumption. And all that electricity that needs to be produced somehow — which often involves the burning of fossil fuels.

Long before the establishment of Israel in 1948, Scottish urban planner Patrick Geddes consulted the Zionist Commission in 1925 on how the future metropolis of Tel Aviv should be designed to minimize the effects of the desert heat. Its roads were to be built on a grid to channel the sea breeze from the Mediterranean into the city. To this day, the city center hugely benefits from this design.

Buildings in Tel Aviv also benefited from the Bauhaus school of architecture and design, which puts an equal emphasis on pragmatism as it does on aesthetics. The Bauhaus penchant for flat roofs, for example, has proven to be useful as they reflect solar heat. With new technology such as the advent of solar panels emerging over time, flat roofs have continued to be popular in hot urban centers.

The influence of Bauhaus can be seen elsewhere as well. Israeli architect Arieh Sharon built Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria in the 1960s using Bauhaus ideas that have since become the staple of smart design. He addressed the tropical climate by creating space for open gardens and courtyards for the wind to move. Classrooms are always 7 degrees Celsius cooler than the outside temperature.

If courtyards provide cooler air, cities like Paris and Barcelona know the way forward. With their city blocks planned around giant courtyards, residents not only benefit from a cooler microclimate but also from living in pleasant surroundings. More recently, the city started changing the way it channels traffic around the more than 500 city blocks in a bid to reduce carbon emissions.

Residents of lower-lying coastal regions have known for a long time that building elevated houses — so-called stilt houses — provides protection against flooding, which is a growing side-effect of global warming. The setup also cools the buildings from underneath. Granted, it is difficult to retrofit existing structures this way, but if you're in the market for coastal property, think stilts!

The growing number of so-called natural disasters is directly linked to climate change. When Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017, the city benefited from the intelligent design of its 64-hectare Buffalo Bayou Park, which served as a flood plain bearing the brunt of the flooding. The park itself remained largely unscathed.

Nowadays, there are cities springing up overnight in the Middle East, providing fresh opportunities to address the effects of climate change from the get-go. Next to Abu Dhabi's airport, there is an entire suburban city being built, designed to be run on renewable energy and have net-zero emissions. Masdar City might be a utopia today but could deliver the blueprints for tomorrow's urban designs.

The street temperature in Abu Dhabi's Masdar City neighborhood is up to 20 degrees Celsius cooler than the heat in the surrounding desert, as a wind tower channels cooler air from the sky and pushes it down to form a cooling breeze. This idea, however, is copied from the ancient city of Muscat, Oman, where taller buildings were designed to channel winds into narrow streets in a similar manner.

While old buildings are charming, they are often built in a way that maximizes the effects of high temperatures, inadvertently contributing to global warming. Some countries like the UK are pushing to retrofit these dwellings with improved insulation in a bid to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 80%. Such building projects can be costly, with a "deep retrofit" coming at a price tag of €20,000.

To address the climate needs of the future, people have to embrace new building materials. Above all, there's a call to stop the widespread use of concrete with its large carbon footprint. But existing concrete buildings, especially the giant Brutalist structures from the 1960s, are also great heat insulators. So in short: Stop using concrete but make the most use of existing concrete structures.

If you're building a house in the near future, think passive. Passive design incorporates features that minimize your impact on the environment. Think smaller windows, overhang roofs, space for solar panels or rooftop gardens, where the rain cools off your building while feeding plants that offset your carbon emissions. And they look great, too.