if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills
where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*
I hate learning about instances of "oh yeah we know how to do that, we just don't".
this is exactly why I love talking about historical passive heating and cooling techniques
oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?
and we're still building them?
while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?
uh. okay then
(also public transit. the history of public transit in the US is infuriating, because we had it! and then we destroyed it!)
THIS IS SO TRUE
in some cases it goes back to colonialism. colonizers trying to put a certain aesthetic that was thought of as more valuable or attractive in a place we were trying to force to be the way we wanted.
Trying to import a new culture, and replace the old culture, bringing in the architectural ideas of the old place. ignoring the local climate and ecology
