Completed in 2021 in Hanoi, Vietnam. Images by Olivier Dauce. Vietnam is considered one of the country’s most vulnerable to climate change in the world. Climatic phenomena such as floods, typhoons, heat wave and...
“For centuries, ancient civilizations cooled down their buildings by using the natural freshness of water through the adiabatic principle. To evaporate, water needs energy, which is “absorbed” from the heat of the ambient air, thus generating the cooling effect. To picture it easily, you may think about a body of water in a park in summer: the closer you get from it, the more you feel a cooler air.
In parallel, Vietnamese craftsmanship remains vibrant and the countryside is filled with craft villages, each specialized in a specific trade, such as bamboo, silk, pottery or many others. This helped us designing a low-tech cooling device using the adiabatic principle coupled to the know-how of a local craftsman. Imagine a bamboo tower designed under a hyperboloid shape for structural stability. Between the main poles is setup a medium on which water runs by gravity. At its center is installed a blower taking the hot air from above and pushing it down at human height. As it crosses the water twice, the air is naturally cooled by the adiabatic principle”