The solar architecture movement of the 20th century failed to reconcile natural heating and cooling effects with healthy ventilation. It also ignored the fossil-fueled production of building materials. I'll explore this history, asking what lessons we can learn and what forgotten ideas are worth revisiting. Then I'll present our experiments on heat-recovery loops and sub-ambient passive cooling. Can we imagine a new kind of solar architecture, free from fuel and refrigerants, with natural materials, ventilation, and temperature control? As the story unfolds, you'll see flow visualizations that change your understanding of interior climate. You'll also learn how the original Royal Victoria Hospital experimented with ventilation heat recovery and how to reject heat into outer space from inside your room.
Salmaan Craig
Salmaan Craig is a building scientist, architectural educator, Assistant Professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, and an Associate Member of Civil Engineering at McGill University. He used to be a Lecturer and Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He also spent several years in practice, first as a façade engineer at Buro Happold and then in the Specialist Modelling Group at Foster + Partners, contributing to Masdar Institute, Apple Campus, and Bloomberg Headquarters. Today, his research program develops new concepts for solar architecture with biogenic materials. He asks how to compose and shape these materials as part of natural thermal and ventilation cycles, so they can one day replace mechanical systems for air-conditioning. His research group derives most of their insights about these thermal flow cycles from physical experiments in the lab and out in the field. Their architectural interest in these cycles is as a catalyst for building form and new patterns for living and working. Meanwhile, their ecological interest lies in understanding if these new biomaterials can not only replace air-conditioning but also help reconcile construction with natural climate solutions at the regional scale.