September 20, 2007
Life before climate control
I stumbled across Mental Floss this evening. A characteristic article is Life Before Air Conditioning, which describes how people dealt with heat and cold before modern climate control. Temperature is actually a more significant architectural problem than one might realize: buildings in excess of 200m weren't built before air conditioning. Though you can open a window in a five, ten, even twenty story building, the higher you get, the faster the wind gets, which makes natural ventilation something of a problem.
The site in general has a lot of really fascinating articles. Check it out.
