Climate-Adaptive Architecture
I have been watching a lot of videos on YouTube about architecture and I came across this video while I was scrolling through suggestions. It seemed interesting because it tackles tropical design and Philippines is one of the countries that has been featured.
Here is the video if you'd like to spare some time to watch it. You can also continue reading as I will be talking about the video.
Carol Marra from Marra + Yeh Architects shared her insights into how architecture can adapt to climate extremes. Carol earned her degree at the University of Texas and worked in Seattle before moving to Australia. In 2005, she and her husband founded an architectural firm in Sydney, as well as a presence in Malaysia. Carol is a design advisor to the Government Architect NSW and teaches sustainable design at Sydney University. Her work is to create structures and environments that are both ecologically conscious and acceptable. The work of her practice has been recognized through international publications and awards. She was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship in 2009, which sent her to Japan, China, and the Philippines to study vernacular traditions that can adapt to extreme weather patterns.
The Churchill Fellowship offers fellowship to Australians in any subject matter and you get to travel somewhere of your choice to research and study a particular subject. The reason she went to Japan, China, and the Philippines is that they share similar climatic conditions. She went specifically to places that had a very long history of human settlements, some areas of cities that have been around for 10,000 years. She looked for a long history of buildings that copes with climate in particular things like monsoons, typhoons, earthquakes, and variations between summer and winter.
She talked about four design principles which are the urban form, building form, the wet-edge, and fenestrations. She first tackled the urban form, the similarities of the layouts of the cities even though they had been planned around different principles. The cities that she visited are Fuijien in China, Vigan in the Philippines, and Kyoto in Japan which I think are good places to visit and study since the cities are rich in culture and history. She noticed that the streets in the city were quite narrow. She thinks that it was because people in ancient cities walked a lot more and a lot of public life took in the streets of the city and a lot of that has to do with basically how you create an entire urban form that protects people as they move around.
Observing the building forms especially in China, houses are designed for people to feel comfortable through cross ventilation. By rearranging the private spaces and the way that private space relates to the interior spaces of the house, there is a way to actually create a variety of conditions that can deal with a variety of conditions.
Carol also pointed out series of elements that allowed modifications to how a building responds to the outside conditions. An example of these are the rain shutters in Japan, these shutters create an interstitial space that they use for different activities when lifted up and protect the house from rains, winds, and typhoons when lifted down.
Another passive cooling element is the roofs of the houses in the Philippines which are decoratively punctured to promote air movement through the cavity of the roof. Houses were also designed to withstand earthquakes and typhoons. The window screens made of shells were also commended by carol because of how it modulates light, wind, and rain.
I love how they incorporated the elements observed in the houses in their designs and how it promotes passive cooling. By means of observation and research on how buildings from tropical countries stood the test of time and calamities, one can use those elements to create a design, a good architecture that provides degrees of comfort in ways that the climate is shifting and changing. Carol said that if the building itself has the ability to shift and change then it can accommodate changes in the climate much quicker and easier.
Check out my previous articles
My father is a Policeman: A Moral Dilemma?
Trying something new : The day I started learning watercolor
To sum it up, the main goal of a climatic-adaptive architecture is to provide a comfortable and durable house to live in. Also, this is an informative article, I enjoyed and also learned from this!