Borrowing from other Places to Ensure Climate Responsive Design
Marie Short House, but Pritzker Prize winning Australian architect Glen Murcutt, is a perfect example of designing to your climate.
Climate Responsive Design
One of the most important and enduring principles of good architecture is designing a building for its climate. Climate responsive design means that everything from the orientation of a building, its materials, arrangement, size and location of windows and even its roof pitch are carefully considered to make sure that a building is comfortable. That means a lower carbon footprint, a more comfortable building year round and generally a building that is a better fit for its surroundings.
I’ve written about the science of comfortable temperature ranges here so I won’t go into lots of detail about it now – but different climates need different architectural responses.
We can recognize this instinctively. Call to mind a Northern European A-Framed house, or a Saharan Adobe home or Roman Courtyard Villa. They are all providing climate responsive design, its just that they have vastly different climates. A framed houses are sharp pitched so snow will slide off the roof easily. Saharan Adobe homes are thick walled with small openings to prevent heat build up inside. Roman Courtyard Villas are shady and provide lots of windows to capture cooling breezes.
Borrowing from other places
Because we enjoy a Mediterranean climate in Perth, and many parts of the Southwest we share the same climate as the people who build the Courtyard Villas in Rome. This means we can draw on the same principles of climate responsive design as the thousands of years of building in Rome. But there are many more places with a long history of designing for their environment. Perth also shares a similar climate to the people of Jerusalem, Monaco, Los Angeles & Casablanca.
Although the people, building materials and cultural touchstones are very different, many of the same climate responsive design principles apply across these places. This can be a great tool when looking for interesting design ideas from a diverse range of places all trying to achieve a similar response in their buildings.
Finding cities that share your climate
So how do you find more places with a Mediterranean climate? Or what if you live in the north of Western Australia – surely you don’t want to design with a Roman climate in mind.
A climatologist by the name of Wladimir Koppen came up with a classification system in the late 1800s which bunches similar climatic features together - I won’t go into the fact that climates have changed since the late 1800s, that’s for another discussion (although its been updated a bit). For our purposes its close enough. Like all good scientists of this era, he named the system after himself. So if you search for ‘Perth Koppen Climate Classification’ you’ll find out we’re a Csa. If you’re in the Kimberley that’s an Aw/As and Albany Csc. Don’t worry too much about how the codes are made up and what they mean but you can then do a search online for other places with those classifications. You’ll then find the name of that particular climate too,
Tropical Wet/Dry for Broome, Mediterranean Cold Summer for Albany.
Places with similar climates to Broome are as diverse as Key West in Florida, Mumbai in India and Cali in Colombia.
Designing with Koppen in mind
With this in mind you can use the Koppen Climate Classification to design for your climate. First, establish the principles of good building design for that climate. For a Mediterranean climate such as Perth you’ll want to:
Orientate buildings away from the hot afternoon sun
Promote cross ventilation through building layouts and openings orientated toward prevailing breezes
Use thermal mass in the floor to maintain a steady internal temperature
In a Tropical Wet/Dry Climate you’ll:
Use lightweight materials because they don’t store much heat
Use high ceilings to promote air movement (plus a ceiling fan)
Elevate buildings for air flow underneath
Use high pitched roofs to quickly shed water in high rainfall events
For more, on this the website yourhome.gov.au is a great resource – although they use different language to describe the climates it’s the same principle. However, its firmly focused on Australia so it’s a little harder to “borrow” from other places.
Deep, shaded eaves surrounding a central courtyard is a hallmark of the Roman Courtyard House. It provides shade and promotes cross ventilation - two important considerations in designing for the Mediterranean climate.
Next go looking for similar places in the world that design with that climate. You can look at some 1st Century Roman Villa, or a 11th Century Moroccan mosque for how they create breezeways for cross ventilation or broke up the building into parts to allow multiple shady areas. However, there are some fantastic contemporary examples of how these same principles are achieved. For that a good search online can help.
It’s not just the climate
Finally, buildings are not just a response to their climate. They are also a reflection of the communities and cultures that built them, the materials available and the histories of a place. So, just because two buildings are designed with the same climate in mind, they might look and function very differently. This is part of the beauty of architecture. That variety is part of what gives each region its identity.