Air conditioning accounts for nearly 20% of the total electricity used in buildings globally and cooling energy demand is predicted to significantly increase over the next decades due to urbanization, population growth, and global warming. Heat stress is a major environmental justice concern, disproportionally impacting disadvantaged communities. What are the paths to reduce the massive energy consumption of the building sector and at the same time still provide people with healthy living environments? With COVID-19 and extreme heat stress events placing a strong focus on the precarious relationship between indoor spaces and human well-being, we need a new paradigm for environmental control in buildings.

The Thermal Architecture Lab seeks to find sustainable and equitable cooling alternatives to replace current building practices. Working at the intersection of heat transfer, architectural design, and material science, we develop novel technologies and design strategies to simultaneously reduce buildings’ energy demand and provide thermal shelter to people in a warming world. In this lecture, a series of projects will be presented, exploring various methods to provide both ventilation and climatic adaptation to interior spaces across different climatic zones.