Is it possible to have air conditioning without using electricity?
People have been living in hot desert conditions for thousands of years and they found ingenious way to survive and thrive. Keeping cool was and still is essential and they had ingenious inventions to cool the home without using electricity, so can our modern architectural designs can definitely learn something from this!
In Iran and the middle east towers can be found on buildings and they have a special purpose, to cool the building. They are known as wind-catchers and they work in a few ways:
The first and most common is to cool the inside of a building. The tower has openings that are facing the wind and trap it inside creating a nice breeze inside the building, When used with the Qanat, (which is an underground water channel or pool) air is pulled down, it reaches the water and is drawn up the wind-catcher to be dispersed in the building.
When there is no wind, the wind-catchers are like a chimney, letting the hot air rise and escape. The wind catchers can also be used with a filter, to stop dust particles and pollution entering the building.
There are hundreds of wind catchers in Yazd, which is a city in Iran entirely made of adobe buildings, there are also lots of dome shaped roofs with small holes on the top. This shape also helps to keep the air inside the building circulating and therefore cool when its hot, and warm when its cold.
Paintings dating to around 1300BC discovered near modern-day Egypt depict two triangular structures atop a Pharaoh 's royal residence, leading archaeologists to believe this was the first wind catcher developed. It’s still its unclear which country or culture invented these architectural designs first, but the ideas of keeping building cools have clearly spread far and wide with variations depending on the region.
Since the early 20th century modern housing has failed to design houses to stay cool instead favoring electric powered air conditioners which are more prevalent than ever, which accounts for 22% of all the total electricity used in buildings around the world today.
