if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills
where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*
I hate learning about instances of "oh yeah we know how to do that, we just don't".
I have a book from the early 1980s about passive solar homes that talks a lot about how using computers to analyze a building site can lead to houses custom-made to work with not only the climate of the general area, but also the microclimates of the site, and I genuinely like the looks of most of the houses featured in the book
And when I looked up why that approach was abandoned, no longer considered the Way of the Future/High Tech way to build even modest homes, I found out it was because insulation technology also experienced advances during that time, meaning it also became possible to build a home that completely ignored the local climate yet offered reasonable comfort year round
And then I learned about vernacular architecture, which is the academic term for "stuff built without being designed by architects"--it's largely building practices that have been figured out by people in a region, using materials from that region, to deal with the climate of that region
And then, yeah, I got even angrier at McMansions and suburbs full of identical houses all over everywhere






















