Are we cooling poorly designed architecture?

No.120 — Read old posts on Tinyfarmlab.com
Reading Time 5 minutes

In April this year,
all 50 of the hottest cities on the planet,
on a single day, were in India.

Not most of them.
All 50.

But this is not India’s problem anymore.

Europe experienced its most intense heatwaves,
breaking records in cities across,
France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK.

Thousands of excess deaths have already been linked to the heat.

You might be sitting in your room, AC on,
and still feeling like the room is working against you.
Not the machine.
The building.

Air conditioning is not an engineering problem,
It’s a design problem.

For fifteen years,
our answer to Indian heat has been the same:
build fast,
build with concrete and glass,
then bolt on an air conditioner
to fix what the design got wrong.

It's not working.
And the numbers show why.

Where mainstream cooling actually fails

Most new construction uses thin concrete walls,
sometimes as thin as 15 cm,
because thinner walls mean more carpet area to sell.

But concrete conducts heat almost twice as fast as clay brick.

The wall soaks up the day's heat
and then releases it straight
into your living room,
all evening.

Glass makes it worse, not better.

Big glass facades
and French windows look modern.
They also trap heat like a greenhouse.
So the AC has to work harder
just to undo what the windows let in.

The nights aren't cooling down anymore.

This is the part that scares me most.
In 2024, parts of north India
saw four straight nights
where the minimum temperature
stayed 4 to 7°C above normal.

Buildings need cool nights to recover from hot days.

And the fix everyone's reaching for can't scale.
Air conditioners in India are projected to go
from 67 million units in 2022
to 318 million by 2032

More ACs mean
more load on a grid
that already struggles during heatwaves,
and more heat pumped straight back out into the street.

We're cooling our homes by heating our cities.

It's a feedback loop.

The uncomfortable truth is that air conditioners don't destroy heat.
They move it.

Heat is not democratic.
The same 45°C lands very differently
depending on which side of the city you're on.

The privileged people like us can buy their way out of it.
AC in the car,
AC in the office,
AC at home,
a backup inverter for when the grid fails.

And every one of those ACs dumps
its heat back onto the street,
which brings us to who's standing on that street.

The construction worker laying the concrete slab.
The delivery rider doing 40 trips a day.
The security guard in a plastic chair outside.
The family in a tin-roof settlement
where the room is hotter inside than out,
and the "solution" is to sleep
on the terrace or the pavement.

These are the people who physically build and run the air-conditioned city, and they have the least protection from the heat it creates.

The recent Transsolar installation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale is particularly relevant to the questions you're answering because it reframes cooling as a social, political, and environmental issue, not just a technical one.

Visitors walked through a space surrounded by the "outside" side of air-conditioning units, experiencing the waste heat normally expelled from conditioned interiors. The project asked a simple but powerful question:

What is the real cost of comfort?

Architecture made a promise.
Those buildings would protect us from the climate.

Our response to a hotter climate seems simple:
If it's hot, cool it.
But what if we've been asking the wrong question?

What the old buildings already knew

None of this is a new problem.
Havelis across India solved it centuries ago,
without a single machine.

For thousands of years,
people built homes across the Indian subcontinent without air conditioning.

Not because they enjoyed sweating.

But because buildings themselves were designed to stay comfortable.

Thick earthen walls plastered with lime
slowed the movement of heat.

Courtyards created their own microclimates.
They pulled hot air up and out at night,
drawing cooler air back through the rooms.

Jaalis, those carved stone screens,
that let breeze through while blocking direct sun.

Verandahs blocked the harsh afternoon sun.
Chajjas, the overhangs above windows,
tuned to block the harsh summer sun
but let the gentler winter sun in.

Trees became part of the architecture.
Roofs reflected heat or
insulated it with earth and vegetation.

Materials weren't chosen only because they were cheap or strong.

They were chosen because they understood the climate.

This isn't an argument against air conditioning.

The real question is:

Why do our buildings need so much cooling in the first place?

Imagine if we designed buildings that reduced heat before it entered.
Air conditioning would still have a role.

But it would become the last layer of comfort, not the first.

At Tiny Farm Lab, this question is shaping much of our work.

Through the Godrej Design Fellowship, we're exploring how agricultural waste and locally available biomaterials can become climate-responsive building materials for a hotter India. Instead of treating straw, husk, fibres, and other crop residues as waste, we're asking whether they can become the insulation, wall systems, and thermal buffers that future buildings need.

Because perhaps the future of cooling doesn't begin with a better air conditioner.

Perhaps it begins with better architecture.

Most people do not choose air conditioning
because they prefer technology;
they choose it because their buildings perform poorly.

If we want to reduce AC dependence,
we need to create buildings
that remain comfortable through
design,
materials,
shading,
ventilation,
and landscape integration.

For decades,
air conditioning has been marketed as a symbol of progress.

We need a new narrative where climate-responsive architecture is seen not as a return to the past, but as a more advanced and resilient way of building for the future.

Love,
Raghav and Ansh

P.S. - If you are on LinkedIn, let’s connect!


What you can watch - How to cool our homes (even without ACs)

What you can listen to -

What You Can Read - 

If you found value in this newsletter, please consider sharing it with a friend.

Kindly forward them this link.

You can read old posts here.

Tiny Farm Friends Newsletter.
Every week, we share tiny, valuable lessons to help you transition to the countryside and build naturally.