Building for extreme heat and equity

No.106 — Read old posts on Tinyfarmlab.com
Reading Time 5 minutes

AC!
No AC!!

You might be fighting for the remote control of your air-conditioner.

On the other hand,
this year,
Uttarakhand and Himachal,
witnessed yet another round of devastating cloudbursts.

A sudden fury of water.
Lives lost.
Homes destroyed.
Landscapes scarred.

We often dismiss these as “mountain problems.”
But the truth is,
they are deeply connected to what we build
and consume in our cities.

Because every glass skyscraper that traps heat,
every air-conditioned room that pumps waste heat outside,
and every car running on fossil fuels.
All of it adds up.

It changes the balance of our climate,
And in turn,
the mountains suffer.

Today’s newsletter is deeply inspired by our conversation with our TFF(tiny farm friend) Evita Rodrigues, who works in climate policy and urban resilience.

On our recent call,
she asked us an important question,
“Why is the architecture industry not responding to the reality of rising heat?“

2024 has been declared the first year when average global temperatures have exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, a critical tipping point scientists have warned us about for decades.

And yet,
we keep building as if this number means nothing.

The Myth of Glass and Comfort

Modern cities are obsessed with glass.
Glass facades have become a symbol for
progress,
modernity, and
aspiration.

But glass buildings are heat traps.
They let the sun pour in during the day
and lock it inside,
forcing us to rely on massive air-conditioning systems.

It is not just bad design,
it is a vicious cycle.

The more glass we use,
the more air conditioning we need.
The more air conditioning we use,
the more heat we pump back into the city.
The hotter the city gets,
the more glass buildings demand cooling.

This is not architecture,
it is self-sabotage.

We Once Knew Better

What makes this worse is
we once knew how to build differently.

Long before air conditioning,
architecture itself provided comfort.

Courtyards that cooled homes by creating shaded microclimates.
Thick mud and stone walls
that absorbed heat during the day
and released it at night.

Jaalis and perforated screens
that filtered sunlight while letting breezes through.

Stepwells and water bodies
that tempered the surrounding air.

Verandas and shaded streets
that allowed people to live outdoors,
not locked in glass boxes.

These were not just aesthetic traditions.
They were climate-responsive strategies,
born of centuries of wisdom.

They worked with nature,
not against it.

Can We Live Without AC?

It feels almost impossible today.
Most of us are so acclimatized to air conditioning
that the thought of living without it seems absurd.

Yet, it is worth asking,
can we imagine a future where AC is not the default,
but the last resort?

In Venice this year,
the German climate engineering practice Transsolar 
created an installation called Terms and Conditions.

We got to know about it through our dear TFF Aarti Dhingra, who works at Transsolar.

It asked a simple but unsettling question:
What have we really signed up for when we cool our interiors at all costs?

In the installation,
the “outside” of the air conditioner,
the part that dumps heat,
was brought inside.

Suspended in the gallery,
it confronted visitors with the waste heat
usually hidden,
usually someone else’s problem.

Walking through the space became a metaphor.
A reminder that cooling one place always heats another.
That our “comfort” is never free,
it’s displaced.
From there to here.
From them to us.

It made visible the inequities of our thermal world:
how privileged interiors stay cool,
while the outside,
often inhabited by the less privileged,
bears the burden of that waste heat.

Where Do We Go From Here?

We cannot afford to keep designing buildings
that fight the very climate they exist in.

We cannot keep pretending that the
carbon footprint alone is the problem,
heat itself is the issue.

The mountains remind us with every flood.
The cities remind us with every heatwave.

There is no single fix.
It will take many small solutions, layered together.

Some come from the past,
vernacular wisdom like shaded courtyards,
wind towers,
mud walls,
and deep eaves.

Spaces that breathe,
orient themselves to the sun,
and belong to their place.

Others come from the future,
adaptive envelopes,
or experiments like
Carlo Ratti’s ideas on responsive architecture.

The point is not to wait for a silver bullet,
but to weave old and new into buildings
that work with heat,
not against it.

Belonging in architecture means this too:
a home, a city,
a world that does not push us further away
from comfort,
but draws us back into balance.

Love,
Raghav and Ansh

P.S.: If you are on LinkedIn, let’s connect. You can read our latest post here.


What you can watch - Inside Bahrain’s Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 | Interview with Andrea Faraguna

What you can listen to - The Transsolar Podcast - Terms and Conditions - Ep. 1 with Jochen Lam and Bilge Kobas

They explore the concept of the installation and unfold some of the stories behind the obvious – for a mindshift in how we plan our built environment.

What You Can Read - Bahrain’s 2025 Venice Biennale Pavilion Addresses the Global Issue of Extreme Heat

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