Architectural Means and Tools for Providing Indoor Air Comfort: A Historic Perspective

The technological leap of the past century and especially the fundamental changes of the last few decades led to placing the bar at higher levels of comfort on one side and, in the same time and conditioned by these standard levels, to the use of more energy than ever before. Jevons predicted—or intuited—this trajectory as early as 1865, with his famous “The Coal Question”: the resource that was harvested with more performant technologies would not be used more efficiently but new fields of application would be adapted to it. Therefore, in our energy-dependent society, one common sense approach would be to return to “square one”; not in the caves, obviously but in a system where both passive and active systems intertwine, in the effort of reducing the use of energy and in consequence the pollution and the waste from building and building-related activities. This chapter presents some of the architectural means and design methods that were employed in the building sector throughout history, that provided comfort long before technology managed it by just pressing a button.