Let's get started.
We can't get enough of open floor plans.
We're going to destroy your house.
We open it up. Opening up the spaces.
You can see every area of the house from the kitchen which is exactly what we want.
HDTV gets a lot of credit for making the open layout so popular.
But central heating and cooling help it to make it possible.
Air conditioning freed us from having to design for climate and now it's got us trapped.
From 1910 to 1940,
you could buy a whole house from the floor plan to the lumber to the nails,
straight from the Sears catalog.
Just like HDTV does today,
the Sears homes reflected mass market taste.
Look at all those walls.
It's not because people back in the day were ignorant rubes who hated natural light.
There were practical design considerations.
For one thing, we didn't have
the construction technology to build open layouts on the cheap and we
kept our kitchens closed off because we used to think of
cooking as a task for the hired help better left on scene.
It was also about climate control.
In an era before air conditioning and central heating,
smaller spaces were more practical.
On a cold night, you could stay cozy in an enclosed den,
on a blistering day,
heat from the kitchen would stay in the kitchen.
Once we could cool our homes with machines,
we didn't have to rely on design to control the temperature.
So now, the homes we build are divorced from the places we live.
A McMansion in Florida looks identical to one in Michigan,
despite the major differences in climate.
It's easy to criticize the uniformity of the American suburbs.
Think little boxes on the hillside.
Little boxes made a tic taky.
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all.
But is there anything actually wrong with them?
Yes. These homes with their wide open layouts and disregard for the local climate,
need more energy to heat and cool.
That's a problem because we're headed straight for a global cooling crunch.
The US uses more energy on cooling alone
than the entire continent of Africa uses for everything.
Right now, cooling uses 10 percent of the world's electricity.
That number could triple by 2050.
The International Energy Agency warned in their 2018 report
that this is one of the most overlooked and most critical energy issues of our time.
The convenience of AC has caused us to forget some really brilliant old school,
home design principles that kept our ancestors cool.
To begin with, there was such a wide variety of architectural styles and floor plans
that the buyer can usually find exactly
what suits him best and the location where he want to live.
Take this early 1700 house in Coastal, North Carolina.
The high open space here drew hot air
up and out of the house something called stack effect ventilation.
Even the humble southern shotgun house was designed to stay cool.
Its windows are aligned specifically to create
cross breezes or to go even further back in time.
Over 1,500 years ago,
builders in India developed structures called steppe wells.
As the water here evaporates,
it cools air around it.
They used lattices as outer skins for their buildings.
They helped provide shade and diffuse the hot sun.
This is the Pearl Academy in Jaipur India.
It was built in 2008,
and its architect used
those traditional designs to make a more energy efficient modern building.
When it's 110 degrees outside,
it's a relatively comfortable 80 degrees inside.
So, even though it's in a hot desert climate,
the Pearl Academy relies on minimal air conditioning and for only two months out of here.
As the planet gets warmer, we can't ask people to live without air conditioning,
but we can reduce our reliance on air conditioning.
The other alternative would be to build
thousands more power plants at massive financial and environmental cost.
This is a problem we created and it's problem we can solve,
partly through better design.
We can turn to the thoughtful passive cooling designs of our past.
Thanks for watching. Swing by the comments with your thoughts,
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