Yes, a building in San Francisco doesn’t need air conditioning in the summer, what a surprise. Make the same design work in Phoenix Arizona and we’ll have something.
Even in Phoenix, the need for air conditioning can be reduced by designing houses well. As the article notes:
> Even in exposed, hot and arid climates, cooler temperatures are never too far away. In Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan state in northern India, daytime temperatures regularly reach upwards of 40C in the summer months. But just a few metres below ground, the temperature of the earth in the region remains a much gentler 25C, even through the fiercest summer heat.
> But just a few metres below ground, the temperature of the earth in the region remains a much gentler 25C, even through the fiercest summer heat.
That can be a risky bit depending how it's used specifically e.g. london's underground was pretty much freezing when it first opened but the clays have a hard time shedding heat so these days the walls warm up the undeground.
This is talking about digging down a few metres and having a loosely covered courtyard in the space, very different.
Thick walls, passive roof cooling, maybe partly sunken... These things can work for a standalone house or certain types of commercial buildings but they're harder to work into bigger structures although evaporative cooling at least can be used.
[0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/central-line-temperature-lon...
> When much of central London’s Tube network opened in the early 1900s, temperatures in tunnels and at stations were recorded at around 14C.
[1] https://physicsworld.com/a/keeping-buildings-cool-by-sending...
> To understand how more of the Central line could be cooled down, just look at the Victoria line. In 2006, a similarly experimental groundwater cooling system was installed at Victoria station to lower temperatures in mid-platform areas. In 2011, TfL completed the installation of 13 ventilation shafts throughout the Victoria line, while the new fleet of trains running on the line allows TfL to operate a regenerative braking system, which returns power to the rails when a train brakes. And when a whopping 38 per cent of heat generation on the London Underground comes from trains braking, that’s a pretty big deal.
It's basically another example where sensible design can make a huge difference.
That's hardly likely in Phoenix.
> This allows air conditioning to be used very modestly, when it is necessary at all.
I'm not sure why every thread about energy efficiency improvements has people come in and do the "it's not a perfect solution for these edge cases" thing. Everyone knows that already, and it's totally beside the point.