Today's architects can learn from a 19th century's lost ventilation system
techxplore.com
techxplore.com
> By re-reading archival documents, the researchers were also able to clarify the role of British hospital specialist Henry Saxon Snell, who mysteriously backed away from the project after developing its original designs. The board of governors pushed Snell to step down after local consultants argued his ventilation scheme wasn't fit for the cold winter.
Implies the design doesn't work??
Essentially, carefully managing the path that air takes into the building and out allows for heat to be recovered (like a counter-current heat exchanger, or radiator). This is similar to how heat boxes for efficient chimneys work - make the path for hot air to escape necessarily impart the heat into the surrounding brickwork.
TFA: > Further analysis shows significant heating savings are possible in mildly cold seasons compared to natural displacement (74%) and natural mixing (60%) ventilation.
The 'ducting' for the airflow was hollow cavities in the various masonry walls in the building, forming a circuitous route long enough to recover the heat while maintaining good airflow for ventilation.
That's as technical as this article gets. I don't think the author understands the ventilation-system design.
Just as old temperature maintenance was done via "no moving parts" (mainly large thermal masses), so old ventilation was done via "temperature drafting". For a long time we've overcome temperature maintenance via just forced air induction heating/cooling, which is not the most efficient. We're now saving some heat by using HRV/ERV but there's likely ways we can utilize things like this is talking about to reduce the energy needed to do it.
Not related to ventilation, but I found the Trompe compressor to be an interesting example of forgotten technology