Architects use local materials and merge traditional techniques with modern technology to make schools and orphanages cool, welcoming places

If architects are people who like to think their way around challenges, building schools in Burkina Faso must be the dream job. The challenges, after all, are legion: scorching temperatures in the high seasons, limited funds, materials, electricity and water, and clients who are vulnerable and young. How do you keep a building cool under a baking sun when there is no air conditioning?

Architect Diébédo Francis Kéré grew up in the small village of Gando and knows the challenges well. He and other architects such as Albert Faus are finding ingenious ways to use cheap materials to make sure that the schools and orphanages that they have built around Burkina Faso are cool, welcoming places.

Kéré, who won the Pritzker prize in 2022, has spoken movingly about the support he was given as a child by the whole community, with everyone giving money towards his education as he left the village and eventually gained a scholarship and studied in Germany. “The reason I do what I do is my community,” he said.

Gando primary school, built in 2001, was Kéré’s first construction after completing his studies. “At first, my community didn’t understand why I wanted to build with clay when there were glass buildings in Germany, so I had to convince them to use the local materials,” Kéré has said. Men and women came together to build the school, merging traditional techniques such as clay floors, beaten by hand until they were “smooth as a baby’s bottom” with more modern technology to seek better comfort.

Continue reading at the source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/29/we-dont-need-air-con-how-burkina-faso-builds-schools-that-stay-cool-in-40c-heat

In Pacific Palisades and Malibu, some houses with fire-resistant designs remained standing amid neighborhoods of destruction. 

More than 12,000 structures have been consumed by the wildfires raging across Los Angeles this week, many of them single-family homes that have stood for decades.

A brand-new house in Pacific Palisades designed and built by architect Greg Chasen in summer 2024 could have easily been one of them. None of the other homes around it survived, and a car parked out front by a neighbor was the perfect vector to spread the flames.

Yet on Jan. 9, after a night of devastation, Chasen found the house intact, barely touched by the fire. A photo of the house posted by the Malibu architect went viral on X, and a thread on Reddit swelled with guesses about what saved it.

Luck was the biggest factor, Chasen concedes, but it wasn’t providence alone. If it weren’t for several fire-resilient design strategies, the home would have been destroyed.

Continue reading: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-13/los-angeles-wildfires-why-these-homes-didn-t-burn

Source and full article: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/02/it-was-an-accident-the-scientists-who-have-turned-humid-air-into-renewable-power

In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. It’s a claim that will probably raise a few eyebrows, and when the team made the discovery that inspired this new research in 2018, it did.

“To be frank, it was an accident,” says the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao. “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.”

The UMass Amherst team were surprised to find that the device, which comprised an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless.

Each nanowire was less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, wide enough that an airborne water molecule could enter, but so narrow it would bump around inside the tube. Each bump, the team realised, lent the material a small charge, and as the frequency of bumps increased, one end of the tube became differently charged from the other.

“So it’s really like a battery,” says Yao. “You have a positive pull and a negative pull, and when you connect them the charge is going to flow.”

For their recent study, Yao’s team have moved on from nanowires, and instead are punching materials with millions of tiny holes, or nanopores. The device they have come up with is the size of a thumbnail, one-fifth the width of a human hair, and capable of generating roughly one microwatt – enough to light a single pixel on a large LED screen.

So what would it take to power the rest of the screen, or indeed a whole house? “The beauty is that the air is everywhere,” says Yao. “Even though a thin sheet of the device gives out a very tiny amount of electricity or power, in principle, we can stack multiple layers in vertical space to increase the power.”

That’s exactly what another team, Prof Svitlana Lyubchyk and her twin sons, Profs Andriy and Sergiy Lyubchyk, are trying to do. Svitlana Lyubchyk and Andriy are part of the Lisbon-based Catcher project, whose aim is “changing atmospheric humidity into renewable power”, and along with Sergiy they have founded CascataChuva, a startup intended to commercialise the research. They first began working on the idea in 2015, some time before Yao’s team at the UMass Amherst. “We were considered the freaks,” says Andriy. “The guys who were saying something completely impossible.”

In fact, trying to prove the worth of an early proof-of-concept at conferences had them literally red in the face. He says: “The signal was not stable and it was low. We were able to generate 300 milliwatts, but you had to put all your effort into your lungs in order to breathe enough humidity into the samples.”

They’ve come a long way since then, with Catcher and related projects receiving nearly €5.5m (£4.7m) in funding from the European Innovation Council. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across. According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of power a day – roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024.

More at: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/02/it-was-an-accident-the-scientists-who-have-turned-humid-air-into-renewable-power

Examples of head-scratchingly impressive building material can be found throughout the ancient world, and Maya lime plaster ranks high among them.

Scientists from the University of Granada in Spain explored why this plaster was a step above the building materials of its mesoamerican peers.

The secret ingredient was sap from nearby trees, introduced during the plaster-making process. The sap created insoluble crystalline structures (similar to those found on the shells of mollusks) that were well-suited to surviving the hot and humid climate of central America.

Full article https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a43658939/mystery-of-stronger-maya-plaster-solved/