Greenzone Online

A friend of mine had a term for the experience of cruising down a road at 65 miles per hour with all four windows down so the wind would rush in and suck the sweat right off your body - “Mexican air-conditioning” is what he called it.  So I couldn’t resist applying his jargon to the clever design of the Torre Cube office building by architect Carme Pinos, which is incidentally located in Mexico, for its marvelous use of good-ol’ natural air as the primary climate control mechanism.  Despite being in Guadelejara, the building is designed to be comfortable most of the time without using electric air-conditioning.  It accomplishes this seemingly impossible feat by utilizing a central open-air atrium space to allow for natural heat convection (hot air can rise out of the center of the building and escape to the outside).  It also has a unique (and visually intriguing) double-walled exterior which consists of a glass wall with functional windows on the inside and a grid of movable wood panels on the outside.  The two facades are separated by a space where the workers can step out and adjust the position of the panels to let the desired amount of light into their work space, thereby minimizing the use of artificial lighting.  If this sort of environmentally friendly design can work in Mexico, I imagine it would also work great in places like Texas, Arizona or Southern California where air-conditioning is a huge energy drain.  I can also see it applied to residential homes along with solar panels, rooftop wind turbine generators and other sustainable design elements.