For more on Félix Trombe and the history of the Trombe Wall, see Paul Bouet, “A Silent Graph: Tracing the Algerian Past of French Solar Experiments” ABE Journal 18 (2021); Paul Bouet, “Solar Extractivism,” e-Flux Architecture, October 2022, see ®; Paul Bouet, “Domestiquer l’énergie solaire: Architecture, décolonisation et écologisme dans la France d’après guerre, 1945-1986,” doctoral thesis, Université Gustave Eiffel, 2022; P. Medici, “The Trombe Wall during the 1970s: Technological device or architectural space?” Spool 4, no. 2 (2015).
Douglas Kelbaugh fonds, 1970-2008. Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Douglas Kelbaugh, “The Kelbaugh House,” Solar Age 1, no. 7 (July 1976). “There was no one to turn to for advice, so I based the solar engineering purely on the drawings in the magazine, slowly turning the ideas over in my head and guessing how it would perform. Thermodynamics are deceptive. The simplest concepts proved the most slippery and I had to rethink them many times. I did not contact Trombe’s group in Odeillo, France, because I assumed there would be a language problem and that they were probably tired of requests. Also, I liked my hunches and felt the Sagitterean urge to gamble.”
Douglas Kelbaugh, “A Thermal History of the Kelbaugh House,” Progress in Passive Solar Energy Systems, American Solar Energy Society, 1983.
Douglas Kelbaugh fonds, 1970-2008. Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Ron Thornton, “How to Move Heat in Passive Homes,” Solar Age (July 1984), 26-30.
See, for example: G.A. Chown, “Thermal Envelope Houses,” National Research Council of Canada, 1982; Hillary Sample, “A House within a House,” in Building Systems: Design, Technology, and Society, eds. Kiel Moe and Ryan Smith (London: Routledge, 2012).
Terry M. Boake et al., “Doubling Up II,” Canadian Architect, Aug 1, 2003. See ➝.
Jospeh.W. Lstiburek, “Why Green Can Be Wash,” ASHRAE Journal (November 2008).
Daniel A. Barber, “Active Passive: Heat Storage and the Solar Imaginary,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 1 (2021): 103–21.
William A. Shurcliff, “Super Insulated Houses and Double Envelope Houses,” Brick House Publishing Company, 1981.
Ibid.
Barber, “Active Passive.”
See: Paul Bouet, “How Did It Fail? Considering the Decline of Environmental Experiments,” Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of the European Architectural History Network, Estonian Academy of Arts (2018): 451-457, see ®; Aleksandra Jaeschke, The Greening of America’s Building Codes: Promises and Paradoxes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2022); E. C. Bassas et al., “A review of the evolution of green residential architecture,” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 125 (June 2020); M. Economidou et al., “Review of 50 years of EU energy efficiency policies for buildings,” Energy and Buildings 225 (Oct 2020).
Félix Trombe, “Perspectives Sur l’utilisation Des Rayonnements Solaires et Terrestres Dans Certaines Régions Du Monde,” Revue Générale Thermique 6, no. 70 (Oct. 1967): 1285–314.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Bouet, “A Silent Graph”; Félix Trombe, “Perspectives Sur l’utilisation Des Rayonnements Solaires et Terrestres.”
Félix Trombe, “Devices for Lowering the Temperature of a Body by Heat Radiation Therefrom,” US3310102 A, March 21, 1967. See ➝.
See Bouet, “Domestiquer l’énergie solaire.” On pages 87-88, Bouet writes that the engineers who lived in the solar-heated test buildings “acted as guinea pigs for the laboratory's experiments” and experienced “a feeling of confinement, due to the fact that the interior air is barely renewed, in order to retain as much of the captured heat as possible.” Ventilation was probably also banned for the buildings using terrestrial radiation for cooling, though these were never really inhabited (Paul Bouet, personal communication, March 2023). Metabolizing humans and ventilation are, of course, counterproductive sources of heating when trying to show how to passively cool an interior space below ambient temperature.
Margot McDonald and Carolina Dayer, eds., “Activism in Architecture: Bright Dreams of Passive Energy Design” (London: Routledge, 2018); S. Yannas, E. Erell, J.S. Molina, Roof Cooling Techniques: A Design Handbook (London: Routledge, 2005).
McDonald and. Dayer, eds., Activism in Architecture.
M. Santamouris and J. Feng, “Recent Progress in Daytime Radiative Cooling: Is It the Air Conditioner of the Future? Buildings 8, no. 12 (2018):168.
R. Fortin, J. Mandal, A. P. Raman, S. Craig, “Passive Radiative Cooling to Sub-Ambient Temperatures inside Naturally Ventilated Buildings,” Cell Reports Physical Science 4, no. 9 (September 2023): 101570.
Ibid.
P.F. Linden, G.F. Lane-Serff, D.A. Smeed, “Emptying filling boxes: the fluid mechanics of natural ventilation,” Journal of Fluid Mechanics 212 (March 1990): 309-335. For an overview of buoyancy ventilation research since 1990, and the influence of the “Cambridge group,” see T. Chenvidyakar, Buoyancy effects on natural ventilation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
For water bath models in action, see ➝, after R. Fortin, P. Osborne, S. Craig, K. Moe, M. Jemtrud,"Water bath demonstrations of two buoyancy ventilation modes: displacement vs. mixing," Scholars Portal Dataverse,1, 2020.
A.W. Woods, S. Fitzgerald, S. Livermore, “A comparison of winter pre-heating requirements for natural displacement and natural mixing ventilation,” Energy and Buildings 41, no. 12 (2009). For an overview of mixing ventilation applications, see Chenvidyakarn, Buoyancy effects on natural ventilation.
Natural mixing ventilation ought to be possible in conjunction with a Trombe Wall in certain conditions; however, this pairing has not yet been examined in the scientific literature. Natural mixing ventilation is most likely to occur when the heat source is distributed on the floor. See, for example, T. Chenvidyakarn. "Buoyancy effects on natural ventilation," Cambridge University Press, 2013, and D.A. Parker et al., “Vertically distributed wall sources of buoyancy, Part 2: Unventilated and ventilated confined spaces,” Journal of Fluid Mechanics 90 (January 2021): a16.
F. Suerich-Gulick, Anna Halepaska, Salmaan Craig, “Cascading temperature demand: The limits of thermal nesting in naturally ventilated buildings,” Building and Environment 208 (January 2022). See also M. DeKay and G. Brager, Experiential Design Schemas (ORO Editions, 2023).
For the history of ventilation and environmental experimentation in the nineteenth century, see H. Schoenefeldt, Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament : David Boswell Reid and Disruptive Environmentalism (London: Routledge, 2020); C. A. Short, The recovery of natural environments in architecture: Air, comfort and climate (London: Routledge, 2017); A. Fair, “'A Laboratory of Heating and Ventilation’: The Johns Hopkins Hospital as experimental architecture, 1870–90,” The Journal of Architecture 19 (2014): 357–381. No clear precedents for nineteenth century heat recovery ventilation had been found by historians until our recent study. See: Anna Halepaska, Annmarie Adams, and Salmaan Craig, “19th-century thermosiphon ventilation and its potential for heat recovery in buildings today,” iScience, in press.
A. Halepaska, A. Adams, S. Craig, “19th-century thermosiphon ventilation and its potential for heat recovery in buildings today,” iScience, Vol 27, Issue 1, Jan 2024, ➝.
Ibid.
H. Pallubinsky et al., “Establishing Resilience in Times of Climate Change—a Perspective on Humans and Buildings.” Climatic Change 176, no. 10 (September 2023): 135.
Ibid.
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).