30 YEARBOOK 2024 their popularity has increased as people have discovered just how good they are for dealing with discomfort quickly and effectively. In hot climates, the ceiling fan is similarly enjoying an overdue renaissance. This is the realm of ‘thermal delight’ first described by Lisa Heschong (in Thermal Delight in Architecture, MIT Press, 1979). Humans are much more sensitive to change than to absolute conditions, so, for example, leaving hallways cold enhances the pleasure felt when entering a cosy lounge. The psychological aspects of comfort may make us uneasy in our very deterministic global north world, where we trust more to instrumentation than to our own senses. But this is a blind spot. If we can overcome our need to enumerate, we will have many more tools at our disposal for slashing the energy and carbon we are using to try to make our buildings comfortable. One final concern about our current focus on air temperature and space conditioning is based on the impact this has on the building and its occupants. It is well known that heated air rising is apt to create uncomfortable draughts; but more subtly, since the primary way we feel cold is via radiation loss into the surrounding surfaces, the warm heating is being used to try to raise the temperatures of those surfaces. Setting aside the discredited notion that a ‘neutral thermal environment’ is actually desirable, heating surfaces with moving air is extremely inefficient, especially if there are any sources of damp (the resulting evaporation will cool the wall). It is therefore little wonder that we in the global north currently use so much energy to provide building comfort but still meet with very debatable success. The complex background to comfort fits well with the evidence of field researchers such as Freya Wise2 who have had little trouble demonstrating that when older buildings are maintained and operated by people who understand them, they use very little heating or cooling energy. And this is despite many alterations: post-industrial fashions led not only to the loss of the draperies, but also to the removal of ceilings to reveal roof timbers, of partitions and even of the renders that kept the buildings dry. All of these features have the potential to make the buildings more comfortable while using even less energy and carbon. Conservation experts may be the only professionals who speak with building owners and occupants on the subject of climate change without having a product to sell. We have many important messages with which to support them, not least how reinstating lost furnishings could quickly and cheaply make their buildings comfortable using little or no energy and carbon, and at the same time greatly benefit their health and wellbeing. Given the seriousness of the climate emergency, many conservation officers in local government and the statutory heritage authorities are thinking of allowing more changes to historic buildings, but I do not believe we should be focusing on risky fabric-first interventions of dubious longevity and utility such as solid wall insulation. Is it time, though, to encourage reinstating the passive features that were lost when we began to throw fossil fuels at every problem? Replacement of lost renders, ceilings, sash windows and awnings would all be high on my list. Even when there is no record of the building having had these features originally, if some or all of them will make the building more comfortable and therefore more useable now and into the much hotter future, should we not be encouraging owners and occupiers to consider them? References ¹ Hannah Pallubinsky – see https:// orcid.org/0000-0002-1181-1277 ² Freya Wise – see https://orcid. org/0000-0001-9532-3862 Robyn Pender recently retired from her post as senior Building Conservation Advisor in the Historic Building Climate Change Adaptation team at Historic England, but she is still actively involved in heritage conservation and climate change, particularly through her own company, Whethergauge Limited and at Cathedral Communications Limited where she is one of the editors of The Building Conservation Directory and Historic Churches. The cloths hanging on the wall behind the Virgin in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation were not merely decorative, nor were they there to indicate her importance: to the medieval eye they showed she was quiet and studious. (La Anunciación by Fra Angelico from Prado in Google Earth)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=