Heat waves in Western Europe are occurring earlier and earlier. They are no longer confined to July and August but now spill over into June and September. The ‘energy transition’ is seen as the universal remedy for ‘global warming’: with the help of heavily subsidised programmes, the aim is to imagine an ecologically correct future in which technology will lower the thermostat. In the meantime, mass housing is becoming unliveable, and children are baking in concrete schools where temperatures are reaching 40°C.
The unsuitability of homes and public buildings for the heat is the result of several decades of frenzied modernisation of the built environment in the years following the Second World War. As the countryside was being permanently depopulated, cities were surrounded by belts of low-rent buildings intended to house first the baby boomers and then, once that generation had passed, immigrants. These mass housing structures, built quickly using cheap materials, are now proving totally unsuited to rising temperatures.
And what about the public buildings that have sprung up in so many cities, built with glass and concrete? Libraries, community centres, administrative buildings, schools, and colleges have multiplied, with soulless, characterless architecture and materials that cannot withstand the test of time. Today, their ‘modernity’ is no longer attractive.
But it’s not just the tower blocks in disadvantaged suburbs. At the other end of the social scale, people are locking themselves away in air-conditioned glass towers with a disastrous ecological footprint.
In between, traditional housing, whether village houses or Haussmann-style buildings, has been the target of much sarcasm and unjustified criticism: not functional enough, too expensive to build, a symbol of bourgeois order… We’ve heard it all. But the unleashing of nature and the crushing heat are calling for a little more restraint from the detractors of tradition, who would do well to reconnect with the buildings that have enabled European cities to embody a form of civilisation full of wisdom for centuries.
The advantages of traditional European housing are countless. Stone construction is extremely effective at keeping buildings cool. In some regions, buildings used to be constructed using adobe, a traditional material made from earth, which is one of the most effective natural insulators. The relative narrowness of the streets in old towns—such as those found in Italy’s medieval cities—limits the amount of sunlight reaching the façades, where the slabs advocated by Le Corbusier and his followers turn into stifling mineral grounds with endless reverberation.
Stone, wood, adobe: a few overzealous modernists were keen to denounce these methods as ‘outdated’ in the 1960s and 1970s. Concrete was seen as the universal solution. Today, we are returning to them. Each region had its own genius, as architect Bernard Quirot explains: “Each area developed specific responses based on its broader geographical context. These are mostly ecological, and there is no reason to believe that they are obsolete. We need to build much less and, above all, destroy less.” On the contrary, he stresses, it is technical solutions at all costs (e.g. expensive external insulation systems) that will quickly become obsolete, with materials that have no history and no longevity, potentially leading to a real “architectural disaster.”
Take Haussmann-style housing, for example. The stone buildings that line the streets of Paris today have surprising climatic characteristics. The thick stone walls effectively keep the buildings cool in summer. The traditional windows, when they have not been replaced by double or triple glazing designed to limit energy loss, ensure natural ventilation and a very healthy air exchange, which explains the French people’s long-standing mistrust of air conditioning. With a few common-sense measures—creating draughts at night and closing the shutters during the day—there is simply no need for air conditioning to keep the interior at a comfortable temperature, even during heatwaves. Urban planners are now unanimous. The Haussmannian city layout is a gem of common sense and balance: “building densely without creating anxiety-inducing concentrations, creating clear, identifiable public spaces that are identifiable and on a human scale, offering a high density of services distributed without creating congestion, allowing traffic to flow smoothly through a fairly fine urban grid without creating too many roads, and controlling heat loss from buildings through compact designs that nevertheless allow access to air and sunlight,” as the research reveals.
Today, as heat waves return, a few articles are appearing here and there extolling the virtues of traditional architecture. It all depends on what we mean by ‘traditional’: the press usually considers the term should exclusively belong to the Maghreb or to Africa—as if only the countries on the other side of the Mediterranean could boast of climate wisdom rooted in history.
But long before Haussmann, Western ingenuity produced a wealth of buildings adapted to the changing seasons. Monastery cloisters, for example, with their system of superimposed galleries and variations on the original Roman atrium model, perfectly meet the requirements of natural air circulation to stay cool in summer without being freezing in winter. Churches, with their thick stone walls, whose appeal is being rediscovered by municipalities in times of climate crisis, also offer havens of coolness: people linger there, feeling good and enjoying the semi-darkness and silence.
In this area, as in so many others, there is ancestral wisdom to be rediscovered. Cities attract and become congested in a frantic race for global connectivity. Towers are rising that are neither sustainable nor aesthetically pleasing. Meanwhile, villages are dying. Their small, cool, and welcoming houses are crowded around the square. They have stood there for centuries and are just waiting to last some more. If there is anything good to be gained from climate madness, it is to find our way back to them.
