Watercolour and crayon
©2017 Charlene Brown
According to Wikipedia, windtowers, or windcatchers, are traditional Persian architectural elements providing natural ventilation by catching the wind from any direction and directing it down into the building. Windcatchers can be found in traditional Persian-influenced architecture throughout the Middle East, including the Gulf Arab states, especially Dubai. That is where I first saw them.
According to the World Bank, Dubai is one of the largest consumers of energy per capita in the world – and in the summer months an estimated two thirds of that is used for air conditioning. There has been some hopeful theorizing that the windtower concept could be integrated into new buildings there and this might make a meaningful reduction in their “AC addiction.”
The Carbon Almanac was published in July of 2022. Several hundred of us worked on this project (you’ll find me at the beginning of the eleventh row at Meet the people behind the Carbon Almanac.)
Since the publication of the Carbon Almanac, I have received updates about the on-going world-wide campaign to avoid climate disaster by reducing carbon emissions in every way possible. The October 12 Carbon Almanac update quoted a story from the BBC program, Future Planet: The Ancient Persian way to keep cool, “From ancient Egypt to the Persian Empire, an ingenious method of catching the breeze kept people cool for millennia. In the search for emissions-free cooling, the "wind catcher" could once again come to our aid.”
The Future Planet story used the Iranian city of Yazd, as I did in the above story, excerpted from a blog post I wrote in June 2017 following a trip to Iran with the art travel program of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
