Happy to announce that I’ve been given seed funding from the Royal College of Art London RKE Research Development Fund to develop various aspects of the The Ecological Semiotics of Heat and Pollution in Athens/New Towers of Winds/Evaporative Cooling and Urban Air Conditioning research project that I have been developing in recent years with Aran Chadwick of Atelier One structural engineers, Rosa Shiano-Phan and Juan Vallejo from the University of Westminster. The seed funding is supporting design development with Atelier One to provide reliable costings for a 3 year prototyping programme, material fabric development and model testing with Flora McLean from fashion and textiles at RCA (and House of Flora), and to support the construction and testing of a pre-prototype this summer at the Latraac Skate Bar and Urban garden in Athens. All in support of a major funding application that we aim to submit to the AHRC in early 2025.
The prototype studies which we tested at Latraac through the last week of July 2024 were a great success, and we achieved cooling of the space below the fabric device of 10 degrees Celcius, using zero energy and only some water.
Many thanks in particular to the support of Dimitra Vlami, Zachos Varfis and Latraac, and the artist and writer James Bridle, who has supported the project and who joined us for a day to help to erect the octagonal second prototype and to test (pictured below).
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