Tag: urban heat island

  • Making Kypseli Cooler!

    Last week we had the first public event at the Rheomode Athens studio-workshop space at Skyrou 19. With an art installation permit from the Municipality of Athens we occupied a car-parking space on the street outside of the Rheomode space, and – with the enthusiastic support of our neighbors – erected a small 6m high iteration of our pre-prototype evaporative cooling structure. This was our first public testing in Kypseli, following a series of prototypes that we erected and tested in the Latraac Bar and Urban Garden in July 2024, and an exhibition of our work at the Venice Architecture Bienalle 2025.

    The installation was a great success, collecting important new data and with lots of enthusiastic engagement from our neighbors, passers-by and children who especially enjoyed the misty-rain calibration. That day the ambient temperature was mid thirties Celsius and we consistently achieved around 5-7 degrees cooling – sometimes more – right up until midnight when we finally demounted the installation with the help of locals.

    Inside we screened the two films that we made (with Gemma Riggs and Linn Phyllis Seeger) for the Venice Biennale 2025.

  • ‘Urban Evaporative Cooling and the Ecological Semiotics of Heat and Pollution in Athens’ research-in-progress to be exhibited at Venice Biennale 2025

    Very happy to announce, after several months of discussions, that our work on evaporative cooling, heat and pollution in Athens, will be exhibited at this year’s Venice Biennale.

    The curator Carlo Ratti has set the theme Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., which connects well with the ‘eco-mental’ and semiotic framing I have given our broader urban evaporative cooling research…

    The curators asked if it was possible to construct a full scale tower, which would have been amazing, but which would not have worked well without complete reimagining, as Venice is already evaporatively cooled by the canals and lagoon!

    Instead, we are enjoying working on a two screen film installation piece which will be presented in the ‘Artificial Intelligens’ section, in the Corderie building of the Arsenale, in one of the curator Carlo Ratti’s main curated spaces on ‘Intelligens’.

    The core project team is myself as Project Lead and P-I (at both RCA and Rheomode, where Dimitra Vlami is helping to project manage), Aran Chadwick from Atelier One structural engineers, Flora McLean, also from RCA (Fashion and textiles), and Rosa Schiano-Phan and Juan Vallejo from University of Westminster. In addition we are working collaboratively with the filmmakers Gemma Riggs and Linn Phyllis Seeger on producing material for the installation and online.

    Many thanks to the Royal College of Art – both the Research Office and the School of Architecture in particular – for supporting this project, and to the University of Westminster and Atelier One for additional support.

    Many thanks also to the support of local allies such as Latraac Skate Bar and Urban Garden and Zachos Varfis, artist-writer James Bridle, the Municipality of Athen Heat Officer Elissavet Bargianni and UN Habitat Heat Officer Eleni Myrivili.

    Filmed at Latraac Athens during pre-prototype testing July 2024

  • RCA research fund award for The Ecological Semiotics of Heat and Pollution in Athens!

    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).

  • The Ecological Semiotics of Heat and Pollution in Athens

    I had the pleasure of being invited to participate as a guest researcher, contributing to the joint Chair of Sustainable Urbanism at TU Munich and NTUA Polytechnic Athens project on the transformation of urban landscapes led by Norbert Kling, Tasos Roidis and Mark Michaeli, which was supported by a three year grant from the Schwartz Foundation from 2020. We had a series of great workshops with a great team of core and guest researchers, and which resulted in the publication of the excellent book ‘Taking Action: Transforming Athens’ Urban Landscapes’, published by Jovis in 2023.

    The book can be purchased as a hardcopy or downloaded for free as a PDF, following the link here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783986120139/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOoq7Typpq9Zb4i2smndAheBGoBJ6NAIwUR3tBaWLcWR1fc7nbWqV

    In my chapter in the book, PDF below, I bring together a few of my research strands… firstly, I try to use my understanding of Greory Bateson’s ecological aesthetics and ecology of mind , to frame thinking about our environments as our extended unconscious… our extended eco-mental systems, or extended mind. I take on the concrete case of the contemporary city of Athens in Greece, and its various conditions and pathologies (in particular urban heat island and pollution island effects), and use my recent work on what I’ve described as ‘The Two Orders of The Three Ecologies’, as well as more Marxian and climate and environmental justice rooted approaches to looking at the city. Finally I bring in my longstanding and ongoing work (with a shifting collective team of co-researchers) looking at the possibility for a new kind of urban air conditioning ‘collective equipment’ using passive energy evaporative cooling devices.

    10.1515_9783986120139 (1) (dragged)Download