There are two kinds of people: those who prefer to be cold, and those who prefer to be hot. I am of the latter camp, and summer for me is the best time of year—not to sit in overly air-conditioned rooms but to be outdoors, or, as is more often the case, to appreciate the outside from indoors.
Like it or not, people around the world are increasingly dealing with being too hot. Temperatures to date are already high enough to give 2024 a good chance of breaking 2023’s record as the hottest year since global tracking began. No level of air-conditioning—arguably a cause of the problem—will fix that.
The August issue highlights buildings and spaces that smartly connect to nature, rather than turn their back to it. We start with the House of the Month in Brazil where, according to its architect, Arthur Casas, “it’s always summer,” and plant life and natural materials are focal points of the interiors.
Our Building Type Study is a celebration of the season in more ways than one. While we examine buildings designed for food, wine, and hospitality, those same buildings go a step further to integrate with the landscape, and tread lightly on it. We visit a winery in France that carefully deconstructs an existing hotel to reuse parts of it as a new production facility, utilizing traditional, and mainly passive, techniques to maintain all-too-important atmospheric conditions. A hotel complex in Belgium softens the harsh relationship between its coastal town and the sea wall. The round structure of a self-sustaining nature escape in Italy, featured on the cover, takes in the Alpine views from every direction, and accommodates an expansive solar array on its roof. Other projects tackle biophilic design and sustainable building on a smaller scale, whether incorporating greenery and daylight or employing prefabricated parts that can easily be disassembled and rebuilt elsewhere.
A new book by Pierluigi Serraino, AIA, The Modern Garden: The Outdoor Architecture of Mid-Century America, challenges the long-held assumption that architecture dominates the landscape. We have all lived or worked in that type of scenario: air-conditioned boxes, often with windows that are inoperable and where swaths of green are nonexistent. As how we live and work changes—I write this with a soft breeze and the sounds of birds chirping coming through a window—and we understand more deeply the impact of our buildings on the earth, let’s all focus on how architecture can have a more symbiotic relationship with its surroundings.
