Historic Practices of Ventilative Cooling: A Case Study on the House of Parliament, 1836–1966

Ventilative cooling is a concern of contemporary practice, but research into the design of historic buildings has illustrate that the use of ventilation for cooling has been a much more longstanding practice. It was widely utilised in public buildings throughout nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, often in conjunction with other historic techniques. This chapter provides a critical examination of ventilative cooling as a historic practice, using the House of Lords as case study. This provides a setting where the challenges of cooling buildings before the introduction of mechanical refrigeration and air conditioning can be studied. Inside the two debating chambers ventilation was utilised for cooling purpose in three different ways. In addition to (1) reducing the indoor air temperature, ventilation was utilized to (2) harness the cooling effect of air movement, (3) and also to cool the architectural fabric, following the principal of night-purge ventilation. Focusing on the period from 1835 until 1950 and taking a realist perspective this chapter re-examines the experience and knowledge that users, scientific researchers and technical staff had acquired, illuminating the practical challenges of achieving thermal comfort through ventilative cooling, covering both mechanical and natural methods. This shows that historic practices not only engaged with the technological but also managerial and user-experience perspectives.