Namita Bhandare in Mint:
Every summer of my childhood, my mother and aunt would gather together my cousins and me and take the train from Bombay (it was not yet Mumbai) to Kanpur where my grandmother lived. I don’t think there was any air-conditioned travel by train then-or if there was, we certainly didn’t opt for it-so at some point during the 24-hour, hot and dusty journey, we’d rent a great big block of ice which would be placed in a metal container. This “cooling device” would pretty much take up the entire compartment. I don’t believe it worked at all, at least not in dramatically bringing down the temperature. What it did do instead was create a huge puddle as the ice melted and invariably found its way out of the leaky container. And, yes, it gave us the opportunity to invent fantastic games-who could keep their feet on the ice longest-while our mothers gossiped away, oblivious to the factthat their childrenwere getting frostbitten toes.
Memories of those hot summer days came back to me as I read architect Aditya Dev Sood’s column, My Experiments with Cooling, on the website 3QuarksDaily. Sood writes about the loss of traditional architectural features-central courtyards and chajjas (horizontal projections off windows from which you could hang chicks or place plants) that were designed to facilitate coolness within Indian homes.
It is true that contemporary architecture with its glass and concrete facade is climate-inappropriate. Features designed to create cooler homes seem to have disappeared-the central aangan (or courtyard) that Sood refers to, where the radiating heat generated by the walls would rise up and out of homes. More:
