Collective Comfort explores the potential for a new, integrated approach to community cooling. This exhibit envisions cooling centers not merely as air-conditioned spaces but as hubs of collective comfort that prioritize resilience through social engagement and collective bodily joy. In rethinking these spaces, these design prototypes examine how architecture can foster environments that don’t merely cool but actively bring people together. Drawing inspiration from ancient desert civilizations, where communal interaction and sensory pleasure were crucial, the exhibition reconsiders how design can promote both thermal comfort and community well-being.
Moving away from the homogeneity of standardized cooling, these designs allow for a range of thermal experiences, inviting visitors to explore how diverse spaces can serve distinct programs. At the heart of this approach is a challenge to the reliance on fossil-fuel-based, single-family home cooling, proposing instead a shift toward collective resilience. Through these spaces, neighborhoods can redefine comfort and deepen their understanding of climate adaptation—creating cooling centers that serve as pillars of social resilience. Through detailed design studies, spatial frameworks, and material prototypes focused on the Phoenix Metro Area, Collective Comfort offers new visions for resilience as part of the cultural and physical landscape.
Today, nightime temperatures no longer drop significantly enough to enable such intelligent and low energy, passive material strategies. A high volume of concrete and asphalt in desert cities creates an urban heat island effect where sidewalks, parking lots and streets radiate the heat they have collected during the day off at night. With little to no night time cooling available in desert cities, can the material intelligence of thermal mass, stack ventilation and energy storage still be harnessed to prevent buildings from overheating? Designers need to update how we build with thermal mass to engage with contemporary construction methods, industries, and trends of hot nightime temperatures in a changed desert climate. The exhibit displays three full-scale building portions or prototypes for incorporating these ancient and intelligent material technologies into contemporary construction methods.