Lovely

STICKS & STONES visits Sydney:

....Contemporary Australian architects do a good job of harnessing the ever-present breezes to cool and ventilate. This works at the medium scale at which most designers seem comfortable here. Tilted overhanging roofs vent built-up heat and cast welcome shade. Louvers are the subject of intense design attention: inside or out? Metal or wood? Thick and meaty or light and ephemeral? Louvers cover the entire surface of one apartment block I saw. The building comes alive as residents tilt, swivel, fold up, and retract their slotted walls. Suiting their own preferences, they create an architectural anemone, its tendrils waving in the passing breeze.

There’s no rocket science in this, but this architecture of sun protection makes buildings wonderfully habitable. There is frequently a rich range of thresholds between outdoors, fully open to the sun, and the innermost realms of a house, where you are completely enfolded by walls and, perhaps, air conditioning. You use these spaces differently at different seasons and times of day. It dispirits me to think that in far wealthier America it is a radical notion not to build a box in the sun clad in stucco and tinted glass, with a box on top pumping in air-conditioning tonnage.