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Comment by asciimov | Hacker News Reader

As a Texan, who has spent a good chuck of their life in the Panhandle and west Texas:

So far I have only made it through half of this, but it is clear this person has not ever spent any amount of time on a farm or a ranch or in any part of Texas (west or not).

Food production is smelly and dirty. You don't want to live upwind of a gin or feed lot. In west Texas you don't build high because of wind. For such an arid place they sure are banking on having access to a shit ton of water.

There is a huge aquifer that most of the places out on the High Plains of Texas pump from. It's use is contentious, but your not going to be surviving off of a 3 acre playa lake.

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I agree with you.

Upon reaching the following line, I laughed out loud. This is utopian social planning at its least realistic:

“There will be an urge to build each home optimized for air conditioning. Don’t. All buildings must be useful and livable even with the power cut. Hence, natural ventilation, strategically designed windows that open, etc. is necessary. Obviously you can add AC (Air conditioner) on top of that, but in no way should the town be dependent on AC.”

Anyone who has never been to West Texas should check the weather today in some subset of {Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, Pecos, San Angelo, El Paso, Alpine}. (Some are nice and some are not!) If you can work inside all day with your house that temperature... good for you, but I cannot. And nearly every house in all of those places is air conditioned.

Better yet! Visit the Great State of Texas and take a walk of three blocks or more outside in a city during the heat of the day in June, July or August and report back on how much you liked it...

I know of a few people that live in dugouts in west texas.

One of them has had the property in their family for generations. They say that it stays relatively cool during the summertime and warm in the winter.

I'm in Austin and I one of the reasons public transportation struggles is that for several months every year, it's too hot to even sit at a bus stop, let alone walk to or from one unless you have a shower available at your destination.

Singapore has some air conditioned bus stops.

Chennai in India has some too, but the ACs usually don't work and the bus stops are covered by glass. So it becomes a very hot greenhouse.

I think junkies would be tearing out the copper tubing from those on day 2.

I don't think we should be surprised that buildings not designed for deserts perform poorly in extreme desert climates. The solution is to build structures that take the climate into account. Indigenous and Spanish colonial architects didn't have the luxury of designing around AC, so they built houses that reflected that limitation. Those houses remained quite livable without AC even during severe heat waves. A little active cooling on top makes them perfect.

Some historic cities (e.g. Marrakech and Ures) have designed the entire urban landscape to improve the outdoor situation as well. Dense corridors of high thermal mass buildings create shade, fountains and other water sources provide active cooling, and so on.

West Texas has highs several degrees higher than central Spain, which is the small difference between unpleasant and deadly.

November? Not about design. It's about execution. To build those types of hand built buildings today, without the workforce to do so, and pass modern inspections? Good luck.

Houses like that are still being built and passing inspections today, mostly in NM. I realize that technologies requiring actual builder expertise (because they're uncommon) and a minimal level of competent, individualized design are out of reach for the majority of the market, but it's not some inaccessible future tech.

It's not that past generations had some special knowledge on building structures that we have forgotten, but they were doing the best they could with the materials they had at the time.

Lot's of adobe buildings were made by the indigenous people as that's about all they had, mud and clay. Mud and clay are terrible insulators, they retain heat extremely well, which is why they are great for pizza ovens.

In the arid parts of Texas evaporative cooling works really really well but requires a decent supply of water. I've never seen people use solar chimneys in these parts but those older generations could have done it with their technology, as long as they had a source of cool air to pull from.

The low R-value is why the Southwest Thermal Mass Study was done, because adobe was anomalously effective considering how badly it insulates. It's well-suited to the environment and relatively cheap. It also wasn't limited to the Americas.

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