Buildings increasingly rely on energy-intensive mechanical systems to maintain comfortable indoor climates. As global temperatures rise, cooling has become one of the fastest-growing sources of energy consumption.
Passive Cooling explores how ceramic materials can actively participate in regulating environmental conditions through their intrinsic material behaviour and spatial organisation. The project reimagines architecture not as a static enclosure but as an environmental system that works with natural processes rather than against them.
INVESTIGATION
Passive Cooling investigates how silicate materials can become active environmental agents within climate-responsive architecture.
The research combines two interconnected fields of investigation. The first develops porous ceramic materials derived from industrial by-products, construction and demolition waste, geological resources and other silicate-based material streams. The second explores how geometry, fabrication and spatial organisation can amplify the environmental performance of these materials through airflow, water retention, evaporation, shading and thermal exchange.
The investigation therefore operates simultaneously at the scale of material and architecture.
Material Development
The investigation develops porous ceramic systems from a wide range of silicate resources, including industrial by-products, construction and demolition waste, mineral residues, discarded ceramics, glass waste and bio-based additives.
Rather than focusing on a single material, the research investigates how different silicate resources can acquire new environmental functions through transformation.
Material composition becomes one variable within a broader environmental system.