The Cooling of America

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house: Brrrrr!

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He proposes that heat pumps be employed to warm the building in winter, simultaneously making ice that will be stored in huge underground bunkers until sum mer, when it can be used to cool the structures without consuming electricity. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architectural firm renowned for its skyscrapers, is constructing an energy-efficient cube-shaped building for Draper and Kramer in Chicago that features three sunlit atriums. Architect Gunnar Birkerts' 14-story IBM building in Detroit is black on its north and east sides, to absorb heat, and silver on its south and west sides, to reflect it. A combination of tilted windows and curved stainless steel windowsill reflectors bounce natural light into the interior. The building requires only a mod erate 50 footcandles of artificial lighting and uses a thrifty 42,000 B.T.U.s of heat per sq. ft. per year (vs. up to 200,000 B.T.U.s for a glass-and-steel office building of similar size).

Perhaps most remarkable, considering recent taxpayer resistance to any expenditure at all for schools, the Boise school board accepted the most expensive ($3.1 million) of four designs for its Amity Elementary School. It uses solar panels to heat its hot water, but this is the least of its innovations. The greater part of the 26-room school is underground. Heating and lighting costs are about 60% of what would be expected for a conventional school of the same size. The kids seem to love what is now known as the "Idaho potato cellar."

And in New Hampshire, the countrified city man has thrown a day's accumulation of junk mail and the sports section of the Boston Globe, fine sources of energy, into his antique Glenwood woodburning cookstove, along with some dry birch kindling and some twelve-inch splits of coarse grained red oak. He has watched the ancient oven thermometer, as reliable as the day it was made 80 years ago, climb to 425° F. That's a little high. Fiddle with the damper. Now pop in three bread pans full of cracked-wheat dough.

The city man has been working out side, and his feet are cold. He takes off his boots, leans back in his chair, and props up his feet on the Glenwood's footrest. Yeast works in the bread and in the city man's mind. He decides to build a solar house. He's going to out-Dubin Dubin. Out-Butler Butler. When he's a very old man, too creaky to cut and split eight cords of wood a year, he's going to stay warm. Damn them all! −John Skow

*Which express numerically a material's ability to retard the flow of heat.

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