College of Environmental Design

The unbuilt proposals for the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair offer a cross section of designs put before the public in a formative moment just before modernism came to dominate architectural discourse and production. Projects by luminaries Bernard Maybeck and Richard Neutra joined projects by Joseph Strauss and Henry Killam Murphy. Here were architectural hopefuls at the nadir of the Great Depression attempting to draw their way into the commission of a lifetime. Thus, a Beaux-Arts bohemian competed with a sincere modernist, a self-promoting engineer, and America's leading practitioner in China. At the same time, the proposals were part of the larger economic and political landscape of San Francisco, as neighborhood associations and politicians used them to attract the fair to their part of the city. More than pie in the sky, these designs show in amplified form the way architecture is embedded in public discourse as a form of persuasion, a kind of politics by other means through which elites and other stakeholders argued for their preferred reality. As tools of intra-urban boosterism, these plans reveal the competing interests within San Francisco at a pivotal moment in its development, when its future lay in the formation of a regional metropolis that could compete with Los Angeles for commerce on the West Coast and beyond.

Sleep is a pillar of human health and wellbeing. In high- and middle-income countries, there is a great reliance on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems (HVAC) to control the interior thermal environment in the bedroom. However, these systems are expensive to buy, maintain, and operate while being energy and environmentally intensive-problems that may increase due to climate change. Easily-accessible passive and low-energy strategies, such as fans and electrical heated blankets, address these challenges but their comparative effectiveness for providing comfort in sleep environments has not been studied. We used a thermal manikin to experimentally show that many passive and low-energy strategies are highly effective in supplementing or replacing HVAC systems during sleep. Using passive strategies in combination with low-energy strategies that elevate air movement like ceiling or pedestal fans enhances the cooling effect by three times compared to using fans alone. We extrapolated our experimental findings to estimate heating and cooling effects in two historical case studies: the 2015 Pakistan heat wave and the 2021 Texas power crisis. Passive and low-energy strategies reduced sleep-time heat or cold exposure by 69-91%. The low-energy strategies we tested require one to two orders of magnitude less energy than HVAC systems, and the passive strategies require no energy input. These strategies can also help reduce peak load surges and total energy demand in extreme temperature events. This reduces the need for utility load shedding, which can put individuals at risk of hazardous heat or cold exposure. Our results may serve as a starting point for evidence-based public health guidelines on how individuals can sleep better during heat waves and cold snaps without relying on HVAC.