How This Desert City Stays Cool With An Ancient Air Conditioning System

This is a Bâdgir an ancient air conditioner invented around the eighth century AD.

Despite using no electricity, it has a cooling system that kept houses at a pleasant temperature during the hot summer months. However in the winter the buildings still remained warm and comfortable. These buildings are found across Iran but they are most prevalent in the ancient city of Yazd.

As you can see this city is surrounded by extremely dry arid desert conditions, the climate is pretty extreme with the hottest month being July which has an average temperature of around 38c or 102°F and the highest recorded temperature in the city was a whopping 46°C that's 115°F, There is also little to no rainfall throughout the year, with the average annual rainfall being somewhere between 0.4 – 0.7 mm.

Its crazy to think even today most building do not have modern air-conditioning but instead they still rely on the ancient air-conditioning systems this is because unlike powered air-conditioning and fans, Badgirs are silent and continue to function when the electrical grid power fails.

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[fourex]

It would have been nice to include some inside temperatures of the buildings to see how effective this technique is cooling the building.

[regndeer]

techniques like this aren't just good for keeping things cost effective and environmentally friendly. by practicing them, we can keep and pass down their designs. when advanced technology fails, we always fall back on older and simpler designs like this. it's always important to preserve ancient analog designs.

[asseenontv-ch]

Don't know if it's still there, but Coconut Grove (surrounded by Miami Florida) had a small shopping mall open at both ends built as a wind catcher with cascading water fountains at each end that caught and cooled the wind, making it nice and breezy and cool even when it was over 100F degrees outside.

[charlesunderwood]

I have stayed in places in the Moroccan desert when it is 40 degrees and never need to use the AC because of the excellent building design, that has remained essentially unchanged for over 2000 years. Why are people in the southern US not building riad/villa style building designed to stay cool?

[newtoncooper]

Old houses in the U.S. are made with heavy timber, wide overhanging eaves, 10- 12 foot ceilings, large floor to ceiling windows, which are opened at night and closed before the heat of the day builds. This works great. Now we build with light timber, narrow or no eaves, small windows and an AC unit, running constantly, despite all the toxic foam insulation and plastic wrap.

[gabetalks]

Modern arrogance has blinded us to the fact that the ancients were far more advanced than us in so many ways. We still marvel at their creations, yet still have the audacity to look down upon them.

Edit: I'm not saying that this modern age is primitive. What I'm saying is that the ancients weren't the ignorant fools many people think they were. Obviously humanity has continued to progress tremendously, but still, a lot of the discoveries and advancements we make today are just us re-learning what the ancients already knew.

[LisaApril]

Every time I see something ancient people have built I see they have Far exceeded us without destroying the planet.

[AhJodie]

This is a brilliant concept that we need to continue using rather than waste energy on air conditioning.

[spacelemur]

An ancient solution that has become modern again. ❤

[rjung_ch]

👍💪✌
Anything that can be done without power of any sorts is a winner. Imagine living in such arid hot areas, how else would that have been possible, without such bright ideas?

[movie]

My parents are from Yazd. Badgir are very helpful, but many houses also use fans as wells as air conditioning.

[aurorajones]

0:38 We need this in AZ where our highest temps have been in the 120F. All we have are A/C units buzzing away and the city itself magnifies the heat with a heat island effect negating any temp loss at night resulting in 102 being your coldest part of the morning at 5am. Insane.

[Dina]

Truly amazing this ancient air conditioning system. The ancients were more advanced than we thought.

[imaginative-monkey]

For curious people information, Badgir literally means wind-catcher. Baad (rhymes with mud) means wind and geer (rhymes with gear) is the short form of geerandeh, which
means catcher.

[yahyabokula]

This is amazing. As a HVAC engineer this is such a genius feat to come across. It looks like a VRF. Im highly amazed

[melvin]

Beautiful !! Wonderful !!
And.. works very well with adobe, I'm sure.
Myself, I'm building a village for my children.
Here in the desert southwest, United States, adobe building is an all but lost technique.
I've had to learn it from scratch.
Thank you for the inspiration!
Wow! Just what I've imagined.
Thank you.

[piccalillipit]

*I LIVE IN A COMMUNIST* era apartment block in Bulgaria - we have a wind catcher on the roof.

It pressurises a column of air down to the underground basement and back up a central riser in the bathroom where we have a vent that blows cold air out all summer. Its extremely effective - the bathroom is also a fire safety cell as it has positive pressure fresh air and 20cm thick concrete walls [NO the communists were not thick and backwards as we were told in the west]

[alixp]

That is unbelievably awesome!!!! And they wanted us so dependant and so greedy using electric companies!!

[gochuckyourself-yfrz]

Yeah we used to have those in older schools in the United States back before we installed air conditioners we had big vents on the top of the school buildings but when we got air conditioning they were removed .

[YNomadicDusk]

Definitely a great thought to bring forward to modern architecture! I love seeing stuff like this! This is the stuff we need to be examining to adapt to our warming climate.