On Summer Heat

For as long as I remember I have enjoyed summer heat. For a long time I lived in a house that was like a cave in summer. It would be 30°c outdoors but 21 to 25°c indoors. It felt like stepping into a cave when I got home. For a summer or two I lived in a apartment on the 5th floor in Meyrin and during the 2003 summer heat wave I would open the windows on both sides of the building and get a nice draft.

For five years now I have lived in the rafters of an apartment building and it gets hot. I have an aranet 4 sensor in the bedroom and it indicated that the room is 27-30°c in the last two days. The paradox is that the outdoor air temperature was 17°c.

Playing With Air Flow

This morning I played around to see if I could cool the bedroom with the morning’s fresh air and failed. I got it from 28°c to 27°c before it stopped cooling down. I took a fan and tried to blow the hot air out of the apartment and it descended to 27.0. I then pointed the fan straight up at the ceiling to push out the hot air and that made things worse. It shot back up to 27.4°c.

Designed to Trap Heat

There are two problems. The first one is that the staircase and lift are entombed within the building. In summer heat from the apartments below makes its way into the structure and at a certain point the stairway becomes a heat reservoir. The bottom floors are cool, but the top floors are at 27°c or more.

The heat inertia is trapped within the concrete and tiles, so the building will not cool down until Autumn comes back. I don’t understand why a stairway within a building that goes from the basement to the top floor would not have some kind of vent to purge hot air. It would make sense that the stairway would have a velux or other window, to vent hot air naturally, and create a cooling draft during the summer months.

Noise Pollution and Air Pollution

The other problems are noise pollution. One summer the noise came from the rebuilding of a roof. For two or three years it came from people grinding metal to fix tractor parts. For five years there has also been the noise pollution from construction but more recently it has come from the gravière nearby. You hear the clanking of metal against stone, of vehicles backing and more. As I write this the noisy farmers are digging a ditch for some reason so there is even more noise than usual.

You also have the sound of people on balconies and in gardens talking, laughing and more, for hours at a time. The result, especially during pandemic isolation is that those noises were a form of psychological torture.

We then come to air pollution. It comes from people smoking, but also from the nearby pollution. Nitrous Oxide and ozone, especially during droughts and heatwaves gets especially bad. The result is that the fresh air, too, is not as fresh as it could be.

The Ordinary Habit

Whether it was at the Palais Wilson, an edit suite near Geneva, a house in one village, or an apartment in Meyrin I would open a window and the air would flow during the entire day. I would open the window in the morning, and close it in the evening. In a quiet village you can open windows when it’s cool outside and keep them open for the entire day. In a noisy village you keep them closed, due to noise pollution.

Mosquitos and Spiders

One of the reasons for which I don’t want to keep the veluxes open too often is that two or three times I have seen big spiders. I don’t mean small spiders with skinny legs. I mean big furry spiders. They usually appear at the start and end of summer, once the roof has become more livable again. My main concern with mosquitos is that they fly by your ear just at the moment when you want to sleep and keep you awake.

Office Saunas

When I worked in one building I had a cartoon of ice tea and an open window in the summer months and I was fine. In the Palais Wilson I worked on the ground floor right next to a tarmac road and my office/studio became a sauna. I found that if I kept the window open, and the office door open I got a fantastic, cooling draft. Normal people would have used a fan but I used differential air pressures. This made a huge difference to my level of comfort.

And Finally

In Geneva you have the constant noise of the city, so the background noise acts as white noise. In Meyrin despite the nearby airport planes are quieter than construction so you can open windows and be at peace for the entire day.

In a quiet village you hear the birds, and an occasional car. If there are works, metal work or other, suddenly the silence is broken regularly by the noise of that work. When you’re trying to focus, that noise is distracting. It’s that noise pollution that takes an apartment from being a comfortable liveable space into a stuffy and uncomfortable space.

Instead of opening a velux and a window I turn on a fan, for white noise, and to create a draft. Nature, in a quiet place, provides effective cooling. In a noisy space we need to improvise compromises. I miss living in a quiet place. In fact I miss living in a place where the background noise, masks the background noise, with white noise.

For most of my life I have loved the summer heat, but now that I can’t escape it, I suffer. I suffer from the noise pollution, which is why I suffer from the stuffy warm rooms. I think that’s why I love rain now.