Heat Waves in Europe: Rediscovering the Cooling Wisdom of Traditional Design
5th July 2025
Heat waves in Western Europe are occurring earlier and earlier. They are no longer confined to July and August but now spill over into June and September. The ‘energy transition’ is seen as the universal remedy for ‘global warming’: with the help of heavily subsidised programmes, the aim is to imagine an ecologically correct future in which technology will lower the thermostat. In the meantime, mass housing is becoming unliveable, and children are baking in concrete schools where temperatures are reaching 40°C.
The unsuitability of homes and public buildings for the heat is the result of several decades of frenzied modernisation of the built environment in the years following the Second World War. As the countryside was being permanently depopulated, cities were surrounded by belts of low-rent buildings intended to house first the baby boomers and then, once that generation had passed, immigrants. These mass housing structures, built quickly using cheap materials, are now proving totally unsuited to rising temperatures.
And what about the public buildings that have sprung up in so many cities, built with glass and concrete? Libraries, community centres, administrative buildings, schools, and colleges have multiplied, with soulless, characterless architecture and materials that cannot withstand the test of time. Today, their ‘modernity’ is no longer attractive.
Sometimes the old ways are best.