Sustainability · March 2026 · 8 min read

Passivefirst

Comfort in most of India can be reached for long stretches of the year without mechanical cooling, if the building is designed for it from the first sketch rather than corrected for it at the end.

By Ruthwik, Partner · Architect & Urban Designer

Passive first

Design the section, not just the plan

Orientation, depth of overhang, height of opening and path of air decide whether a room is comfortable before any equipment is switched on. These are section decisions, and they are almost free at the sketch stage and almost impossible to retrofit.

We test massing for shade and airflow first, then size mechanical systems for the residual hours that passive measures cannot cover. The result is smaller plant, lower running costs, and a building that stays usable when the power does not.

Machinery as the exception

Air-conditioning is not the enemy; unexamined air-conditioning is. When cooling is treated as the default rather than the exception, buildings are sealed, deepened and glazed in ways that then require the very machinery that justified them.

Reversing the order, passive first and machinery for the remainder, tends to shrink every downstream number: connected load, tariff, embodied carbon of the plant, and the maintenance burden handed to the client.

Takeaways

  • Passive comfort is a section problem, solved at sketch stage.
  • Size mechanical systems for the residual hours, not the peak fantasy.
  • Smaller plant lowers load, cost, carbon and maintenance together.

Next in the journal

Material honesty