Passive Air Cooling – It’s not Just for the Birds

Photo by Matthew Millman Photography

In 2007, Matarozzi Pelsinger Builders worked out of a loft-like industrial space in the Mission that lacked sufficient air flow on the handful of warm San Francisco days.  During those San Francisco “heat waves,” we had to haul out 6’ tall industrial fans in a feeble attempt to move the air. With the fans howling, it felt like working in an old airplane hangar with prop planes readying to taxi out to the runway. (more…)

Frank Lloyd Wright and the “Solar Hemicycle” (Jacobs II)

In 1943 Herbert and Katherine Jacobs, of Madison, Wisconsin, commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a home for them for the second time.  The first they had built in 1936, the design that became known as “Usonian I” (or Jacobs I), a home that featured low cost construction, an open interior plan, floor-to-ceiling living room glass, and a slab floor, as well as the first adaptation in the United States of radiant floor heating.  Today’s home styles owe much to this original concept.

(more…)