Jun 21, 2026 · 58 min · 11 segments
Hannah Lucinda Smith and David Bodanis join Emma Nelson to go over the week’s news. We also hear from Tyler Brûlé in Athens and Petri Burtsoff on Finnish midsummer. See…
No entities detected.
David BodanisPanelistEmma NelsonHost
Tyler BrûléHannah Lucinda SmithPanelistPetri Burtsoff
Uh, there was a time when Turkey and Iran and the south of France were world leaders in air conditioning, but it was done in a natural way.
I lived for years in a little village in the south of France where the, uh, streets were so narrow there could be no cars, and they curved very slightly, and the walls were high.
I-In Iran, there were the famous wind towers that would scoop up air going in.
Uh, I don't know about Turkey, but I can imagine some of the older rural areas, uh, were incorporating that in their design.
I mean, what I will say is that the kind of modern Turkish design is not good for air conditioning, sort of concrete box.
But interestingly, I was in Morocco for Monocle last year, and I met an architect, very young architect, um, who'd set up a very quickly successful company taking inspiration from the old style of Moroccan houses, which basically look a bit like hobbit houses.
They're like these little domes, and what you do is you make sure that you position the doors and windows in the correct place.
And the genius of these houses is that they can cope with both extreme heat and extreme cold.
So you can be sort of In the sort of Moroccan desert and temperatures getting up to forty-five, fifty, and it-- the temperature inside these houses will still be twenty degrees lower throughout the day.
And then you can go up to the Atlas Mountains, do exactly the same thing, and you have temperatures twenty degrees higher.
So they really are, you know, if you want to get some inspiration for how we should be building now, probably look back to the traditional forms of building.
Tyler, how have the residents of Vouliagmeni adapted to the heat? What do their buildings look like?
But listen, uh, we're at that, [laughs] that edge of the, of the Aegean.
Uh, so there's a, there's a, a lot of, you know, new boxy shockers, and this is the one I don't understand.
Uh, there was a time when Turkey and Iran and the south of France were world leaders in air conditioning, but it was done in a natural way.
I lived for years in a little village in the south of France where the, uh, streets were so narrow there could be no cars, and they curved very slightly, and the walls were high.
I-In Iran, there were the famous wind towers that would scoop up air going in.
Uh, I don't know about Turkey, but I can imagine some of the older rural areas, uh, were incorporating that in their design.
I mean, what I will say is that the kind of modern Turkish design is not good for air conditioning, sort of concrete box.
But interestingly, I was in Morocco for Monocle last year, and I met an architect, very young architect, um, who'd set up a very quickly successful company taking inspiration from the old style of Moroccan houses, which basically look a bit like hobbit houses.
They're like these little domes, and what you do is you make sure that you position the doors and windows in the correct place.
And the genius of these houses is that they can cope with both extreme heat and extreme cold.
So you can be sort of In the sort of Moroccan desert and temperatures getting up to forty-five, fifty, and it-- the temperature inside these houses will still be twenty degrees lower throughout the day.
And then you can go up to the Atlas Mountains, do exactly the same thing, and you have temperatures twenty degrees higher.
So they really are, you know, if you want to get some inspiration for how we should be building now, probably look back to the traditional forms of building.
Tyler, how have the residents of Vouliagmeni adapted to the heat? What do their buildings look like?
But listen, uh, we're at that, [laughs] that edge of the, of the Aegean.
Uh, so there's a, there's a, a lot of, you know, new boxy shockers, and this is the one I don't understand.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.