Cooling Without Air Conditioning: Passive Design Lessons from Traditional Islamic Architecture

A fascinating lecture by our Visiting Research Fellow for Environment and Sustainability.

How did buildings stay cool before air conditioning?

This talk explores passive cooling strategies embedded in traditional Islamic architecture and asks what they can teach us about designing more comfortable and energy-efficient buildings today. Drawing on Rofayda's PhD research and archival work at the Library, this presentation explores architectural features such as the Mashrabiya, shading, ventilation, geometry, materials, evaporative cooling and how these traditional principles can be reinterpreted through contemporary research and design.

The talk will highlight how traditional architecture represents not simply a historical aesthetic, but a body of environmental knowledge developed in response to climate, materials, craft and human comfort.

This event is part of Green Libraries Week.

She is also a British Library Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow for Sustainability and Environment. She holds a PhD in Architecture and Environmental Design from the University of Westminster, where her doctoral research investigated how principles of the traditional Mashrabiya could be reinterpreted as a contemporary passive cooling system.

Her research combines traditional architectural knowledge with environmental analysis, computational simulation, material experimentation and full-scale testing. She has experience teaching environmental design and building performance simulation at undergraduate and postgraduate level and has presented her research internationally.