Yazd Windcatcher Villa
A villa on the edge of Yazd that turns the traditional badgir into a contemporary natural-ventilation system with adjustable dampers and sensors.
Yazd’s summers routinely pass forty degrees, while desert nights stay cool, turning the daily temperature swing into a valuable resource. The client wanted a home that could be lived in for most of the year without air conditioning.
A windcatcher that thinks
The villa’s four-sided windcatcher is built of brick and lightweight concrete, and its timber dampers are opened and closed by small motors. Temperature and wind-direction sensors decide which face captures air and which exhausts warm air. Incoming air passes over a shallow basement pool before reaching the living room, dropping several degrees on the way.
Sixty-centimetre perimeter walls and low domed roofs store heat through the day and release it at night. A year of monitoring showed indoor temperatures never rose above thirty-one degrees during the hottest weeks of July.
