TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Foundations · AGE 13—16 · FACTUAL · DURABLE
Your site's climate is a dataset
A machine reads your site's weather file before you draw a line.
The idea
You feel the climate of a place: the afternoon heat, the wind off the sea, the rain in July. Weather stations have been recording the same things as numbers for decades — temperature, humidity, wind, sunshine — hour by hour. Put a year of those numbers in one file and you have a weather file. India's National Building Code uses records like these to sort the whole country into five climate zones: hot-dry, warm-humid, composite, temperate and cold. To a machine, your site's climate is that file of numbers.
Why it matters
Once climate is a file, a machine can read it before you draw a line. Every environmental tool on this map starts from that file.
See it in the studio
A tutor asks, "Which way does the hot wind come from on this site?" One student points the way they remember from the visit. Another opens the weather file for the nearest station and draws a wind rose. Both may be right. Only one can be checked.
Watch for this
Thinking the file is the site. A weather file comes from a station, often at an airport, kilometres away and in the open. Your plot sits in a lane, behind a wall, under a tree. Start from the file, then correct it for your plot.
Try it
Find the climate zone for your town under the National Building Code. Then find out where the nearest weather station is, and how far it is from your school. Write down one thing about your school's own microclimate that the station cannot know.
Prove it
Explain to a friend what a weather file holds, where the numbers come from, and one reason the numbers at your site might differ from it.
How it works
A typical weather file holds 8,760 rows — one for each hour of a year — with temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and solar radiation in each row. The common format is called EPW, and ISHRAE, the Indian society of heating and air-conditioning engineers, has published files of this kind for many Indian cities. Free tools such as Ladybug read them and draw sun paths, wind roses and comfort charts. India's National Building Code uses long-run records like these to place every town in one of its five climate zones, and the zone is the first thing a design should respond to. Later cards on this map — climate numbers, the surrogate, simulate-then-trust — run on exactly these files. A model that predicts your building's heat needs this data. Without it, it has nothing to work from.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.