About Us
Developing climate-adaptive architecture in warming climates through collaboration, practice and monitoring.
Our Mission
The ARC 'Cool Buildings' programme addresses the pressing challenge of achieving thermal comfort in hot and humid climates. It focuses on developing, testing, and disseminating innovative passive cooling solutions that are affordable, sustainable, and adaptable to local needs. ARC is a team of volunteers led by Andrew Simmonds of Simmonds Mills, a UK-based architectural R&D firm, in partnership with the Al-Mizan Children's Ecovillage in Tanzania, which serves as the first of several ARC-initiated field-testing R&D sites in Africa and Asia. The Ecovillage management and staff provide ARC with facilities and collaborative capacity, acting as a hub for exemplar-building demonstration, community engagement, creative problem solving, knowledge and solutions dissemination.
Who We Serve
The project specifically targets two key markets: lower-income self-builders, who require affordable and accessible solutions to improve housing quality, and higher-income managed self-builders, who demand passive cooling innovations that can be integrated with modern building standards. By addressing the distinct needs of these market segments, the project ensures scalability and adoption across a wide socioeconomic spectrum.
Our Approach
By integrating robust R&D with community engagement, ARC is supporting innovative and scalable pathways to improve thermal comfort in buildings in hot and humid climates, addressing both immediate needs and long-term sustainability goals for people living in environmentally and socio-economically challenging regions. ARC solutions aim to create cool, comfortable indoor environments without the immediate need for mechanical cooling and dehumidification equipment.
Future-Proofing
As global temperatures rise and climate-vulnerable countries face increasing extreme heat and intense rainfall events, there will inevitably come a point when passive cooling alone may no longer suffice. Recognising this, our approach is to future-proof designs to allow for easier retrofit of energy-efficient mechanical cooling and dehumidification systems. This ensures that buildings designed today will not only meet the immediate needs of their occupants but also remain adaptable to future climate conditions. The solutions developed will integrate with modern mechanical systems to minimise energy consumption and operational costs, avoiding the common problem of retrofitted buildings consuming unsustainable amounts of energy.