private bank offices.
a regional bank branch on the dry pacific coast, redesigned so the façade carried the climate instead of the air-conditioning.
radiation reduction · postponed.
design completed, project postponed. headline metric to be confirmed on resumption.
what the climate asked for.
chitré is hot, dry, and bright, closer to a sahel climate than a wet panamanian one. the client's brief was a calm, daylit branch open to walk-in clients, which the earlier scheme had answered with a fully glazed perimeter and a 12-tonne chiller.
the work was to cut the cooling demand back to something a quieter system could hold, without losing the daylight or the openness that made the brief make sense.
how we worked the problem.
we modelled the radiation map on the existing scheme first, in three timeslots across the year. west and south were the loudest surfaces. the section was redrawn around a perforated breezeblock screen that admitted ventilated daylight while breaking the direct flux by a measurable factor of two.
the screen is local, cast on site, and reads as carved stone from outside, but the reason it exists is in the simulation, not the mood board.
each move contributes incrementally.
performance is not one heroic intervention. it is the small decisions, added up. each row below is a number the model produced.
the façade does most of the cooling, quietly.