6.25.Hungary-3-detail-g Highlights Relevant to Sustainable Design:
Geothermal applications have multiple advantages.
Along the bottom of the sketchbook, you will see what appear to be small houses. They are actually pince, pronounced “pin-sir,” or wine storage houses. The houses are only the front of much larger structures and storage processes. Each one is merely a door with one room for tasting, and then the wine cellar extends back into the hillside, sometimes as far as a hundred feet. By extending into the hill, the tunnellike cellars take advantage of the cool and constant ground temperature below the freezing point of the frost line. The underground space is always about fifty to fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the latitude, as long as it is at least three and a half to five feet below the ground surface. Indigenous people around the world have taken advantage of this free and constant temperature well before air-conditioning and heating. The passive geothermal advantage, in this case, keeps the wine at the right temperature year-round.
The greatest thing about the pince is that if you knock on one of the doors and the winemaker happens to be inside, he will gladly sit you down and proudly serve you a taste of his wine. We had quite a few lunches in the pince rows scattered around the wine country. The hillside behind the cellars has a few clustered trees, and I drew them like balls in the style of medieval etchings.
Author and illustrator: Charlie Szoradi is an architect, inventor, and the CEO of Independence LED Lighting. He writes about many other topics related to passive geothermal heating and cooling through his extensive travels around the world.
If you have found this posting online, it is an excerpt from Mr. Szoradi’s book Learn from Looking that served as the inspiring seed content for this drawing share resource. For additional drawings and insights on interior climate control and passive geothermal, we hope that you enjoy exploring LearnfromLooking.com. You can search via general terms such as sustainability as well as narrower terms such as passive geothermal, passive solar, and HVAC.
