Architecture for Fermentation and vice versa.

Abstract

The climate change and the consequent rising temperatures are evident, and solutions that respect the environment, the society and economy are needed. Human population has raised until a point in which those solutions were designed to place humans in first position. A demonstration of this fact lies on our own home designs, they have been improved by knowledge donations from many disciplines, between them, architecture. Several passive-cooling techniques comes from this discipline and might help to enrich the portfolio of some others that will be affected by the same issue of temperatures. Fermentation is an ancient technique that has evolved until our days, and it means approximately 1/3 of our culinary diversity. Fermentation, like architecture, relies on the design of semi-isolated environments that facilitates certain kind of life: microscopic, macroscopic or both.  Assuming that the rising temperatures affects the stability of life, same rising-temperatures’ challenge is shared by both architecture and fermentation and the cross-contamination of passive cooling techniques in a multi, inter and even transdisciplinary way might create new solutions for both and many other disciplines. To this end, this review proposes as a hypothetical experimental model, the Iberian pork slaughterhouse, a space designed to host both human and microbial life, and which will therefore also be affected by the increase in temperature. Future studies are therefore proposed to test the hypotheses put forward in this review.