Before air conditioning and central heating, a house had one job above all others, which was to make the local weather bearable. In Canada’s Central Arctic that meant snow blocks. In the deserts of central Iran it meant towers that catch the wind. Put the two side by side and you can practically read the climate off the walls.
Here are ten home types from around the world, each shaped by heat, cold, snow, flood or scarcity, and each with one detail that tells you exactly what problem it was solving. We cut a few from the usual list (the condo and the patio home had nothing to say about weather).
Built against the cold
The igloo, Canadian Arctic and Greenland. Snow is mostly trapped air, which makes it a surprisingly good insulator. Traditionally igloos were built only by Inuit of Canada’s Central Arctic and the Qaanaaq area of Greenland. With the outside air at minus 45°C, body heat alone could keep the inside somewhere between minus 7 and 16°C. The clever part is the floor plan. Cold air sinks and pools in the low entrance, while people sleep on a raised platform where the warmth gathers. A house that sorts air by temperature, made from the weather itself!
The turf house, Iceland. Iceland was about 30 percent forested at settlement, mostly birch, and good timber was scarce. Turf was everywhere. So Icelanders built a light wooden frame and wrapped it in thick walls and roofs of cut sod, which insulated far better than wood or stone alone. One version, the gabled burstabær, lasted well into the twentieth century before corrugated iron and concrete replaced it. We’ve written more about them in The Magic of Icelandic Turf Houses.
The log house, Finland and Scandinavia. The cold north had tall, straight pine and spruce in quantity, and solid wood holds heat better than a thin frame covered in skins or boards. Finnish builders refined it from round logs with a smoke hole to squared logs locked together with double notches, with moss pressed into the joints. Some historians credit Finnish and Swedish settlers in the colony of New Sweden with building the first log cabins in North America in the 1600s, and the form went on to define the American frontier.
The gassho-zukuri farmhouse, Japan. In the mountain villages of Shirakawa-go and Gokayama, snow piles deep every winter. The answer was a thatched roof so steep it reminded people of hands pressed together in prayer, which is what gassho-zukuri means. The roofs are built without nails and shed snow rather than holding it. Inside, the tall roof created a big attic where families raised silkworms. Some of the houses are more than 250 years old, and the villages became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.
Built against the heat
The courtyard house and windcatcher, Yazd, Iran. Yazd sits in the desert, and its skyline is punctuated by tall towers called windcatchers. Wind pressure pushes air down one side and suction pulls it out the other, and in still air the tower works as a chimney. Some designs draw air through a qanat, an underground water channel, cooling it before it rises through the house. Add thick earthen walls and shaded courtyards and you get a livable microclimate in an arid place. UNESCO listed the historic city in 2017. If we could see only one city on this list, it would be Yazd.
The pit house, Matmata, Tunisia. Here the Berber solution was to go down. Builders dug a large round pit into the ground, then carved rooms into its walls, with some homes linking several pits by trench-like passages. You may already know one without realizing it. The Hotel Sidi Idriss played Luke Skywalker’s childhood home in Star Wars, filmed there in 1976!
Built for rain and flood
The rumah gadang, West Sumatra. The Minangkabau longhouse stands on wooden piles that can lift it up to three meters off the ground, clear of wet earth. Its roof sweeps up into sharp horn-shaped points called gonjong, said to recall buffalo horns. The detail we love has nothing to do with weather: the house belongs to the women who live in it and passes from mother to daughter.
The Queenslander, Australia. Raised on timber stumps, the Queenslander lets air move under the floor, lets floodwater run beneath it and keeps termites away from the timber (metal “ant caps” on the stumps help). A wide veranda shades the rooms, and a steep corrugated iron roof sheds tropical downpours. The style emerged in the 1840s. Honest footnote: the underfloor space mainly cools houses in northern Queensland, and some Queenslanders end up hotter for it.
Built for the sun, then exported
The bungalow, Bengal and everywhere after. The word comes from the Bengali bangla, meaning a house in the Bengal style, a low single-storey dwelling with deep verandas against the sun. The British took the idea home and then around the world. England’s first houses called bungalows went up at Westgate-on-Sea around 1869, and in the United States the form peaked between 1900 and 1918, sold as precut kits through the Sears mail-order catalog. By then it had drifted far from its climate. A veranda made for the Bengal heat ended up as a porch in Ohio.
The ger, Mongolia. We’ll end with the one that moves. A Mongolian ger is a collapsible lattice wall, bent roof poles and a wooden crown ring called the toono, wrapped in felt made from the wool of the family’s own sheep. It goes up or comes down in somewhere between half an hour and three hours, which is the whole point for herders following pasture. And it hasn’t gone away. About 62 percent of Ulaanbaatar’s population lives in ger districts on the city’s edges, though fewer than half of those residents actually live in a ger.
Most of these forms are fading, and some of their virtues were romanticized along the way. But each one was worked out over generations by people who couldn’t afford to get it wrong. For more buildings that earn their place, start with our guide to the most extraordinary buildings or wander the architecture archive.
