Logan House

Naturally-ventilated, dogtrot style houses in the hot and humid climate of Florida are rapidly disappearing in the wake of air-conditioning. Simple strategies to promote natural ventilation are not to be forgotten. Designed to promote passive cooling, the Logan House in Tampa, Florida serves as a model to counter this trend through stack- and cross-ventilation. However, after  more than 15 years after construction (1981) we were curious if the house was still naturally ventilated, what the patterns of air movement and their resulting velocities. We conducted a series of studies over a three-year period bringing together students from 3 universities in the field. We also used scale model test date from a boundary layer wind tunnel at the University of California Berkeley and a bubble technique in a physical model at the University of Oregon. Our work resulted in several papers disseminated at the Passive Low Energy Architecture conference and several National Passive Solar Conferences.