Building — 4 min —
The north-facing myth
Imported design advice keeps arriving with its orientation upside down for this latitude.
A lot of the residential design guidance circulating in Kabul is translated from European sources, and it carries assumptions about sun and heat that do not survive the journey.
At this latitude, with this altitude and this sky clarity, south glazing is not a way of gathering scarce winter sun. It is the dominant heat load for eight months and the main heating source for four, and it needs to be designed for both — which means a calculated overhang, not a curtain.
An overhang sized to block the high summer sun and admit the low winter one is a single number, derived from the latitude, and it is the cheapest thermal intervention available. It is also almost never drawn.
