After warmly owning up to plans for stocking the Olympic Village in Paris, France, to the brim with condoms, the “green” housing for Olympians is almost complete. Mysteriously, they will be housed with no air conditioning in their buildings. Instead, they will be using some interesting, if not unbelievable, technology to keep the athletes and their rooms at an appropriate temperature.
Yann Krysinski is responsible for the infrastructure at the 2024 Olympic Games. “We designed these buildings so that they would be comfortable places to live in in the summer, in 2024 and later on, and we don’t need air conditioning in these buildings because we oriented the facades so that they wouldn’t get too much sun during the summer, and the facades, the insulation is really efficient.”
As Reuters uncovered, the rooms will still have cooling systems. Using circulated water in the floors, the rooms will be kept at cooler temperatures, but this is a relatively new technology, and not without its faults. With the summer games having a large concentration and requirement for terrific foot conditioning, the cold floors have the potential to cause problems on bare feet, especially if they malfunction. There are also concerns about the cold floors and wet feet from either a pool or a shower.
Built with the committee’s quest to have the smallest carbon footprint on record, they plan on housing roughly 6,000 Parisians after the games conclude with this housing. Given the record-breaking heat Paris saw last year and the 5,000 lives that went with it, this is a risky experiment to be undertaking during the Olympics.
