In the Northeast, there is a long tradition of spending time at a summer camp or cabin. If you’re lucky, you may have enjoyed the connection with nature that a minimally constructed wood building offers — exposed rafters, wall studs, and historic board sheathing. These details are charming, but they also reveal what’s missing as heat waves intensify: insulation, shading, and the other quiet mechanisms that keep a space livable in summer.

This spring, Placework worked with the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine, to develop concepts for improving thermal comfort inside their art studios as summers grow hotter. Because the buildings are historic and deliberately low-tech, a minimalist approach was necessary — one that preserved the character of the structures while addressing a real and growing problem.

A Different Kind of Problem

Typically, improving a building’s thermal performance means modifying the envelope for optimum efficiency and conditioning the air mechanically. That approach wasn’t appropriate here. Instead, this project called for something simpler and more natural: passive design principles that encourage airflow and natural ventilation, and that reduce solar heat gain by managing sun exposure rather than mechanically countering it.

Measuring What Isn’t There

The study considered three buildings as test cases, each with a range of possible interventions. To evaluate which changes would meaningfully improve conditions, we borrowed a method more commonly used in mechanical system design: we built an energy model to analyze Energy Use Intensity (EUI).

Air conditioning was never part of the strategy. But a baseline EUI still serves a purpose — it’s a datum against which every proposed change can be measured. If adding a shading device, modifying ventilation openings, or insulating a wall reduces the modeled demand for air conditioning, that’s a reliable signal that interior conditions have genuinely improved, even without any equipment installed.

Findings Specific to Each Building

The resulting strategies varied by building, shaped by each one’s exposure to sun, prevailing winds, and form. A few observations carried across all three:

• The studio windows all face north — a favorable orientation that reduces solar heat gain while preserving the quality of natural light the artists depend on.
• Insulation on the roof and select walls proved to have an outsized impact on comfort, even within a minimal design language.
• Ventilation was a central strategy throughout: a gentle breeze cools skin even when air temperature stays constant, making airflow one of the most effective and least intrusive tools available.
• Where possible, we looked at lowering the temperature of incoming air itself, through plantings and shading positioned to create a buffer between the inside of the building and the intensity of direct solar exposure.

What Comes Next

These are small interventions — but combined, they produce a noticeable improvement in occupant comfort. Further passive measures remain available for the future: new tree plantings as they mature, or adjustments to daily schedules that reduce exposure during peak heat. If the school later decides that mechanical cooling is necessary, a geothermal heat pump system would be the most energy-efficient option and would preserve the significant cultural landscape the campus occupies.

The studios at Skowhegan are quirky, beloved structures, but the questions they raise are not unique to them. Many owners of older, lightly built structures in the Northeast are facing the same shift in climate, and the same tension between preserving what makes a building distinctive and making it livable through an increasingly hot summer. Passive design, evaluated rigorously, is often the first and most reasonable place to look.