Working in challenging climates presents problems for those responsible for ensuring the occupants comfort. How do designers fare in a less developed area like the Galapagos?
You'd expect the Galapagos National Park Service to have more than a passing concern for good environmental performance. Yes, finances are tight, and the build-quality of its offices leave something to be desired, but still the Park should be keeping its use of energy under control.

The National Park's headquarters, on Santa Cruz Island, is set in a stunning landscape of cacti and strange shrubs. Despite the pleasant sea breeze, temperatures can still reach over 30°C, which means some form of mechanical cooling is needed to keep people working efficiently. Conversely, it never gets cooler than 18°C so heating the offices isn't an issue.

The offices have grown as the Park's responsibilities have been extended, and as its government budget allowed for more office space. From a small start of just a couple of rooms in 1968, the office complex now boasts 30 cellular offices clustered in groups of three or four offices, connected by walkways to the executives' offices at the centre.

The buildings use breeze blocks in most exterior walls, although some of the buildings use volcanic rock for one or more walls, chosen for aesthetic reasons rather than their thermal properties. The offices have simple corrugated steel roofs raised above a shallow-pitch roof support. This is a low thermal-mass wooden structure in older buildings, while concrete is used in more recently constructed offices.

Partitions between offices are mainly lightweight plasterboard with wooden frames, and, like nearly all buildings in the Galapagos (and Ecuador as a whole), there is no insulation at all. The edge of the roof projects 0·8 m from the walls on all sides of most buildings, offering shading through most of the day, but there is no additional shading for windows. This means the sun enters east or west facing offices at the beginning or the end of the day.

Large, single-glazed, windows occupy about a third of external walls, bringing in more light and heat. The central window in each bank of three opens manually and is fitted with a fly-screen.

Building on the Galapagos is very expensive compared to the mainland, at more than double the cost. This means that even straightforward components like fly-screens do not come cheap. There are three factors at work here: the high cost of shipping-in building materials and components; general labour costs that run close to triple those on the continent; and the lack of local expertise in construction – which means people must be bought in from the mainland or further afield.

You enter a typical office through a half-glazed doorway. This entrance serves both the outer office and a second, inner office, which is linked by another glazed door (figure 1). In most cases these pairs of offices are home to a whole department with one, two or three people in each cellular office and the department head situated in the inner office.

One packaged Panasonic cooling unit with built-in controls sits on the wall of the deeper office. However, the outer office just has a domestic fan to move air around with no form of independent cooling.

This means people in the outer office must rely on their boss for a comfortable workspace. First, he must set the controls cooler than he might simply to keep his own office comfortable, and second he must leave the connecting door open so air moves between the offices.

There is an additional problem in some paired offices (like the lower pair in figure 1) – a poor alignment between the cooler and connecting door means little air moves between the two offices even with the door wide open. This makes the outer office uncomfortably warm.

High ambient temperatures mean that the cooler is active most of the time, although it is surprising how often the fan in the outer office is turned off. When the comfort cooling is extinguished just leaving the windows open isn't enough to provide a level of ventilation to keep your British correspondent happy, although locals seem to find it acceptable.

Naturally, sharing just one cooler between two offices provides both cost and energy-saving benefits, as do the simple localised electricity controls.

Power security isn't what you'd expect in a developed country – there were two power cuts in May alone – and the Park has no back-up generator to keep the coolers and computers working. Of course, most Ecuadorians seemed quite pleased at the excuse to down tools and chat for a couple of hours.

So, does this example of equatorial design work for its occupants? Certainly, those in the inner-sanctums, with easy access to controls and a packaged cooler on the wall can keep themselves comfortable. But for those working in the outer offices it is a different story – they must negotiate with the boss to set not only their salary, but also their working temperature.

Given the limits on resources for construction and managing energy, plus the combination of high costs and low technical knowledge, the designers have not done a bad job. Energy consumption is far from extravagant compared to UK norms, and most of the offices are comfortable for most of the time.

Natural ventilation, like it or not

People in the Galapagos are well accustomed to the principles of natural ventilation. They normally open every openable part of the building to make the high temperatures bearable. Consequently, most buildings are designed with large opening windows, and shaded patios outside for al fresco eating. However, this mentality makes it difficult for people who aren’t familiar with mechanical cooling to get used to keeping windows and doors closed. Sometimes doors of Park offices are left open all afternoon, with the cooler working continuously. A linked problem is that some doors do not close properly. People do not see drafts as a problem, so do nothing when the latch on their door fails to hold the door closed, or when the door sags and warm air comes in through a gap at the top. Snags with latches and hinges are sadly all too common in Ecuador – you simply cannot buy many high-quality building components without importing them from outside the continent, and paying the high premium this entails. One advantage of working in a hot country is that people are very tolerant of high working temperatures. Most people at the Park are quite happy when temperatures reach 25°C or more in the office. Another plus for comfort cooling here is the low computer density. Only about a third of the desks support computers making for considerably lower internal heat gains.

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Building Sustainable Design