I was looking at housing in New Orleans and saw that the Shotgun House was a historically dominant style in the city.
It’s named the Shotgun Shack because you could fire a gun into the front door and the bullet would pass through each consecutive room, and through the back door. I stumbled on this airflow diagram.
It reminded me of the Tesla Valve, a purely mechanical means of restricting fluid flow to one direction. When fluid flows from right to left, it has a relatively unimpeded path.
But if you reverse the flow direction, these deviations from the main path help redirect the flow back on itself. Each deviation exponentially decreases the amount of fluid that passes.
What if we slightly modified the shotgun house: instead of open doorways, we use kitchen-hinged doors that swing in AND out to direct the dominant flow of air to our liking.
If you open the doors into the rooms, air is deflected and flows straight out the back. If you open the doors into the halls, air flow is siphoned off of the main flow and into the rooms.
In order to keep air flowing, a window would have to be open in every room, so that new air can flow into the rooms and not build up on itself (i.e. get in a ‘traffic jam’) in the hallway.
Another consideration: As in the scientific diagrams, the majority of air flow is redirected by the first one or two deviations (open doors), and so the front of the house (left side) would receive most of the cooling air flow, while the back two rooms would stagnate. This may be desirable if the occupants spent the majority of their time in the rooms that receive airflow, during hours of peak wind (say at night during nighttime cooling). Conversely, it may be desirable to deflect air from entering the rooms during the day if it is muggy and hot (as in New Orleans’ summers). Instead, the house may take advantage of other passive thermal methods such as ground well cooling (digging into the ground to take advantage of it’s constant and relatively cool temperature of ~56 degrees F).
Just a thought.