Talk with Anne Maxwell Foster
Onera Prize 2025 recipient, interior designer, and preservation research fellow Anne Maxwell Foster will present her research project titled: Passive Cooling Revisited: Window Awnings as a Climate Strategy for Historic Buildings.
Once integral to how buildings responded to summer heat, window awnings have largely disappeared from the contemporary built environment—despite their proven effectiveness. This talk revisits the awning as a forgotten but powerful tool for passive cooling, demonstrating how exterior shading can reduce indoor temperatures, improve thermal comfort, and significantly increase energy efficiency in existing buildings. Combining architectural history, building science, and energy performance analysis, Foster brings together established scholarship with new technical findings to reassess the awning’s potential role in addressing today’s climate challenges. The presentation begins with a richly illustrated overview of the rise and fall of window awnings in New York City’s architectural history, situating them within broader cultural, technological, and regulatory shifts.
Technical questions of performance and effectiveness are then explored through a focused case study of a 1901 apartment building in Harlem, where energy modeling reveals measurable reductions in cooling demand. Building on this work, Foster introduces expanded research supported by the Onera Prize for Historic Preservation, extending the methodology beyond a single building to evaluate the potential impact of awnings across a range of historic building typologies throughout New York City.
By translating technical findings into accessible guidance for preservationists, architects, building owners, policymakers, and the public, the research ultimately calls for a renewed understanding of awnings as a practical, low-impact climate strategy—and highlights their overlooked role in shaping a more sustainable future for historic buildings.
About the Speaker
Anne Maxwell Foster is a preservation professional with over 15 years of experience in design and stewardship of the built environment. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Boston College and a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she was awarded the 2025 Onera Prize for Historic Preservation for research examining the decarbonization potential of passive cooling strategies for older and historic buildings. She is a former Fellow with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Columbia University’s Climate School Earth Network. Her work has focused on policy-relevant research at the intersection of preservation, climate, and institutional practice.