Passive Design and Microclimate Cooling in the Tropical War Museum: A Nigerian Perspective, With the National War Museum, Umuahia as Reference Case

Ahuka Chika Godswill; Esau James Esau PhD; Mrs Chioma B. Akani.

doi:10.56201/ijgem.vol.12.no7.2026.pg72.83

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Passive Design and Microclimate Cooling in the Tropical War Museum: A Nigerian Perspective, With the National War Museum, Umuahia as Reference Case

Ahuka Chika Godswill, Esau James Esau PhD and Mrs Chioma B. Akani.

Abstract

Nigeria's only dedicated war museum, the National War Museum in Umuahia, Abia State, occupies a hot-humid tropical site in the country's south-eastern rainforest belt. Like most public heritage buildings constructed in Nigeria in the 1980s, its galleries rely heavily on mechanical air conditioning to maintain visitor comfort and to protect fragile civil-war-era artifacts, uniforms, photographs, and paper archives from heat and humidity damage. This dependence is expensive to sustain, vulnerable to Nigeria's chronic power supply instability, and disconnected from the passive cooling logic embedded in the region's own vernacular and tropical-modernist architectural traditions (Fry & Drew, 1956; Uduku, 2006). This journal examines how passive design and microclimate cooling strategies, orientation, courtyard planning, stack and cross ventilation, evaporative water features, vegetative shading, thermal mass, and hybrid conditioning of sensitive archival zones, can be applied to a tropical war museum typology in Nigeria, using the Umuahia museum as the empirical anchor for the discussion. Drawing on comparative studies of passively designed museums in Lagos (Justice et al., 2024), regional thermal-comfort research from Umuahia and Rivers State (Alozie et al., 2016; Ihunwo, 2025), and international literature on museum indoor-environment guidelines (Sharif-Askari & Abu-Hijleh, 2018; Ogwu et al., 2022), the journal argues that passive strategies are not merely a technical retrofit but an opportunity to align the museum's environmental behaviour with the emotional and cultural narrative it is meant to carry.

References

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Passive Design and Microclimate Cooling in the Tropical War Museum: A Nigerian Perspective, With the National War Museum, Umuahia as Reference Case

Abstract

References

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