No, not the forbidden techniques! Don't you realise what you've done?!

cut to a person soaking their feet in a vat of liquid nitrogen

The problem with a lot of the architectural solutions taken from the past is that they rely on an open building envelope. Ventilation is great when it's enough, but the moment you have to close off the building envelope to use mechanical air conditioning, those architectural features dont help. Swamp cooling has similar challenges.

Shading, however, is a really important feature that we are largely missing. Lots of eco-friendly buildings are designed with large overhangs over south/west facing windows to block sunlight during the summer and let it in during the winter. I think it would be neat to have a building that is designed to be slightly more "active" than that. E.g., maybe every equinox you deploy/stow a rigid awning structure, so you get even more light in winter and less in summer.