Hall of Heat · Catalogue 10

🧱 The Thermal Wall

Watch heat flow through building materials in real time. A thermal wave propagates from a warm room through brick, insulation, glass or wood — Fourier's law made visible. See why a 100mm air gap is not insulation, and why 270mm of mineral wool changes everything.

Exhibit A · The living wall

Heat flow through your wall

Hot (inside) Warm Mild Cool Cold (outside)

Inside temperature 21°C

Outside temperature 5°C

What you're seeing. Each column of pixels is a thin slice of wall. Heat diffuses from left (warm room) to right (cold outside) at a rate determined by the material's thermal conductivity (W/m·K). Low conductivity = heat barely gets through = good insulation. The colour map shows temperature: red is warm, blue is cold. Watch how insulation creates a sharp temperature cliff, while glass lets heat pour straight through.

Exhibit B · Material comparison

Why materials matter

Thermal conductivity (W/m·K) measures how easily heat passes through a material. Copper is 400 — it's basically a heat highway. Brick is 0.6 — slow but steady. Mineral wool is 0.035 — heat barely gets through. That's a 10,000× difference between copper and insulation. Your wall is a carefully chosen stack of these barriers.