I gotta say, this is my pet peeve about most new home construction: they are designed for 24/7 artificial climate control. I grew up in a house without AC, but it was built in the late 19th c. in a summer home community, so it had high ceilings, big windows on almost every side, a side stairwell that got a little of the chimney effect going, and porches to shade the first floor windows from the sun. With fans running all the time, it was tolerable for all but about 6 weeks of the year (when we put window units in the bedrooms/study).
When I was in CO and we built our house, we installed a whole house fan that was mounted in the ceiling on top of the second-floor loft overlooking the family room. Because you get awesome temperature swings there, even if it was 90 during the day, when the sun dipped behind the mountain it would go to like 68, so we'd come home, open the basement windows, turn on the whole house fan, and the house would be cool in less than 15 minutes.
Now, though, most homes aren't designed for the local climate. I am back in the area where I grew up, but none of the newer homes are designed to manage the hot, muggy days naturally. So you really are forced to use the AC, because the inside of those homes gets much more miserable much more quickly than mine ever did. And the worst part is that people then learn that this is "normal" and don't consider any other options. My DH grew up in modern suburbia, and when we bought another one of those old summer homes, the first thing he did was install AC. Sigh.