thermal mass heating and cooling

[echnidna]

Way back in the olden days there was a movement to passively heat/cool a house using underground thermal mass of the soil itself. The process was sometimes called "cool tubes".

By constantly changing the air in a house over a 2 hour cycle the house was supposed to be kept in a median temerature range.

But 20 years down the track cool tubes seem to have died out, is there any modern info available?

[Big Shed]

Perhaps not quite the same that you are talking about, but geothermal heating/cooling is slowly taking off, particularly in the US.
There are a couple of projects here in Australia:

http://stott.customer.netspace.net.au/geotherm.htm

I did a lot of reading on this subject before I built our house in an effort to avoid the wood heating scenario, in the end it got all too hard, I now burn wood!