Corner rooms with two or more open windows in perpendicular facades can be naturally ventilated in cross-ventilation or pumping ventilation. These two airflow regimes also occur in rooms with two openings in the same façade, in the form of single sided pumping or cross sided ventilation. This paper presents an experimental and numerical simulation study of the scale and occurrence of these two flow regimes for rooms in a rectangular building exposed to wind. Flow visualization and tracer gas measurement of effective airflow were performed in an atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel using a rectangular model of a three-story building (1/20 scale) with a ventilated middle floor. Experimental results show that pumping ventilation occurs when the wind is perpendicular to the façade (single sided rooms) or aligned with the building corner (corner rooms). In addition to these two perfectly aligned wind directions, pumping also occurs for a range of incoming wind angles: ±19° for single sided; and ±9° for corner rooms. As a result, for isolated rectangular buildings that have, at least, one single sided and two corner rooms in each facade, pumping ventilation can potentially occur in two or more rooms for 62 % of incoming wind directions. To investigate the transition between steady cross-ventilation and unsteady pumping ventilation, three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics large eddy simulations were performed to obtain wind generated pressures in the ventilation openings. Results show that the transition from cross-ventilation to pumping occurs when the steady pressure becomes smaller than the unsteady component. These results are used to develop a pressure based simplified model for corner ventilation that can predict effective airflow from external wind generated pressures with an average error below 10.2 %. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd