English

For a house to be habitable it needs to be comfortable. In the warm humid climates interiors need to be cool for most of the year in order to be comfortable vis a vis habitable. There are many factors that contribute to the comfortable part of the overall habitability of a house particularly its aspects of design. The paper analyses the thermal conditions in ten different houses in Dhaka, Bangladeshi in representative days of the three main seasons and tries to identify design aspects that make some houses more comfortable hence habitable than others

This paper discusses the use of the 'wind wing wall' as a device for the passive low-energy 'comfort cooling' of the occupants in the interior of a tall building. The case study building is a 21-storey, high-rise office tower. the UMNO building designed by Hamzah and Yeang located in Penang, Malaysia which has been designed to be airconditioned, but can also be naturally ventilated if conditions are suitable. The paper describes cfd air flow modelling of the wind effects on the building and the effect on internal temperatures, air movement and ventilation.

The thermal behaviour of an office building is presented and discussed, as well as the results of a sensitivity study, which analyses the impact of architectural decisions and the effect of occupancy in terms of energy consumption (cooling and heating loads). This study was carried out using one floor of an office building, with large glazed facades, recently built in S. Paulo in Brazil, which was monitored for a short period (11 days)]. This building has been used as reference, for the sensitivity studies carried out for two climates, S. Paulo in Brazil and Lisbon in Portugal.

The Mosque of Cordoba is the best example of the Islamic religious buildings that survived in Spain. Its typology corresponds to a mosque of a large scale with the common plan of the early Muslim art. This model became an architectural reference for the mosques of Western Islam. The paper presents the results of measurements undertaken to assess the environmental performance of this building.

The buildings of this Environment Educational Center, designed with innovative energy saving features, minimize the impact on the preexisting environment. Renewable energy concepts have been applied to the building design, and intelligent control of lighting and air-conditioning has been included. Most of the buildings are green roof underground buildings, where domes that allow spans up to 42 m have been designed. Average energy saving is over 70% on heating and cooling demands and 60% in lighting.

Research and development of new-type passive solar houses are the main purpose of this paper. The proposed passive solar houses haven an air circulation system in brick walls combined with passive heating and cooling systems. A prototype model house with a solar collector and Trombe walls was constructed and its thermal performance was measured to evaluate this new system. The efficiency on the real size model house with attached green houses is discussed through thermal performance simulations.