English

A technically and socially innovative housing project at Hockerton in Nottinghamshire has set out to implement the Agenda 21 principles on a local scale. With a radical approach, impeccable design credentials and committed occupant-owners, the scheme is a striking way forward. It might work for them, but will it work for the rest of us?

This paper summarizes the results of an horizontal study on Passive and Hybrid Cooling for buildings, carried out by the authors, on behalf of the EEC Research Program "Building 2000" /1/. The state of the art of the strategies for the prevention of thermal gain is presented. Also the existing situation on the design tools and the computational methods regarding the Passive and Hybrid cooling techniques and components is analysed. Finally the data of several designed and constructed buildings in Europe using Passive and Hybrid cooling techniques and components are given and analysed.

Pressure pans are often misused, and the information they provide can mislead the inexperienced. Bruce Manclark of Delta-T Incorporated (Eugene, Oregon) and Jeffrey Siegel, formerly of Ecotope Incorporated (Seattle, Washington), investigate how mistakes are made, and share their research into one strategy for more accurate pan readings.

Environmental concerns such as ozone depletion and global warming are forcing the building design profession to explore new ways of space conditioning. This paper looks at a number of potential low energy cooling strategies, and using dynamic analysis techniques makes an assessment of the ability of such strategies to contribute to the cooling of buildings in the UK climate.