In summer, it is possible to achieve a satisfactory comfort in residential buildings with purely passive means as thermal inertia, possibility of cross ventilation and solar protection of the external envelope. These parameters have to be taken into account at the earliest stages of building design.

This paper describes the results coming out of the European Commission supported THERMIE Target Project Energy Comfort 2000. This was the first Target project, containing eight non-domestic buildings, started in July 1993 and to be completed at the end of 1998. The project aimed to design and construct buildings which use less than 50% of the energy of a traditional equivalent, by using passive methods, particularly to avoid the need for air-conditioning. High quality internal conditions were to be achieved.

The greater availability of information and telecommunication technologies and the trend towards flexible working practices allow the home and the workplace to coexist. Many studies mainly emphasize economic and social consequences of teleworking. However, there is no assessment of energy and indoor climate impact of teleworking at home. Furthermore a professional activity is usually not envisaged at home, and home is not built according to the same building design process as offices. Consequently, teleworking at home raises new questions about the evolution of dwellings.

This paper reports the results of thermal comfort and indoor air quality studies in forty-three flights with a duration of more than one hour. The measurements were performed continuously during the whole flight (from the departure gate to the arrival gate) and the parameters monitored were temperature, relative humidity and carbon dioxide concentration. The results were then compared with the ASHRAE Standards for the thermal and indoor air quality.

The role of metallic surfaces is not only to save energy in winter and in summer by separating the inside and the outside. New and inexpensive ways of collecting solar energy for internal heating, new ways of ventilating, heating and cooling through the fabric elements are described. Two very significant prospects are : radiative cooling by metallic surfaces and enhancement of indirect daylighting by optimised ceilings. The subject of the European CURES program is to promote these new technologies by simulating and testing them.

This paper presents the experimental results of the comparative study of three Passive Cooling Systems (PCSs) for the natural conditioning of dwellings carried out in Maracaibo, Venezuela. An experimental platform has been built to study the thermal performance of PCS. It includes: two full scale test cells, a meteorological station and an automated data acquisition system. The results are analyzed in terms of Indoor Characteristic Temperatures (JCT), Mean Cooling Potential (MCP) and the Cooling Performance Index (CPI) of each PCS.

A comprehensive concept for an energie and comfort orientated retrofitting is realised for an office high rise building ,,BS 4" (on campus at Braunschweig Technical University). This master plan will take the form of a research and developement projekt; a pilot realisation will be carried out on the 10th floor.

A systematic analysis of recently constructed dwellings in the Flemish Region has been undertaken within the SENVIVV-project (1995-1998). In total 200 dwellings have been examined in detail. The study involved various aspects: energy related building data (thermal insulation level, net heating demand, installed heating power, .. ), indoor climate (temperature levels in winter and summer), building airtightness, ventilation, appreciation of the occupants, . . . This paper especially focuses on the results for thermal insulation, airtightness and ventilation.

Natural ventilation can be a part of a strategy for a good indoor air quality. It can also be a way to realise night time ventilation during warm periods. In this latter case, the aim is to cool down the thermal mass of the building to obtain a better thermal comfort during daytime. Night time ventilation requires high ventilation rates and sufficient accessible thermal mass. The ventilation openings have to be well designed to avoid undesirable effects like rain, pollution and burglary.

Indoor air pollution in residential environments caused by chemicals, such as formaldehyde and