New office buildings in Spain are nearly always designed to be air conditioned. The architect Emilio Miguel Mitre Associates (EMMA) has designed a building which avoids air conditioning, thereby reducing energy demand. The design uses the principles of high thermal mass combined with night ventilation, reduction of solar gain during the summer months, high levels of insulation, evaporative cooling, and buried pipes to provide cooling when the external temperature rises above 30°C.

The high environmental_ quality of the buildings in the south of France requires a good control of the summer thermal comfort. For economical and ecological reasons this purpose must be reached essentially by architectural design. In the program "Haute Qualite Environnementale" of the "Plan-Construction". 58 collective housings have been built in Nice in a dense urban zone with a principal consideration to the summer comfort, specially to allow a good transversal ventilation in the moderate hot and humid climate of this city.

This paper describes and discusses the energy saving design features of the Learning Resources Centre at Anglia Polytechnic University. As part of the University's policy on environmental conservation, the design brief for this new Queen's Building specified a low energy passive design solution. The building, which has been occupied since September 1994, was awarded a THERMIE grant to demonstrate a 50% reduction in the annual energy related carbon dioxide emissions for a building of this type.

This paper outlines progress in the THERMIE Target project Energy Comfort 2000 after three and a half years. Seven of the eight buildings are under construction and the eighth will be starting on site in May 1997. The project covers the design, construction, commissioning and monitoring of the buildings which are offices, university buildings, and public and recreational buildings, together with "horizontal activities" which link the projects together.

This paper sets out the monitoring results of the York Energy Demonstration Project (YEDP), carried out under the UK Government's Greenhouse Programme. Energy savings of up to 50% were observed as a result of incorporating energy efficiency measures into housing modernisation programmes. The project also provided insights into a number of replication issues.

In order to study pollution dispersion in built up area, aeraulic simulation at reduced scale in a boundary layer wind tunnel is intensively used at CSTB. The experimental set up and the associated procedures are described here. A comparison with complementary approaches developed at CSTB, numerical simulation and full scale measurements using tracer gas release is also provided.

Analysis of temperature trends for the last 100 years in several large U. S. cities has indicated that since -1940 there has been a steady increase in downtown temperatures of O. l-0.5°C per decade (-0.5°C for larger cities like Los Angeles and 0.1°C for smaller cities). Typically, electricity demand in cities increases by 2-4%/°C, hence, about 5-10% of the current urban electricity demand is spent to cool buildings just to compensate for the urban heat island effect. Downtown Los Angeles, for example, is now 3°C warmer than in 1940 leading to an increase in electricity demand of 1500 MW.

Renewable energy, Rational Use of Energy, and Sustainable 'Design are aspects for the coming building programmes, among many other qualitative aspects. How could sustainable use of energy be integrated in planning and building process?

In the Danish building sector, environmental management is currently being introduced in three areas: design, construction and operation of buildings. This innovation is based on development programmes, some of which are in progress, while others have been completed in the last few years. Dissemination and incorporation of the results of these programmes are being closely monitored. Common to all the development programmes is a requirement that employers and companies formulate an environmental policy describing attitudes, goals, priorities and organisation.