The decision makers in urban planning facevery often a dilemma whether to demolish orretrofit old buildings. Such a dileninia had to besolved during the reconstruction of the campusof the Faculty of Information Technologies atthe Brno University of Technology. One of thebuildings on the campus (a building that used tobe a brewery) was in a really bad shape and thequestion was whether to demolish it and build anew building instead or to put effort andresources into its retrofit.

The evaluation of the effectiveness ofcogenerations in energy saving is dependent onthe profile of electricity demand and heatdemand as many experts know. Those demandsdepend on the use and the energy efficiency ofappliances, on the envelope performancereflecting upon the heatinglcooling loads, on theclimatic conditions such as outdoor temperatureand city water temperature, etc.

This paper shows the experimental evaluation of thermal comfort of people moving from outdoors to indoors in summer. It also shows a building example which makes positive use of environmental changes to improve thermal comfort in the destination, with evaluation by field experiments in summer. A performing arts center based on a Grand Hall was analyzed in this study. The visitors pass thorough several spaces as they move from the outdoor environment to the Grand Hall, and they experience several different indoor environments.

An integrated building concept is a prerequisiteto come to an energy efficient building with agood and healthy IAQ indoor comfort. A designprocess that defines the targets and boundaryconditions in the very first stage of the design and guarantees them until the building is finished and used is needed. The hard questionis however: how to make the right choice of thecombination of individual measures frombuilding components and building sewiceselements.

A wide experimental campaign on transparent advancedintegrated fa~ades with a mechanically, naturally andhybrid ventilated air gap has been carried out both at theDepartment of Energetics at Politecnico di Torino and atLaboratorio Nacional de Engenharia Civil (LNEC) inLisbon.

Building performance can be expressed bydifferent indicators as primary energy use,environmental load andlor the indoorenvironmental quality and a building performancesimulation can provide the decision maker with aquantitative measure of the extent to which anintegrated design solution satisfies the designrequirements and objectives.In the design of sustainable Buildings it isbeneficial to identify the most important designparameters in order to develop more efficientlyalternative design solutions or reach optimizeddesign solutions.A sensitivity analysis makes it possible to identifythe mo

International building legislation is setting stronger and stronger requirements for the energy performance of buildings. The most recent example is the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive in the European Union. The improved energy performance of buildings can't be achieved by additional insulation or more effective building systems only. A major influence factor on the energy quality is the ventilation technology and also the airtightness of the building.

This study explores the plausible mechanismlinking outdoor air supply rates and workperformance through the perceptual responsesand a target salivary biomarker. An extendedobjective is this study is to perform comparativestudy between the healthy and the asthmaticgroups of subjects. A total of 160 young adultsparticipated as voluntary subjects in two phases.The study was conducted in the FieldEnvironmental Chamber which simulates anoffice setting. Subjects rated the air quality at18.0L/s/p to be most acceptable, followed by9.0L/s/p and the least acceptable at 4.5L/s/p(P

Social, financial, energy and technical data from about 1 1 10 households have been collected during 2004 in the major Athens area. The sample has been divided in seven inconie groups and a detailed analysis has been performed. Iniportant conclusions have been drawn regarding the quality of households, the operational conditions and the energy spent per income group. Low income people are more likely to be living in old buildings with poor envelope conditions. The cost per person and unit area is much higher for the low income group for both heating and electricity.

The construction of high-rise buildings beganseveral decades ago in North America, and nowhigh-rise buildings are common in East Asiaand the Middle East. A high rise buildingusually entails various problems in areas suchas energy consumption, IAQ, and stack effect,due to the great height of the building, most ofwhich are related to the airflow and pressure inand around the building. In particular, the stackeffect, which is driven by buoyancy forcesthrough the vertical shaft of the core, is themost critical in severe winter climates.