Towards Climate Responsive Building Design: Bio-Climatic Design Features of Residential Building Typologies in the Warm-Humid Climate of Ghana

Climatic considerations in the architectural design of most contemporary buildings have not been strictly adhered to by building design and construction professionals in the last few decades in the developing world, with users being denied the inevitable interactions with the natural surroundings offered by climate. The situation leads to utilization of energy-based equipment such as air conditioner that is environmentally unsustainable. The study aimed to evaluate the bioclimatic design features of residential building typologies and to identify features that can enhance the environmental responsiveness of buildings. This study adopted the Mahoney Tables to undertake a climatic analysis to develop appropriate design guidelines for the climate context. The developed design guidelines were then used to evaluate the bio-climatic design features of a sampled number of residential building types. The study revealed that features of the buildings reflect the recommended design guidelines, but to varied extents among the building typologies that were studied. Occupants generally find their spaces unsatisfactory primarily as a result of the experience of hot discomfort. The findings are expected to engender a renewed interest in the design of buildings in response to prevailing climatic conditions to reduce reliance on energy use and to serve as a useful reference for contemporary architectural design practice and education.

Method for determining climatic design conditions based on the indoor thermal environment risk level

Currently,climatic design conditions are usually selected according to the frequency of climatic parameters them-selves,which method cannot reflect the indoor thermal environment risk level of the building in design.In this regard,the research proposes to construct the correlation between climatic design conditions and indoor thermal environment risk level,and explore the effect of uncertainty in building thermal performance on this correlation from the perspective of probability,thus realizing the process of selecting the climatic design conditions based on the requirement for indoor thermal environment risk level.Taking Guangzhou in China as an example,the new process of determining climatic design conditions is realized.On this basis,the difference between the traditional method and the present research method is compared.In the Chinese norm method,the indoor thermal environ-ment risk level of the building is between 0 and 0.03%when the climatic design conditions are selected with 0.57%cumulative frequency of occurrence;in the research method,the indoor thermal environment risk level of the building is between 0.2%and 0.6%when the climatic design conditions are selected with 0.57%indoor thermal environment risk level and 100%confidence level.The results indicate that the research method can meet the designer’s expectation for indoor thermal environment risk level in design more directly and accurately.

THERMAL ENVIRONMENTS OF AN OFFICE BUILDING WITH DOUBLE SKIN FACADE

As a symbol of green architecture,double skin facade(DSF)represents a design which possesses many energy saving features,but due to the complexity of the system,the real performances and benefits have been difficult to predict.The objective of this study was to inform the applicability of DSFs,and contribute to the positive impacts of DSF designs.This study compared and contrasted energy savings in a temperate climate,where heating was the dominant energy strategy,and in a subtropical climate,where cooling spaces was the dominant issue.This paper focused on a university office building with a west facing shaft box window facade.The research method was a paired analysis of simulation studies which compared the energy performance of a set of buildings in two different climates.Simulation results showed a good agreement with measurements undertaken in the exiting building during a two-week period.The results specified that DSFs are capable of almost 50%energy savings in temperate and 16%in subtropical climates.Although these indicated DSFs are more suitable for temperate climates than warmer regions,the amount of energy savings in subtropical climates were also considerable.However,due to the costs of DSFs and potential loss of leasable floor area,investigations into other feasible ventilation options are necessary before final building design decisions are made.