Apartment Prototype with Enhanced Natural Ventilation System for Vietnam

Abstract

With boundary-less efforts being made to increase the sustainability of human existence, the architecture field has also been making great efforts concerning this global trend. On the other hand, the urban conditions of developing cities require high-density housing solutions to house their rapidly increasing populations. In the case of apartments, the latter takes priority over the former, thus resulting in high-energy consumption for climate control and therefore high utility bills. This conflict is most pronounced in hot and humid tropical climate areas such as Southeast Asia, where passive climate control is virtually impossible to achieve in high-density housing types. In this paper, the authors make an attempt to develop an apartment prototype for Vietnam that 1) reflects the spatial organization of the Vietnamese ″Tube House,″ 2) allows natural ventilation that is absent in the Tube Houses, while 3) maintaining a high level of density. In doing so, the authors applied environmental strategies used in Vietnamese vernacular architecture and tested the performance of the prototype through air current analysis. As a result, the first two goals were achieved, while the third goal was achievable only to a certain extent.