Assessment of Architects’ Knowledge of Passive Design Strategies in Terminal Buildings among Architectural Firms in Lagos State

Abstract

Buildings are responsible for over 40% of the global energy consumption in recent times. This has led to the advancement of various strategies for ensuring that building can still perform optimally with a reduce energy consumption level. Designers of modern building structure need to develop a new approach towards harnessing the attributes of nature and its immediate environment in order to achieve a great level of indoor comfort to the users. The concept of passive design planning and strategies has been known to achieve such thermal performance in building a structure and reducing energy consumption to the barest minimum. The study aims at conducting an assessment on the knowledge level of Architects conducting business in Lagos State of passive design strategies in terminal buildings. The study was a questionnaire survey with a sample size of 128 randomly selected registered architectural firms located in Lagos. Descriptive statistics were conducted on the data and the result was presented using Table. The study revealed that Architects in Lagos state have good knowledge about passive design strategies in terminal buildings as all the mean scores were above 3.0. While, building orientation, daylighting, natural ventilation and proper landscaping were identified as the most important among the strategies employed for the passive design of terminal buildings in the achievement of users’ thermal comfort and towards the accomplishing reduced use of mechanical technologies.