Creating Sustainable Building through Exploiting Human Comfort

Abstract

As Abbe Laugier elaborated in his book “Essay on Architecture”, architecture was founded on simple nature to protect occupants from harsh external environments, and thus providing comfortable indoor is one of the fundamental roles of buildings. Also, comfort along with building energy use for the provision of comfort is a key consideration for sustainable buildings. Traditional comfort theories based on experimental research imply that improving comfort levels would result in increasing energy consumption in buildings. This paper argues that new comfort theory can greatly contribute to reduction in building energy use, while satisfying occupant comfort in buildings. This paper illustrates how new comfort model based on the adaptive principle was developed from a series of field studies, and proves that the application of adaptive comfort model to the operation of buildings can lead to energy savings. This paper concludes with design considerations for sustainable buildings in order to realize energy saving potentials of the adaptive model in practice.