Climatic Design Principles: Visit to Historic Building with Monash Architectural Students

Gregers Reimann
7 days ago
2 min read

IEN had the pleasure to give talk - on location - about climatic design principles for tropical buildings. We brought the 15 architectural students from Monash University (Melbourne campus) to the recently completed historic building, Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad, which had no choice but to apply the climatic design principles for comfort, daylighting and ventilation, because the building was completed in 1897 before Kuala Lumpur was electrified.

View or download the slides that we presented to the students:

We also spoke about other related topics, such as outdoor thermal comfort and latest research on deadly heatwave events finding that elderly people above 65 years old significantly more likely to succumb to deadly heat stress than younger people.

On a related note, we told the students about the benefits of planting trees to cool down tropical cities, such as George Town, Penang, which currently is undertaking a big tree-planting program with the express purpose of making the city more thermally comfortable.

Lastly, the students were very interested in discussing innovative building design strategies, such as sky cooling and desiccant dehumidification, that we have developed to cool and dehumidify tropical buildings without the use for electricity. We let the students use our thermographic camera and showed them our comfort cube equipment, to make them aware of ways to measure the thermal environment around them.

Always a pleasure to inspire students. Thanks to prof. Erik L'Heureux, who lead this travelling studio ("Hot Air Transformations: Kuala Lumpur"), for reaching out and letting us share our theoretical and practical building design knowledge and help to inspire the next generation of architects.

Links and acknowledgements: