What is Bioclimatic Architecture?

What is Bio­cli­matic Archi­tec­ture .site. –Pub­lished from this geoc­i­ties site that has been the most infor­ma­tive site on bio­cli­matic archi­tec­ture online for years, titled “What is bio­cli­matic archi­tec­ture.”  Repub­lished and Re-edited to make sense ver­sion of the  arti­cle here :

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bio­cli­matic — of or con­cerned with the rela­tions of cli­mate and liv­ing organisms

What is bio­cli­matic architecture?

Build­ing that takes into account cli­mate and envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions to help achieve ther­mal com­fort inside. It deals with design and archi­tec­tural ele­ments, avoid­ing com­plete depen­dence on mechan­i­cal sys­tems, which are regarded as sup­port.  (i.e. Using nat­ural ven­ti­la­tion or mixed mode ven­ti­la­tion)  Archi­tec­ture that has a con­nec­tion to Nature.

Is this new?

No. It can be said that a lot of tra­di­tional archi­tec­ture works accord­ing to bio­cli­matic prin­ci­ples.  It was not long ago when air con­di­tion­ing was rare and expen­sive. An exam­ple of tra­di­tional archi­tec­ture work­ing in this man­ner are often venac­u­lar arche­types, such as the South­ern ori­ented win­dows in South­ern Spain, the use of mate­ri­als with ther­mal mass such as adobe with an earth coat­ing of lime on walls in the houses of Andalu­cia cre­ates a sta­ble indoor micro-climate accom­pa­nied with the loca­tion of vil­lages on south fac­ing slopes.

But, does it really work?

Tra­di­tional tech­niques work, and in Spain we know it well: the cool­ness inside a thick-walled tra­di­tional vil­lage house at noon in August, the com­fort of a tra­di­tional patio in Andalu­cia on a hot day, or how the sun enters through South ori­ented win­dows in win­ter replac­ing  the need for heat­ing. If this works, don’t you think it could be pos­si­ble, through care­ful house design, to design houses like this today?  Answer–Yes! It is entirely pos­si­ble to design mod­ern bio­cli­matic hous­ing and archi­tec­ture, using nat­ural ven­ti­la­tion, pas­sive solar design, and sus­tain­able materials.

How much does it cost?

A bio­cli­matic house needn’t be either cheaper nor more expen­sive, uglier or nicer, than any other. The bio­cli­matic house doesn’t need the pur­chase and instal­la­tion of com­pli­cated and expen­sive sys­tems, but it just uses the reg­u­lar archi­tec­tural ele­ments to increase the ener­getic per­for­mance and get a nat­ural com­fort. To achieve this, the bio­cli­matic design imposes a set of guide­lines, but there still remains a lot of free­dom to design accord­ing to indi­vid­ual taste. Sit­ing of the build­ing, con­sid­er­a­tion of solar access, col­lec­tion of rain­wa­ter, using ther­mal mass to your advan­tage, cor­rect fen­es­tra­tion and solar shad­ing all can be taken into account when design­ing, and the end prod­uct you have is a much more energy effi­cient while being in tune with its sur­round­ings and Nature.

Then, why is bio­cli­matic archi­tec­ture is not well known?

Clothes mean much more to us that the need for ther­mal pro­tec­tion (started sim­ple and some­times lost to the con­cept of fash­ion), hous­ing means more than the need for a com­fort­able place to live, and may rep­re­sent, for exam­ple, a sta­tus sym­bol. As that sym­bol, it must adapt to the estab­lished stan­dards of sta­tus, some­times ignor­ing the envi­ron­ment (i.e. McMan­sions). Energy sav­ing and tak­ing advan­tage of the sun may not fit into these stan­dards, but hav­ing an expen­sive con­di­tion­ing sys­tem to over­heat in win­ter and over­cool in sum­mer every sin­gle space in the house (even if it is sel­dom used) may seem nec­es­sary. The cul­tural iner­tia of the over­done, is hard to stop, because right now its working.…and energy prices go up.

In despite of spo­radic aware­ness cam­paigns, pub­lic­ity takes pride every day to asso­ciate sav­ing with dis­com­fort and low sta­tus, and waste with easy liv­ing and pres­tige. And it gets the point across: a lot of peo­ple asso­ciate sav­ing energy to poverty. Sci­ence is dis­re­garded, global warm­ing has no real world con­se­quence, energy is wasted, peo­ple pay and pay with­out real­iz­ing it. Now our eco­nom­i­cal sys­tem needs us to con­sume as much as pos­si­ble so as to keep the wheel going.

The pow­ers that be are strong and they have built a legacy they want to con­tinue.  Big com­pa­nies (the legacy industries) refuse to inno­vate, lobby to keep the sta­tus quo–no energy sup­ply com­pa­nies is really inter­ested in new tech­nolo­gies for renew­able energy, just the new star­tups. How will they increase their ben­e­fits? How will they sell energy if you are mak­ing your own, or dont need as much because your new house works better. Air con­di­tion­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers aren’t inter­ested in alter­na­tive sys­tems that bust their tech­nol­ogy, nat­ural ven­ti­la­tion does not make money.

Archi­tects and builders don’t worry as far as their busi­ness goes well, and the con­sumer, with no infor­ma­tion on the topic, can­not demand alter­na­tive prod­ucts he does not know, ever won­der why there is no elec­tric car on your streets or solar pan­els on your roof?  Why would the pow­ers that be want you to get energy for free when they can charge for it?

Slowly, new pro­grams, smart com­pa­nies, eco cit­i­zens are becom­ing aware of the energy waste prob­lem, and things are babystep­ping forward–promoting research on the topic and gen­er­at­ing new leg­is­la­tion and stan­dards. For exam­ple, some­thing as sim­ple as good insu­la­tion in build­ings to keep heat inside is a topic for leg­is­la­tion of increas­ing impor­tance. And in a lot of coun­tries insti­tu­tions (USGBC.org) are appear­ing to per­form research and spread bio­cli­matic knowl­edge among archi­tects and builders (like CIEMAT in Spain). Hun­dreds of books have been writ­ten on the topic, and hun­dreds of projects related some how to bio­cli­matic archi­tec­ture have been imple­mented around the world, and slowly it takes hold.

Other related topics

Bio­cli­matic archi­tec­ture deals exclu­sively with build­ing design and mate­ri­als to achieve energy effi­ciency.   Nev­er­the­less, peo­ple inter­ested in alter­na­tive archi­tec­ture will find other terms related to this:

* Pas­sive solar architecture.

It refers to hous­ing design for the effi­cient use of solar energy. As it doesn’t use mechan­i­cal sys­tems (thus the term pas­sive), it is closely related to bio­cli­matic archi­tec­ture, though the later doesn’t only deal with solar energy, but with other cli­matic ele­ments. That’s why the term bio­cli­matic is a litle bit more gen­eral, and inclu­sive, although both work in the same direction.

* Active solar architecture.

It refers to tak­ing advan­tage of solar energy by the means of mechanic and/or elec­tric sys­tems for heat­ing (solar col­lec­tors) and elec­tric con­ver­sion (pho­to­voltaic pan­els). They may com­ple­ment a bio­cli­matic house and off­set energy loads of the building’s users.

* Renew­able energy.

It refers to sources of energy that can­not be exhausted. Bio­cli­matic archi­tec­ture is related to this topic because it uses solar radi­a­tion (renew­able) for heat­ing and cool­ing.  Nev­er­the­less, for a house we may con­sider other kinds of ener­gies, such as wind or water (hydro) power for elec­tric­ity gen­er­a­tion, or methane gen­er­a­tion from organic waste (bio mass)

* Sus­tain­able architecture.

This is a very gen­eral con­cept aim­ing to a min­i­mum envi­ron­men­tal impact of all the processes implied in build­ing, from mate­ri­als (man­u­fac­tur­ing processes that don’t pro­duce toxic waste and don’t con­sume much energy), build­ing tech­niques (for a min­i­mum envi­ron­men­tal dam­age), build­ing location/siting and its envi­ron­men­tal impact, energy con­sump­tion and its impact, and the recy­cling of mate­ri­als when the build­ing has accom­plished its func­tion and is demol­ished. Bio­cli­matic archi­tec­ture is related to it because it helps reduce the energy con­sump­tion of the build­ing is in use.

* Self-sufficient house.

It refers to a house inde­pen­dent from cen­tral­ized sup­ply net­works (elec­tric­ity, gas, water, and even food), by get­ting advan­tage of locally avail­able resources (water from wells, streams or rain, energy from the sun or the wind, elec­tric­ity from the sun, food from orchards, i.e. off grid, etc.). Bio­cli­matic archi­tec­ture coop­er­ates with self-sufficiency regard­ing energy sav­ing for climatization.

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