Development of a sustainable cooling and ventilation system for hot-arid climate regions

It is fascinating, how the architects of the past learned to decrease the impact of extreme climatic conditions from arid to cold climate zones by applying simple, but very intelligent building elements. These elements are what lead to the development of sustainable and energy efficient architecture. The architecture in hot-arid climate regions all over the world has many distinguishable elements in common that provide a higher level of thermal comfort in the living environment. Unfortunately, there seems to be common mistakes made in the design by application of inappropriate building techniques that does not take the climate condition aspects into account. This has led to extremely high energy consumption of the buildings. This paper presents the traditional natural cooling and ventilation building elements in hot-arid climate zone in central Iran and their enormous impact on indoor environment of the buildings. In addition, it demonstrates the design of a school building as a part of the thesis that is based on these traditional technologies and operates with minimal energy consumption. The application of moderated elements in the building saved up to 85% of the cooling energy during the summer season. The collected data confirm that traditional passive techniques deserve further investigation into gaining a higher level of understanding and should be utilized in more architecture of today and the future.