Bioclimatic strategies and environmental comfort: integrated analysis of conflicts

Abstract

Environmental comfort is considered one of the main factors of satisfaction and productivity in offices. When it is obtained bioclimatically and the advantages related to energy saving, it results in environmentally dynamic spaces, which is considered a factor of good quality in a place. Users have a fundamental role in managing controls for the establishment of environmental comfort conditions in their rooms. However, inadvertently, the adjustment for a variable, such as acoustic privacy, can compromise the bioclimatic conditions of the space as a whole. The purpose of this present work was to analyze in an integrated way how users' search for better thermal, acoustical or lighting conditions separately can make the use of office rooms designed with strategies of natural thermal conditioning and daylighting, without air conditioning and electric lighting. A case study was carried out in the teaching rooms of four department buildings on a university campus. Such buildings have bioclimatic strategies and their rooms, with the same morphology, are mostly individually occupied. A mixed approach was adopted in the research, with quantitative and qualitative evaluations with data generated by computer thermal simulation and questionnaires. The results highlighted the interference of controlling noise, natural lighting and external view on thermal and lighting conditions, making it impossible or, at least, reducing the use of bioclimatic strategies.