Performance evaluation and users' perception of courtyards role in indoor areas of mediterranean social housing.

Cities confront two critical challenges: general overheating and inefficient use of energy resources within their housing buildings, both adversely affecting urban citizens' daily lives. To mitigate these issues, passive techniques offer promising solutions on enhancing building comfort levels from a sustainable approach. Although this energy efficiency of air-conditioning systems in buildings in warm climates has been extensively analysed, the influence of the microclimate of transitional spaces attached to them on this performance has not yet been properly assessed.

Use of Natural-Fiber Bio-Composites in Construction versus Traditional Solutions: Operational and Embodied Energy Assessment.

During the last decades natural polymers have become more and more frequent to replace traditional inorganic stabilizers in building materials. The purpose of this research is to establish a comparison between the most conventional building material solutions for load-bearing walls and a type of biomaterial. This comparison will focus on load-bearing walls as used in a widespread type of twentieth century dwelling construction in Europe and still used in developing countries nowadays.