Understanding the environmental performance of the Iraqi traditional courtyard house, Is there an order of façades orientation in randomly oriented land plots?
Description
This paper aims to explore the order used to orient spaces within the Iraqi traditional courtyard houses in an urban fabric of randomly oriented land plots. The importance of the subject lies in the possibility of benefiting from this order in developing contemporary building designs to achieve thermal comfort and energy conservation. The methodology of the research included the investigation of the geographical orientation effect on the exposure of walls to solar radiation to recognize the directions that sun can effectively be blocked in the summer, while maintaining exposure to it in winter. Other directions were also identified, where either blocking the sun is practically difficult or where they have no sun. The paper analyzed the orientation of spaces surrounding courtyard in a traditional fabric to verify whether they follow a specific order or not. It was found that the majority percentage of houses is oriented to the desired directions, despite the randomness of the land plot orientation. This paper designed a model for a courtyard house that simulates ones in the traditional fabric to prove that building spaces can be oriented to specific geographic directions even with randomly oriented land plot.
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The research methodology comprises of studying the following three subjects: 1. Investigating the effect of geographical orientation on wall exposure to solar radiation during summer and winter in Iraq. This would determine the directions that sun can be blocked easily during summer but allowing exposure in winter. This research named these directions “Environmentally Desired Orientations” which the main spaces of the house may be oriented towards. Moreover, identifying other directions where it is practically uneasy to block the sun in the summer, or where they have no sun in winter. Orienting spaces to those directions should be avoided, thus named “Environmentally Undesired Directions.” Due to the dissimilarity of solar radiation exposure on different location in Iraq, the city of Erbil, falls on latitude 36°N, is selected to conduct this study. Using (Solar-2®) software, the average amount of solar radiation energy per square meter of walls was extracted in Watthour per day during summer and winter months for the eight major geographic directions. 2. An analysis to the orientation of spaces overlooking the courtyard in traditional houses to verify if they follow an order of orientation towards the “Environmentally Desired Directions”. 3. Designing a courtyard house model, simulates the one in the traditional fabric, to verify the possibility of orienting the house spaces surrounding the courtyard to the Environmentally Desired Orientations, as the courtyard and the land plot are randomly oriented in the traditional fabric.