China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Generic design strategies for energy-efficient, low-carbon buildings
Published in Paul Tymkow, Savvas Tassou, Maria Kolokotroni, Hussam Jouhara, Building Services Design for Energy-Efficient Buildings, 2020
Paul Tymkow, Savvas Tassou, Maria Kolokotroni, Hussam Jouhara
Figures 4.7, 4.8 and 4.9 show a contemporary three-storey office building with a range of design features that provide an energy-efficient approach. The building’s orientation and envelope have been designed to provide optimum energy performance. The wide horizontal brise soleil extending from the south facade and the deep overhang roofs on the east and west are prominent solar control features and are becoming more commonplace on modern buildings. The brise soleil shields the glazed facade from high sun angles in the summer, but allows lower-angle solar gain when it is beneficial during the heating season. The building has a typical depth of 16 metres to benefit from the prevailing wind direction so that it can use natural ventilation. This is also used at night-time for pre-cooling the office spaces in conjunction with the thermal mass of the exposed concrete soffit. The narrow depth also provides good daylighting levels, which aid health and wellbeing, as well as reducing lighting energy consumption. The building also uses building-integrated renewable energy systems: photovoltaics (integrated into the brise soleil) and solar water heating. Chapter 4 includes a post occupancy case study on this building and has more details about the design features.
The practice of shading in tropical architecture:Le Corbusier’s Legacy and Hsia Changshi’s Exploration
Published in Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 2023
Hsia Changshi’s study in Germany in the 1920s and his brief experience of working with Le Corbusier in Paris (K□gel and Liyan 2010, 23–24) were critical reasons for adopting the language of modernism in his architectural practice in 1950s4According to his memoirs, Hsia Changshi worked briefly in Le Corbusier’s Paris studio from the summer of 1928 to the end of 1929. At the time, Le Corbusier was busy designing the Villa Savoy and the Villa Mandelot. Similar to the shading practices in modern architecture in Brazil and India5The ”Practice of shading in modern architecture in Brazil” indicates the ”brise soleil” design represented by the Ministry of Education and Health – adding concrete shades to the facade to regulate sunlight and ventilation. Costa, Niemeyer, and other Brazilian modernist architects have adopted various forms of concrete sunshades in many projects, Hsia Changshi utilized horizontal, vertical, or net sunshades in the design of the biochemical building of the Zhongshan Medical College to wrestle with the intense sunshine in the Lingnan area and improve ventilation, demonstrating the hybrid characteristics of modernism and hot climate. Hsia Changshi’s representative sunshade design method was mainly used in many of his architectural works from 1951 to 1966.His architectural career was closely related to China’s political environment. From 1966 to 1972, he was involved in the political movement, subjected to political criticism, was imprisoned, and lost the opportunity of architectural creation and practice, and his unique sunshade design method was subsequently interrupted (K□gel and Liyan 2010, 27–28; Jian and Xiaoling 2012). Although I returned to Guangzhou in 1982 to participate in and guide architectural design, this shading design method was no longer applicable to the social environment at that time.With the involvement of a group of overseas architects in political events in the late 1960s, Hsia Changshi’s “shading design” was interrupted (Rui 2010). This Lingnan architectural practice with the characteristics of tropical modernism could not be sustained.