Proposing a Bioclimatic Atlas in Iran to Achieve Climate Responsive Architecture Strategies

The incompatibility of new buildings with the climatic environment and the neglect of the interactions between them have led to the unbridled use of fossil fuels and disrupted the thermal comfort of their occupants. There was a climate-responsive design from the past in Iran's architecture, which unfortunately has been forgotten in contemporary architecture. In the past, buildings that were built in different climates of Iran had special features related to that climate and climate adaptation strategies were well observed. Therefore, the present study seeks to understand the climate of the country and consequently recognize the appropriate use of various solutions to provide cooling and heating to save energy costs. In this article, for obtaining different solutions for the active and passive supply of cooling and heating energy inside buildings for different cities of Iran, daily meteorological data of dry temperature and relative humidity of 155 meteorological stations from 1995 to 2018 were used. In order to evaluate the bioclimatic strategies for providing comfort inside the buildings, two redrawn building bioclimatic diagrams of Givoni were used; one for hot developing countries and the other for developed countries. These diagrams are the latest Givoni proposes for bioclimatic assessment in his book. How the graphs were placed on the psychrometric chart reduced their effectiveness, which the authors have redrawn. All charts were drawn for the stations using GIS software. The frequency of occurrence of climatic phenomena was displayed on 20 ranges of active and passive bioclimatic strategies and the output data were collected in a spreadsheet database. According to the outputs of drawing the bioclimatic diagram of each station, the percentage of frequency of different bioclimatic strategies was calculated, and based on cluster analysis, 8 bioclimatic groups were classified for Iran. Lastly, climate design suggestions were created for each of the 8 clusters, and the percentage of occurrence of thermal comfort conditions and each of the cooling and heating strategies in these 8 zones was evaluated. In heating strategies, the most common suggestion for all regions of the country is "internal heat gain", while cooling strategies in the country are more diverse. Utilization of "natural ventilation" in humid regions, "direct evaporative cooling" in hot and dry regions, "indirect evaporative cooling" in all warm regions, "night ventilation with thermal mass" in almost all parts of the country which include "active air conditioning systems" in hot and humid climates are suggested. The highest percentage of "thermal comfort" is in hot and humid climates and the lowest percentage in the humid Caspian climate, which shows that the main adverse climatic conditions in other parts of the country are because of the cold winter weather. Thus, this result is in contrast to what has always been imagined that the climate of the Caspian region provides the most temperate and favorable environmental conditions for individuals. In the present study, it was found that the lowest incidence of thermal comfort is in this area and the need for direct solar radiation is more than in other groups.