Office buildings

The inappropriate indoor environmental quality of a building causes different problems such as headache and breathing difficulties which are called the syndrome of building sickness. These diseases reduce the efficiency of people and deteriorate the quality of their life. Studies carried out in hundreds of big office buildings across the world show that the indoor environment qualities of these buildings are about the average and a lot of employees are dissatisfied with their work place. Besides, the studies show that many of employees suffer from diseases associated with buildings. These diseases greatly affect the efficiency and working hours of employees and have grave economic consequences for the countries. If a space, including an office space, enjoys a qualitative interior, the employees`health and as a result their efficiency will improve. Therefore, attending to the indoor environment quality is a must in designing modern office buildings. The present field study was conducted on 10 office building in Kermanshah in winter 1390—a city which is located in a cold climate—and investigated the effect of environmental factors on the office indoor environment quality. The analysis of data by Statistical Package for Social Science Software1 revealed that the variables of suitable view and landscape, and ventilation have had the greatest effect and the sun light variable has had the smallest effect on the indoor environment quality.

Energy efficiency in office buildings has been the center of attention for many researches. This special attention is due to highly energy consumption in this building type. Refinement of facade and building’s envelop is a good approach to reduce buildings energy requirements. Double skin facade concepts are commonly used to achieve that object. Although the concept is not new, there is a growing tendency from the architects to put it into practice. However inappropriate selection of technical parameters in this kind of façade, such as its interior/ exterior openings, layers, materials and sهادیng device would lead to reverse expected results. The objective of this study is to improve and optimize the thermal performance of an office building in hot and dry climate. For this purpose a suitable double skin façade concept is designed to reduce the building’s annual energy requirements. This concept is optimized by integrating with a windcatcher. The optimization is performed based on simulating a designed office building by Energy Plus software. The results revealed that double skin façade integrated with wind catcher can significantly reduce annual energy requirement by 26.65%. The proposed solution can be considered as an effective platform for sustainable architecture and reduction of energy consumption.