Basant Abdelrahman, Disha Arora, Pradyumna Vikharankar and Raffaele Schiavello
MASTER IN ADVANCED ECOLOGICAL BUILDINGS AND BIOCITIES 2022-23, IAAC
LOCATION
The Urban social housing studio aims in finding ecological and social design solutions for urban housing, with a special focus on various climate zone this semester. In our specific case, we found a site in a hot and arid climate and, eventually chose a culturally and architecturally rich site in Egypt’s Aswan village. The design mainly aims to cater to the people of Aswan, who were severely affected from the displacement, that occurred due to the expansion of the Aswan Dam.
SUN / SHADING / WIND ANALYSIS
The climate of Aswan is subtropical desert, with relatively milder winters and very hot, sunny and dry summers. The city is located in southern Egypt, along the Nile River, just north of the Aswan Dam. It is one of the driest and sunniest places in the world. Due to the hot and dry summers, along with lower night temperatures, it was essential to take the prevailing North-South winds into design consideration. The Psychrometric chart shares solutions like evaporative cooling for summer and internal heat gain for winters.
COMFORT AND HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY
The Nubian people’s main activities revolve around touristic and recreational activities since that is their main source of income
The below diagram illustrates human activities in different spaces, throughout the day, and how these spaces affects their thermal comfort.
CASE STUDIES
CLIMATIC STRATEGIES
Climate strategies formed through a ranking system of importance and effectiveness, based on the desert climate condition.
PRE-DESIGN CLIMATE PROTOTYPE
TECTONICS STRATEGIES
The importance of human thermal comfort is highlighted in the sections below as a study of spaces and its impact on the temperature.
MASSING STRATEGIES
The study of the prototype is now implemented on a larger scale
CLIMATIC SCHEME
A unit layout is produced in order to understand the function of given spaces and what role they play in the thermodynamic movement.
