Bio-climatic construction and design processes are based on a climate and environmental-aware architectural practice-oriented to achieve efficient use of energy during a building’s lifetime. 

The term ‘bio-climatic architecture’ was coined by the architects Victor and Aladar Olgyay in the early 1960s at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of Princeton University. Thereby, both scholars aimed to respond to the emerging environmental concerns of growing sectors of society in the late 1960s. However, with the Peak Oil Crisis of the early 1970s, this approach gained significant momentum and became widely implemented.

Thereby, practitioners designing bio-climatic architecture seek to generate optimal comfort conditions on the smallest energy budget possible, thus reducing the building’s overall carbon footprint and maintenance costs to a minimum during the building’s lifetime. Therefore, practitioners constructing bio-climatic architecture often use high-tech components to increase the building’s energy efficiency.   Nonetheless, it is of crucial importance to mention that the bio-climatic architectural discourse is centered on the energy performance of erected buildings, disregarding the energy flows running into the material’s extraction & transportation and the building’s demolition. 

Publishers comment: The author of this article mainly combines various parts of other publications to give the reader a first glance at the topic. Unfortunately, this article does not work with quote notes. The last pages provide the reader with a list of sources to which this article refers to.

article written by Guarrotxena, Nere; Orduz, Alejandro; Sánchez, Santiago; Romero, Ihordan Ernesto

READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN THE PDF ATTACHED.