Contemporary House with Vernacular Elements Effect on Natural Ventilation in Tropical Climate

Most design of houses in tropical area today still considers natural ventilation as their main ventila tion approach. However, proper understanding on how natural ventilation reacts tow ards variety of building designs is very important in taking advantage of the potential. Based on previous researches, vernacular buildings show good natural ventilation potential by providing good indoor air movement. Therefore, the research was done to see how vernacular building elements applied on contemporary design houses may affect their natural ventilation performance. T wo case studies of houses were chosen according to design criteria identified. In both cases, the ventilation performance was iden tified by collecting data of the air movement via t he wind speed and air temperature at several points determined inside and outside of the houses. The result shows the high c eiling double volume house known as Rengit House of Case Study 2 shows a better natural ventilation performance compared to anoth er high ceiling double volume house of Case Study 1 known as BP House. The Rengit house roof is high using Malay traditional roof element with ventilation openings, while the windows are positio ned in order where they may capture the maximum cross ventilation at the site. However, in BP house, instead of having numbers of window openings, the slim elongated design of the windows shows a lower performance in capturing the air movement into the house. As predicted, the double volume area of Rengit house which is larger than the BP house also recorded a better vertical a ir movement. The improper positioning of openings in BP house also show interruption on the vertical air movement which def y its ventilation potential.