International Journal of

Traditional building technologies have much to teach us about how to design regionally appropriate structures. The Orosi is one of these useful technologies, which has been used for many centuries in order to control the harsh sunlight in Iran. This architectural element was rather important because the intensive solar radiation could easily damage valuable carpets used in most spaces in Persian buildings. The main question of this research was how much could the traditional Orosi windows reduce the harmful spectrums of sunlight? In order to investigate this effect, a combination of field study, laboratory measurements, and case study research method was applied. Nine Persian traditional Orosi windows were chosen as case studies and the windows’ geometric lattice (Gereh–Chini) and glazing color combinations were drawn and plotted. The experiment was carried out for carpeted and non–carpeted spaces. In order to measure the light transmission of the sample tinted glazing from the Orosi windows, a T80+ spectrophotometer was used. After calculating CIE and skin damage factors and visible transmittance for each piece of glass, an area weighting was used to calculate these factors for the entire Orosi. The results show a significant difference between CIE damage factors of the Orosis in carpeted and non–carpeted spaces where the carpeted spaces had the least amount of CIE damage factor.

Environmental problems caused by fossil fuel consumption, on the one hand, and the upcoming prospect of ending these fuels on the other, attracted much attention towards sustainable architecture. Traditional buildings can be seen as a sample of sustainability; as they have used strategies to cope with the environment, which have been developed over the years, providing users’ comfort conditions for centuries. But before implementing these strategies in today buildings, we need to know the exact effect of their use; something that is regularly performed by an energy simulation software. Thus, first, we should know the ability of the software in modeling different design strategies, and secondly we should be certain of the validation of its results. This research aims to study the ability of DesignBuilder software (as one of the most applied software for building energy simulation) to model and simulate a complex traditional building. The accuracy of DesignBuilder thermal simulation results, in comparison with the experimental data is the main question of this study. To do this, Rasoulian house in Yazd (in hot and arid climate of Iran) was chosen as a case study and after simulating the entire building, the simulation results were compared with experimental measurement data. The results show that in most spaces, the experimental data were only 1–5°C different from the results of the simulation. Finally, the probable causes of these differences were analyzed and some suggestions were proposed to develop DesignBuilder, to be more applicable in simulating buildings of hot and arid climate.