A Critical review on high rise buildings in the context of bio climatic design a case of vertical diversity in tropical Colombo

Abstract

Building envelop plays a vital role in creating comfortable indoor environments by cutting off unfavorable outdoor climatic conditions. The outdoor microclimate around a building varies creating diversified vertical climatic conditions. Yet less attention is given to the vertical climatic diversity in designing facades of tall buildings. The study critically discusses the facade design of tall buildings considering its vertical response and co-relationship to outside climatic diversity. Through a typical empirical study on randomly selected HRB in the existing context of Colombo, the Mahaweli Authority building was selected to investigate the co relationship of building design and the vertical character of its external climate. The final conclusion points out, that the designing process of HRB should pay more attention to bio climatic approach and design interventions with a better understanding on the external climatic character and its vertical diversity, rather than following typical two dimensional planning methods. This will result better and practical design outcome which will increase users satisfaction and improvements in energy saving.