Adaptive Thermal Comfort: How to Design Comfortable Buildings

To remain comfortable in a world of ever more extreme weather events and climate trends, we need a building revolution. Building designers, owners, managers, and occupants must prepare now for future climates with new ways to stay comfortable indoors. This book is a compendium of information on comfort that provides an overview of the complexity of the many ways that comfort is achieved in buildings. It outlines the impacts and implications of current design practices on greenhouse gas emissions from buildings and the health and well-being of people in them. In reality, many modern buildings, and particularly homes, are already failing in various ways. During extreme weather events, they overheat. During power outages, many buildings do not even remain habitable. During the COVID pandemic, cross-infections between occupants were rife in buildings like hospitals and hotels without opening windows. As energy prices soared and globally economies flatlined, many found themselves unable to pay for high-cost comfort solutions and so either had to change their lifestyles and expectations or learn to live with discomfort. Underlying many of the growing global problems is the trend towards an overdependence on mechanical systems to produce comfort, coupled with a decrease in the passive climatic performance of the buildings themselves. Both factors are resulting in a generation of increasingly un-resilient buildings.

The theory of adaptive thermal comfort states that people adapt to those temperatures they normally occupy, and if they become uncomfortable, they tend to change themselves or their surroundings to return to comfort, if they are able or can afford to. This is the third of three volumes, which builds on the practical and theoretical foundations of the subject laid out in the first two volumes. It builds on their premises to shape a new and better roadmap going forward for imagining, designing, and constructing adaptable buildings, and for the behavioural lifestyle changes needed to prepare humanity to survive and thrive comfortably in the very different weather and climates ahead.

Susan Roaf is Emeritus Professor of Architectural Engineering at Heriot Watt University. Raised in Malaysia and the Australian bush and educated in Britain, she has lived and worked as an architect, anthropologist, and archaeologist in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, California, and Antarctica, experiences that colour her unique understanding of buildings and comfort in different climates and cultures and that inspired her work on adapting buildings and cities to a heating world. She pioneered UK building–integrated solar technologies and eco-design and, with Nicol and Humphreys, has promoted adaptive thermal comfort globally. Her expertise in ancient technologies informed some of her 23 books and other publications, all aimed at better understanding performance in the past, present, and future.

Fergus Nicol is an award-winning leader in the field of adaptive thermal comfort, having started as a physicist at the Building Research Establishment in the 1960s. He moved on to work with the UK Medical Research Council and into teaching before leaving both to start the radical book shop Bookmarks. Returning to research in 1992, he is now Emeritus Professor in a number of universities and a top cited scholar across his many publications. He led influential pan-European and Pakistan studies on comfort, and he leads NCEUB, the Network for Comfort and Energy Use in Buildings. He co-founded and ran the Windsor Conferences on Comfort and is internationally respected for his support of fellow researchers and students.

Michael Humphreys is known for his pioneering work on the adaptive approach to comfort. He was Head of Human Factors at the Building Research Establishment and has been a Research Professor at Oxford Brookes University. His scientific interests are the methodology of field studies of environmental comfort, the structure and statistical modelling of human adaptive behaviour, and the interactions between the several aspects of the indoor environment.