Hanan Al-Khatri¹ and Mohamed B. Gadi^2
1Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman
²Department of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Part of the book: Sustainable and Healthy Building Environments

Abstract

Creating thermally comfortable environments in public buildings is a challenging task. Part of the challenges evolves from the contradiction between the subjective nature of thermal comfort on one hand and the practical methods followed in providing it in built environments on the other hand, where the subjective nature emphasises individuality, but the practical methods entail centrality. This contradiction is obviously apparent in public buildings, including educational buildings, that frequently fail to satisfy the thermal comfort demands of their users. The chapter at hand discusses this idea by taking the educational buildings as a case study to understand the effects of centrality in providing thermal comfort.

Keywords: thermal comfort, students, educational buildings, centrality, personal control models

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