Square building or not Cold Climate

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Tony Young

June 26, 2021 16:19

Can someone clarify for me the best building shape for cold climate. In Building construction illustrated it says buildings in cold climates should be compact and square. In Sun Wind Light it says that buildings should be elongated and that compact buildings are not as good. Can someone shed light on this?

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  Michael Ermann June 26, 2021 20:31

  If you live in a sunny cold climate, like Wyoming, and are mainly looking to occupy the building in the daytime, like an office building, then you can see how a long southern wall with windows might collect passive solar gains … If is peak heat loss you are most worried about, like you want to size a smaller boiler to handle nighttime maximum skin heat loss, you’d want to minimize skin area-to-volume ratio (think about how cold your fingers get in the winter because of their skin area to volume ratio). A caveat: passive solar gains only work if there’s enough thermal mass inside to avoid overheating on cool but not cold sunny days, the skin is airtight, the skin (especially the roof) is well-insulated….and none of this thread applies in medium and large buildings (>10,000 sf)…but the exams don’t seem to be aware of these significant caveats yet.

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  Gang Chen June 27, 2021 01:15

  A compact building with a square or round plan can have less heat loss, an elongated building can have more heat gain on the south side if you place the long axis along a east west direction.. They are talking about two different aspects of design. It really depends on the context of the question.

  Gang Chen, Author, AIA, LEED AP BD+C (GreenExamEducation.com)

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