“Microclimatic diversities” around urban high rise building forms in the context of bio climatic design: a case of Colombo

Abstract

The outdoor microclimate around a building varies creating diversified vertical and horizontal climatic conditions. Suddenly blooming up high rise buildings (HRB) in Colombo, without looking climatic adaptations and environmental impacts, cause bad influences occur in near future. Therefore the relationships between the building design and the outside microclimatic diversities are important when applying bio climatic, adaptive and interactive solution in architecture. This study mainly focuses on identifying these micro climatic diversities around HRB forms for a bioclimatic design. Through a heuristic study on HRB in existing context of Colombo, the HNB tower, Seylan tower, BOC tower and Mahaweli building were selected as main case studies with diversified forms to investigate boundary layer climatic diversities. The main conclusion of the study points out, that the designing process of HRB should pay more attention to bio climatic approach and applications with a better understanding on the external microclimatic character and diversity, rather than following typical two dimensional planning methods. This will result in better and practical design outcomes which will increase users satisfaction and improvements in energy saving.