The Well-Tempered Envelope: A Prototype as a Sustainable Residential Building

The paper presents a research on the topic of sustainable healthy indoor environments in residential buildings. In this case, indoor comfort is strictly linked to low energy winter heating and summer cooling, the use of eco-compatible materials and components and, lastly, to the application of sustainable building technologies. This applied research makes use of an architectural prototype built with dry technology – mostly using wooden components and easy disassemblable, renewable, recyclable materials – on which thermal, hygrometric and acoustic performances of the envelope and the entire building, in winter and summer seasons, are verified. A special analysis will be dedicated to the evaluation of the sun screens contributions and the adaptive capacity of the envelope in relation to the sun direction. The verification system is hybrid, as both theoretical and experimental methods for the calculation of the physical parameters are being used. Two are the fundamental aims of this research. The first one is the identification of an appropriate dry technology for a sustainable envelope - characterized by easy disassembly and maintenance, and formed by ecological and bio-compatible materials – , which would be capable of maintaining internal comfort with a very low energy consumption. The second one is the development of a theoretical and experimental verification protocol to check thermal, hygrometric and acoustic indoor performances, during both the design and the usage phase of the building. The paper presents the architecture and the technology of the prototype and a first draft of the verification protocol on the behaviour of the envelope in relation to a sustainable healthy indoor environment and its energy consumption.