Climate Considerations in Building and Urban Design
About this book
Climate Considerations in Building and Urban Design by Baruch Givoni, published by Van Nostrand Reinhold in 1998, represents the most comprehensive synthesis of building and urban climatology that Givoni produced across his long career. Where his earlier books addressed specific technical problems — thermal comfort, passive cooling, solar design — this volume takes a wider view, examining how climate should inform decision-making at every scale of the built environment, from the orientation of a single window to the layout of an entire urban district. It is organized into three interconnected parts that move progressively from the scale of the individual building to that of the city, and finally to region-specific design guidelines that integrate both scales.
Part One, devoted to building climatology, begins with the foundations: how to analyze and interpret climatic data in ways that are directly useful to designers. Givoni presents his well-known building bioclimatic chart — an analytical tool that plots temperature and humidity data on a psychrometric diagram and identifies the passive design strategies best suited to achieving thermal comfort for a given climate. This chart, first developed in his landmark 1969 work Man, Climate, and Architecture and subsequently refined, extends and corrects Victor Olgyay's earlier bioclimatic chart by accounting for conditions inside the building rather than relying solely on outdoor measurements, making it more accurate for predicting actual occupant comfort.
The reader is guided through the use of this tool and its application to real climatic datasets. The building climatology section goes on to examine the architectural variables that shape the indoor thermal environment: the thermal mass of walls and floors, the insulating properties of building materials, the behavior of glazing systems, the role of ventilation, and the influence of building form and compactness. Passive solar heating systems are treated alongside passive cooling strategies, giving the book a balanced, whole-year perspective that avoids the common trap of optimizing for a single season.
The thermal performance characteristics of different housing typologies — detached houses, row houses, apartment blocks, courtyard dwellings — are compared across climatic conditions, giving designers a framework for understanding how typological choices translate into thermal outcomes. Part Two addresses urban climatology, shifting attention from individual buildings to the collective thermal environment of cities and neighborhoods. Givoni examines the urban heat island phenomenon — the well-documented tendency of dense urban areas to be significantly warmer than their rural surroundings — and analyzes the mechanisms by which urban design decisions contribute to or mitigate this effect.
Street orientation, building height-to-width ratios, canyon geometry, the thermal and radiative properties of paving and roofing materials, and the distribution of impervious versus vegetated surfaces are all treated as variables with measurable effects on urban air temperatures, solar radiation loads, and wind patterns. The role of green areas — parks, street trees, green roofs, and planted courtyards — in moderating urban climate is given thorough treatment, drawing on both physical analysis and empirical evidence from cities in different climate zones. Givoni makes a compelling case that strategic integration of vegetation into urban fabric is not merely an aesthetic amenity but a substantive tool for climate management, capable of reducing air temperatures, increasing humidity in dry climates, providing shade to pedestrians and building facades, and improving the overall microclimate of urban open spaces.
Part Three brings the analysis together in the form of climate-specific design guidelines for four broadly defined climate types: hot-dry, hot-humid, cold, and the mixed zone characterized by cold winters and hot-humid summers. For each type, Givoni synthesizes the implications of the preceding analysis into practical recommendations at both building and urban scales — covering site selection, street and block orientation, building form and density, facade treatment, vegetation strategies, and the relationship between indoor and outdoor spaces. This section is explicitly prescriptive rather than descriptive, offering the kind of actionable guidance that practicing architects and urban designers can apply in their work.
The book is generously illustrated with diagrams, tables, and graphs, and its prose is notably accessible for a technically rigorous text. Givoni's ability to present complex climatological analysis in clear, common-sense language — without sacrificing precision — reflects decades of experience teaching these subjects to architecture students. The result is a book that serves both as a reference for experienced practitioners and as a graduate-level educational text.
Climate Considerations in Building and Urban Design remains, more than two decades after its publication, one of the most cited works in the fields of bioclimatic architecture and sustainable urban design. Its integration of building-scale and urban-scale thinking, its grounding in empirical data, and its commitment to directly applicable design guidance make it an indispensable resource for anyone working at the intersection of climate science and the built environment. Sources consulted: Wiley publisher description (wiley.com); Amazon.com product description; BuildingGreen newsbrief; Open Library (openlibrary.org); SciSpace paper record; SCIRP reference database.