Climate-Adaptive Architecture in Arid Regions: Materials, Strategies and Technological Innovations

• Nafae Hamad

  Engineering and Industrial Management, Higher Institute of Science and Technology, Cyrene, Libya

  Author

Climate change in recent years has made this call even more urgent for all kinds of environments, from arid regions to urban areas. These changes are important, as their solutions provide ways to design energy efficiency, thermal comfort, and long-term resilience. This paper reviews innovations and recent developments in climate-adaptive architectural design, focusing on climate-responsive building materials, smart building technologies, and examples from different parts of the world. Current understanding of high-performance insulating materials, phase-change materials (PCMs), and bio-based, low-carbon materials will be discussed, portraying them as very effective in reducing heat transfer, eliminating embodied carbon, and upscaling building performance. It eventually contemplates recent technological advancements by pointing out new sophisticated envelopes of intelligent buildings, responsive-facade buildings, Building Information Modeling (BIM), artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the leverage of technology's new era in digital twins, among other things that increase building operational energy efficiency as well as optimized environmental control and predictive building management. The most effective strategies inferred from a comparative assessment between recent international case studies are those that combine high-performance passive design in combination with enhanced materials and smart digital systems rather than relying solely on individual technologies. The articulation also exposes key obstacles for its implementation, including financial barriers, technical complications, and the difficulty of achieving long-term performance with such systems

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