Environmental Comfort as a Sustainable Strategy for Housing Integration: The AURA 1.0 Prototype for Social Housing

Abstract

The AURA 1.0 prototype is a sustainable social housing proposal, designed by the University of Seville and built for the first Latin American edition of the prestigious Solar Decathlon competition. Different conditioning strategies were integrated into this prototype, optimized for a tropical climate, and focused on contributing positively to the health of the most humble people in society. In this moment, in which a large part of the world population is confined to their homes due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we have the opportunity (and the obligation) to reconsider the relationship between architecture and medicine or in other words, between the daily human habitat and health. For this reason, this analysis of aspects derived from the interior conditioning of the homes is carried out. The main objective of the Aura proposal is to be able to extract data through a housing monitoring system, which allows us to transfer some design strategies to the society to which is a case study, in order to promote environmental comfort and, therefore, people’s health. The AURA 1.0 prototype develops flexible and adaptable living spaces, with a high environmental quality, in order to maintain the variables of temperature, relative humidity and natural lighting within a range of comfort required by the rules of the event. To achieve this end, the prototype develops an architectural proposal that combines passive and active conditioning strategies, using construction qualities and typical costs of social housing. These strategies allowed the project to achieve the first prize in the Comfort Conditions test. So, this paper presents an appropriate and tested solution that can satisfy comfortability and health of residents who live in social housing while maintaining low energy consumption.

Keywords

• architecture
• sustainability
• solar decathlon
• comfort
• health
• environment