Indoor Thermal Landscapes: Investigating Thermal Transitions and Energy Performance in Workspaces

Building standards promote uniform thermal environments, limiting thermal variance. Real building measurements show decreasing temperature variance and overall increasing indoor temperatures. While the Adaptive Thermal Comfort (ATC) approach broadens thermal comfort bands and offers energy benefits, design solutions are required to make broader temperature ranges a reality. The ATC approach, suggests that repeated exposure to the same thermal environments leads to adaptation, reducing the demand for thermal variation. However, some thermal contrast can be pleasurable, inducing alliesthesia and improving health indicators. This work discusses thermal zoning’s potential to promote thermal variation, alliesthesia in architecture and energy conservation opportunities. Particularly, it investigates the role transitional spaces, like corridors and atria, can play in office buildings. Using simulation, we compare thermal and energy performance of different design variants of a multizone building energy model with a central atrium, a thermal buffer zone (corridor), and perimeter office spaces. We compare these variants to a baseline case that portraits a typical office building in Northern Europe, where all thermal zones are seasonally heated. The variants are: (i) unconditioned atrium, conditioned offices and corridors; (ii) unconditioned atrium and connected corridors, conditioned offices; (iii) unconditioned atrium and closed corridors, conditioned offices. The results show that thermal zoning can promote thermal variation leading to alliesthesia in compact, well-insulated buildings. It also highlights the thermal and energy benefits of using buffer spaces like corridors. In our case, a closed-off unconditioned corridor mediates the thermal contrast between conditioned offices and unconditioned atrium, saving appr. 40% of energy compared to the baseline. Finally, we discuss that defining conditioned and non-conditioned zones requires a careful design of the interface surfaces, as well as we discuss the limitations of common energy-related metrics to assess designs that explore thermal variation and alliesthesia.