WALKING IN THE WIND: WIND-DRIVEN URBAN & MIXED-USE BUILDING CLUSTER DESIGN

Abstract

This thesis seeks to use wind to drive the design of a selected urban and building environment. The primary focus is on how wind-driven urban and mixed-use building design can improve the attractiveness and use of outdoor and semi-open pedestrian spaces by improving natural ventilation and thermal comfort in the dense urban context of the Central Business District (CBD) in Singapore. Outdoor pedestrian thermal comfort is important in an urbanised environment such as Singapore's CBD because, in conjunction to the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s latest master plan objectives of achieving a "Walkable" city, having a thermally comfortable outdoor pedestrian environment can encourage people to use outdoor spaces and public transport more, which would reduce their carbon footprint by decreasing private transport use, and hence resulting in a more sustainable environment. At the building scale, conventional building designs such as sealed and air-conditioned glass boxes consume large amounts of energy and do not respond fully to the tropical climate Singapore experiences. By proposing to have primary circulatory and atrium spaces at the pedestrian level open to the outdoors, integrated with combined office and residential towers that respond to both urban, wind and site contexts, this thesis aims to propose an alternative way of designing our cities and buildings. As mentioned by Baruch Givoni, wind is the climatic element that is most modified by urbanization. It is also the one that can be greatest controlled and modified by urban design. This and other studies about pedestrian circulation design and comfort, form the basis and motivation for this thesis.