Three storied terrace houses with an insulated rooftop for tropical climatic conditions

Abstract

With the growing population, there can be seen many developments in the construction field in recent times. People tend to move to the city areas seeking more facilities. However, this has been very difficult due to the high cost of land and construction. Although high-rise residential buildings (apartments) may seem to be a good solution, being an Asian country, most of the middle-class people are reluctant to live in these apartments due to cultural and social problems related to congested life. Therefore, to maximize the effective use of urban and suburban land, while providing private garden space for each house, a three storied terraced housing with an insulated rooftop that will allow the creation of a garden at rooftop level will be a winning option. The main advantage of such terrace housing is that it is ability to satisfy all the relevant building regulations applicable to create liveable houses with a land area of less than 100m2 per house (or less than 4 perch). Thus, when the land prices are very high, still it is possible to keep the overall costs lower since only a relatively smaller land area is now required to have a comfortably large house with a roof top garden. The roof top garden can allow regaining the land lost for the footprint of the house and hence can be considered as an attractive option. In this paper, the desirable concepts that can be followed to create thermally comfortable free running occupied spaces is described by considering the salient points of a warm humid tropical climates with low diurnal temperature variations. The various passive features that can be incorporated to various types of terrace housing also have been discussed in detail. Since Sri Lanka is having many variations of tropical climatic conditions varying from warm wet, warm dry and tropical uplands, such a development could provide a representative sample of possibilities that could occur in the tropical belt of the world in counties located on either side of the equator