With the increase in the urban world population, the need for sustainable cities has become crucial, and comfortable and livable open spaces are an important aspect for this purpose. However, since open spaces are affected by the urban design of an area, their quality depends on the priorities of the stakeholders and decision makers, and thus might be compromised to the advantage of other needs, such as prioritizing profit over the public good. The thesis addresses comfort in open spaces, specifically within waterfront developments because many growing cities are coastal and thus, have witnessed ...

In the high mountains of Lebanon, internal comfort heavily relies on fuel consumption for indoor space heating. Being a country that lacks natural resources such as fuel and gas, the energy sector in Lebanon had been unable to meet the market demand for a long time. The simple solution that was adopted to compensate for the electricity shortage over the past years was to rely on private generators for power supply. This solution urged additional energy costs for heating and cooling demands through the inefficient use of air cooling and heating, and since cooling and heating depend primarily on ...

Solar Chimney (SC) is a passive design used to enhance natural ventilation and space conditioning in a building, limiting the energy requirement of the building to low operational costs. In Lebanon, high energy consumption of residential buildings is recorded mainly for heating and cooling, marking the highest consumption in the Western Mid Mountain (WMM) climatic zone. Thus, proposing the SC application for limiting this high thermal demand in residential buildings of the WMM zone for both heating and cooling would limit the total energy consumption. SC design has various types (Stand-alone SC ...

This paper examines the impact of daylight performance on classroom orientation in Beirut district and its suburbs. Daylight conditions in educational buildings have been of interest since the discovery of artificial light in the nineteenth century. Classroom orientation is crucial in optimizing daylight performance, which can positively impact student health, learning achievements, and psychology. In Lebanon, Government Decree No. 90911 recommends classrooms to have a southern orientation, with the longest part of the southern facade facing south. However, the decree does not provide any further ...

Construction industries may play a critical role in dominant energy usage as pressure mounts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Energy efficiency investments can be a profitable way to reduce carbon emissions. Solar buildings with Net-Zero Energy are emerging as a promising way for reducing buildings' environmental impact. In Lebanon, there is a transition from vernacular to modern architecture in the early twentieth century. It is tightly related to the implementation of concrete in construction and the formation of the national cement industry, which paved the way for the creation of ...

As cities are growing today, various problems are appearing and created by this growth; and Beirut is no exception. The main outcome of this is investments in land for construction, which leads to lack of open spaces and especially green spaces. Beirut is suffering from the over crowdedness of people and buildings and most importantly the lack of green spaces. On the other hand, rooftops are usually large empty spaces that resemble mostly to the empty lots before the construction of their respective buildings, so they are an urban layer that can make up for the lack of open spaces in the city, ...

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic caused by highly contagious respiratory diseases brought about unprecedented crises across the world, and a housing crisis among others. Lebanon in particular, which is the context of this study, was heavily impacted by the pandemic, exacerbated by a pre-existing refugee crisis and by the Beirut Port explosion. This study aims to research the characteristics of an emergency shelter that mitigates the spread of contagious respiratory diseases in Lebanese urban areas as the latter are hubs of infectious diseases. In this context, the study researches the characteristics ...