Architecture Advisor — Bioclimatic Design

Where are you building, and in what climate?

This application asks nothing of a regulation. It works from the position of the building and from the climate that position sits in, classified by Köppen–Geiger, because that is the classification the design literature is written against. Name the place and give its coordinates, then enter the monthly normals of the nearest station. What follows is orientation, compactness, roof, glazing, shading, the organisation of the plan and the movement of air — the decisions taken before any limit can be applied to them.

Place Type a Portuguese municipality, or any name you want the exports to carry.

Region Used only to seed the latitude and to label the site. Nothing in this application is indexed on it.

Latitude Degrees, north positive. Seeded from the region; replace it with the building's own.

Longitude Degrees, east positive. Read it off a map at the site itself.

Altitude of the site Metres above sea level, at the building, not at the town hall.

Building use Decides how the plan is read: a dwelling is zoned by hour of occupation, a workplace by internal gain.

Type of intervention

A new building can still choose its orientation and its form; a renovation has to take both as found.

Monthly normals

Köppen–Geiger is computed, not looked up, so it needs the twelve monthly mean temperatures and the twelve monthly precipitation totals. This application ships none: normals are measured data and it has no authority to invent them. Take them from the IPMA normais climatológicas for the nearest station, from another national service, or from a gridded product such as WorldClim, and name the source so the export carries it. Pick an IPMA station below and press Fill boxes — the twelve pairs and the station coordinates are entered for you.

Where the normals come from

Written into every CSV and PNG this application exports. Pick an IPMA station and press Fill boxes — fichas at ipma.pt/oclima/normais.clima — or name your own source.

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Grounded in the design literature

Olgyay, Lechner, DeKay and Brown, Hyde, Ching and Shapiro, Brophy and Lewis. Every guideline names the book it comes from, and where the books disagree the application says so rather than averaging them into a single number.

The decisions that come before the limits

Which way the building faces, how compact it is, what its roof does, how much glass each façade carries, where the rooms sit against the sun, and how air moves through the plan. None of these is settled by a maximum thermal transmittance.

A companion, not a replacement

Construction Advisor answers to the SCE and reports what an envelope may not exceed. This one carries none of that regulation. Use them in that order: shape the building here, then take it there to be checked.

Nothing is uploaded. The whole application runs on this computer.