Evaluation and visualisation of Mexican mass housing thermal performance

Abstract

Mass industrialised low-income housing is a building typology that is common in Mexico and possesses different characteristics in scale and social impact from other similar developments across the world. The business needs and socioeconomic factors behind these initiatives mean that the environmental performance is typically of low or no importance to developers, who instead are primarily concerned with the speed of erection and profit margins. However, such developments present particular interest to environmental design researchers; therefore, this paper presents some of the results from an extensive post-occupancy evaluation of field surveys conducted over a period of 2 years in Morelia, Mexico. The monitoring phase encompassed 12 dwellings with four different orientations, measuring internal temperature and relative humidity levels at 10 min intervals over the two distinct seasons of the local climate. The results are discussed, and conclusions are drawn to help with future development. In addition, an important aspect of this work is the presentation and communication of the collected data for different stakeholders involved in the design, construction and operation phases. The monitoring results are presented not only in the standard graph formats, but also by way of four-dimensional interactive visualisation approaches, relying on a proprietary research software prototype.