The Atlas Of Comfort

In this post I show you a tool which architects, building designers, mechanical engineers, students of design based disciplines, and general members of the public can use as a guide towards designing more comfortable houses. 

The Atlas of Comfort is the invention of mechanical engineer and soon-to-be Dr Germán Molina, a completing PhD Candidate at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.

Unsatisfied with the way science defined comfort through physiological and thermodynamic parameters alone, Germán sought knowledge in the social sciences and combined this with his engineering background to more holistically define what feeling comfortable is.

To skip directly to the atlas click here

What Am I Looking At?

Germán in his blog posts defines the Atlas Of Comfort as “a systematic manner in which we can analyze people’s comfort and their assessment of the built environment.”  The database which powers the atlas is a collection of qualitative interview responses to buildings and site conditions, classified within concentric components of comfort, and expressed as situational clusters combining various daylight, acoustics, warmth, cooling, and air quality domains.

The atlas shows much more than thermal comfort.  It documents and explains the feeling of being comfortable in buildings as interactions between people and the built environment; social, physiological, psychological needs as they should be met by various building and site design features.

Clicking on the picture above will take you to the atlas’s operating platform. Once there clicking on any part of the graphic opens text items divided into generic summaries for each component of comfort, commentary of interrelationships between components, series of domains or attributes classified into topics, and relevant interview responses (what real people say) about each component, attribute, and topic.

How Can The Atlas Help Construction Industry Professionals?

I became rather interested in this tool because, in my opinion it succinctly and accurately contains many of the dimensions of architectural design as a whole process.

It typically takes years of practice beyond graduate education to gain mastery of each component, to understand how components present as client requests or comments, to know how these need to be addressed through practical design solutions, and the ways in which each component is connected and interacts with other components in the making of comfortable built spaces.

Practitioners will likely benefit from using the Atlas Of Comfort as a checklist of features and typical client driven requirements when needing to design buildings that achieve comfort in trans-disciplinary manners (thermodynamic comfort, psychological comfort, social comfort, physiological comfort, etc.). This is particularly useful if your country’s planning or building laws are performance based.

Thanks to interconnections the made between components, the atlas can be used to more accurately translate client requests into design actions which result in buildings and site treatments that deliver comfort outcomes more accurately and across more parameters of comfort.

How Can the Atlas Help the General Public and Students of Design Based Disciplines?

The atlas makes for an attractive guide for students and the general public on how to think through the typical complexity of building design without the experience.

It can help the general public communicate their wishes more clearly to their building designers and it can be used by students of design based disciplines to increase the thoroughness of design based assignments.

Whilst the Atlas Of Comfort does not replace the thoroughness of practice experience, it certainly can be used by early career designers to focus and expedite their competency in design as a holistic process.

How Can the Atlas Be of Use in the Face of Legislative Changes?

In Western Australia the laws that govern concept and sketch design (part of design elements for development approvals) are rapidly shifting from a deemed-to-satisfy tick-the-box approach to a performance based assessment requiring designers to concurrently consider social, economic, and ecological components and implications of design.

The new system is likely to become law by 2022 and allows the designer more freedom to express how requirements like comfort are achieved by each proposed development. The Atlas of Comfort is a potential asset in guiding building designers and proving proof of concept in the new performance based assessment framework.

References – websites accessed and correct at time of publishing.

Germán Molina’s website can be found here: https://buildingsforpeople.org/

The Atlas of Comfort can be found under Germán’s website “resources” tab, a direct link is: : https://buildingsforpeople.org/atlas.html

Quoted blog post is here: https://buildingsforpeople.org/2020-08-14.blog

Screenshot is from: https://buildingsforpeople.org/atlas.html?code=times_of_occupancy&domain=daylight

If you are interested in a full 45 minute podcast interview of Germán Molina’s work you can find it here: https://homestylegreen.com/257-the-atlas-of-comfort/