Passive design strategies
The design of the Masdar HQ follows the successful formula of combining passive design strategies with active systems strategies and renewable energy to achieve its energy savings goals. But unlike other projects where sustainable strategies appear to be an after thought, the building’s basic forms appears to have been derived from these strategies.
One of the main form-making strategies is a ventilation strategy derived from the region’s traditional ventilation elements. Before the recent discovery of oil in the gulf region’s, its hot and humid climate led to the development of a traditional architecture that encourages air movement in order to improve comfort conditions. One of the ventilation elements used in this environmentally responsive architecture was the wind tower.
The design of Masdar HQ is dominated by 11 cone-shaped adaptations of traditional wind towers which act as outlet wind towers drawing hot air upwards during the day. The optimized form of these cones (also called wind cones) uses stack ventilation as well as the wind above the building to create a negative pressure at the top of the cones, which in turn creates air movement in the interior courtyard spaces at the base of the cone and draws cooler air up through the subterranean levels of the city below. At night, the wind cones reverse roles acting as inlet wind towers drawing cool night air downwards to cool the building structure (Figure 3). Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) studies were used to analyze the effect of outside wind on air movement inside the wind cones and to optimize the location of the air inlets for more uniform ventilation (Figure 4).