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Expectations of traditional and contemporary buildings are different in terms of thermal comfort. Traditional buildings mostly achieve comfort through passive means, without HVAC support, but old levels of thermal satisfaction do not meet today’s expectations, although their passive thermal performances are notable for contemporary building designs. In this regard, the current study tries to investigate the possibility of comparing traditional and contemporary buildings’ construction techniques to achieve thermal comfort from an architectural point of view. In other words, is it possible to achieve passive building design by considering vernacular architecture principals as a reference? Likewise, how well can architects define insulation layers in contemporary construction surfaces in hot and humid climates? To this end, a dynamic, numerical, thermal calculation case study has been modeled in Famagusta, Northern Cyprus, to answer the above-mentioned questions. A mixed-use mode benefitting free-run periods is proposed and compared with a mode providing 24 hours of air-conditioning in different scenarios using the same initial settings. Thus, different floor-to-ceiling heights, insulation placements and indoor conditions have been tested separately in both winter and summer periods. The results show that thermal comfort can be achieved in free-run periods only during a limited percentage of the year. Furthermore, although increasing building heights may lead to a rise in the free-run periods, in contemporary buildings it increases the total energy usage of the buildings between 6% and 9% in the mixed mode. Therefore, vernacular architecture strategies are proper in their own context. However, this energy usage can still be controlled and optimized by such considerations as insulation material placement. In this regard, the best envelope properties for different building functions are proposed for application in hot and humid climates.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a worldwide pandemic in March 2020. As a result, all educational establishments have been expected to finish the 2019-20 spring semester online. Despite the significance of distance education, it appears that online education has not assisted architecture education adequately. This is due to the fact that it has higher learning objectives, is taught via coaching approaches, and incorporates nonverbal communication. Architects are trained through a method focused on the ‘studio course’. In this environment, students’ decisions are unintentionally affected by the unanticipated backtalk and discussions that arise from the design development process. In other words, criticism, which is a graphic and oral communication between the students and the instructor, is one of the most frequent learning strategies utilized in the design studio. The pedagogically distinctive implications of digital design have prompted the need for new educational frameworks in architecture. Thus, the primary aim of this study is to monitor and document current trends, benefits, and limitations of online architectural discourse and learning ecosystems from both students’ and tutors’ perspectives. It also investigates alternative pedagogical agendas in order to address the requirement to integrate different levels of students with online education. In this regard, the effects of the design medium, knowledge-based or theoretical courses, and practical courses are three common types of influences on educational system adaptability and inertia. Finally, in this research, authors attempt to formulate a theoretical framework and didactic principles for the modification of architectural online education by using multiple methods of data collection, primarily based on a systematic observation of the experiments, questioning the participants before and after the experiment, and evaluate of the descriptive results of the experiment.

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