Learning the harmony of indoor air quality from traditional housing. Case Study Batak Karo, Indonesia.

Abstract

Air quality in buildings is an important principle for a sustainable building to create comfort and health for living things and the environment. This study wants to explore how the air quality in traditional housing can be feel comfortable. How the building was designed for passive cooling in harmony with environment surrounding. The combination of qualitative and quantitative descriptive approach was used to analyse the traditional Batak Karo house (Mecu Houses, The Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) was used to know how the air movement inside the house. The Mecu house as a vertical building design proposal. This study focuses on elements of air quality in buildings by using the theory from Iwamura Sustainability of Housing, Embedded in the Local Context. The results of this study showed that the traditional Batak Karo House has the pleasant indoor air quality that achieved from the unique type of roof and openings inside the roof.