MEDITERRANEAN ACTIVE HOUSE: ANALYSIS OF CLIMATE AND USERS IMPACT ON ENERGY AND INDOOR COMFORT IN THE NEW EFFICIENCY STANDARD FOR SUSTAINABLE BUILDINGS

Active House is a new vision of sustainability for buildings, that aims to promote a new way of thinking about sustainability itself. The goal of the vision is to create healthier buildings, capable to assure indoor comfort minimizing the environmental impact. The research proposed is part of the International framework about the evaluation of the performance requested to a construction in order to be classified as Active House. The aim is to investigate how the standard needs to be changed and moulded to be adaptable to the Mediterranean region and to develop practical guidelines for designing an Active House in hot climate. The methodology used is a step by step analysis. First of all it builds a perfect virtual prototype of Mediterranean Active House to evaluate in different scenarios the robustness of the model and the resilience of the building. Once that a med_AH is defined, the conclusions and the hypothesis deduced are validated on two case studies: VELUXlab and RhOME.