Lessons from the Past to Enhance the Environmental Performance of Primary School Classrooms in Egypt

Abstract

The achievement of adequate internal environment quality (IEQ) – as one of the most important aspects of quality of life - lies at the core of every debate about built environment of school buildings. Many attempts have been made in the past to examine different aspects of the internal environment quality of primary classrooms. Unhealthy classrooms with poor environmental quality were found to lead to absenteeism among staff and pupils, and negatively affect the performance of children, schoolwork as well as the education process. Children are more susceptible than adults to the effect of poor internal environment quality, which can be “subtle and do not always produce easily recognizable impacts on health and wellbeing”. Egyptian schools are no exception. The author of the current research believes that the environmental performance of these schools could be better by adopting passive strategies and measures. The current paper presents and analysis three examples of the contemporary schools thought to be climatically and environmentally responsive. Their environmental performances are analyzed in order to adopt useful ideas and measures to deal with the hot dry climate in Egypt. The precedents are chosen from the hot dray region and the semi-arid zones according to the Koppen Climatic Classification. Hourly climatic data of their locations are synthesized Using Meteonorm1 software and analyzed using Weather Tool2 to investigate the response of the school design to the climate context. Results suggest a number of useful passive measures that could be applied on the Egyptian schools in order to enhance their environmental performance.