The following paper is part of an ongoing research about designing and building for extreme environments and climates. These environments are characterized by having physical conditions that are too challenging for human life, including extreme temperatures, lack, or excess, of humidity, high salinity, acidic pH, lack of oxygen and high radiation. This study focuses essentially on extreme temperatures, using as examples the city of Yakutsk, in Russia, and the city of Needles, in California, USA. The former is one of the coldest large cities in the world, where the lowest temperature ever recorded was -64oC; in the latter, which like Death Valley is known for extreme heat during the summer, the highest recorded temperature is +52oC, with a record of +38 oC for the minimum temperature. The purpose of this study is to understand how a building’s morphology, represented by the shape form factor, influences the behaviour of the internal environment and its energy performance. This is achieved through two benchmarks: the variation of the internal free-floating temperature and energy demands for comfort temperatures. The basic shape used in this assessment is a prism with a set of 10 size variations. The results were obtained from computational simulations using energy performance design tools such as LadyBug and HoneyBee, plug-ins of visual programming software Grasshopper, in Rhinoceros3D. Energy simulation engine is EnergyPlus.

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Extreme Environments,Building Morphology,Extreme Temperatures,Energy Design,Energy Simulation