Standard for School Design in The Tropics: Compliance and Classroom Comfort

Abstract

For the design of schools in Colombia, NTC 4595: Planning and Design of School Facilities and Environments, offers design recommendations to achieve comfortable spaces in terms of thermal, visual and auditory comfort. The aim of the contribution, derived from a PhD research, is to analyze the comfort in classrooms of public schools in Cali in terms of: a. climatic moments and b. level of compliance with the Technical Standard, in order to validate the relevance of the recommendations to the comfort perceived by students. The methodology used is the User Perception Environmental Audit, in four public schools, for which measurements of environmental parameters were made with specialized equipment and surveys of 535 students. Statistical processing was carried out using test for paired samples, and one way ANOVA's. Among the main findings is the low use of external environmental conditions, derived from inflexible architectural envelopes; in addition to the low relationship between compliance with the standard and the comfort perceived by students. This demonstrates the need for further study of the normative ranges and recommendations for tropical contexts such as the one studied.