Learning sustainability from Arab Gulf vernacular architecture

This chapter describes an approach that helps to understand the complex relationship between environmental and sociocultural factors and how to learn/derive sustainable design guidelines from vernacular architecture. The method identifies at the outset that vernacular architecture is a result of both cultural and environmental influences. It describes a set of factors that belong to two different categories, sociocultural and environmental, and that have had impact on generating the vernacular architecture of the Arab Gulf. Then it focuses on analyzing selected architectural elements based on the influencing factors. It presents a matrix that illustrates the function of each element and the complex relationship between each element and the factors that affect it. To understand these complex relationships, another matrix was devised to analyze the interactions between these elements under the relevant factors. The outcomes can be used to develop rules of thumb for sustainable design.