The maturation of a low-impact building: post occupancy evaluation of daylighting and the thermal environment over 2 years

Post occupancy evaluations (POEs) are regularly carried out in various types of building to assess whether the building is meeting the demand of its users and to collect information that may be useful for design of similar buildings in the future. They are, however often carried out over a limited period as part of the hand-over process and as such only cover the early part of a building’s life which is often the learning phase for users of the building. As users have often moved from some other facility to the new location, they may also have the “shock of the new” as a confounding factor.
This paper reports the results of the second phase of a long-term POE of a new teaching building for the School of Architecture of the University of Portsmouth, assessing perceptions of comfort against measured data. It builds on the initial results reported at PLEA 2015 comparing these results to the new data to show the effects of the building “bedding in” as its users grow accustomed to its systems and environment. The occupants of the new building are primarily students of architecture and form an unusual population of young, international people who are well-versed in sustainable architecture techniques and expectations.