DAYLIGHT REFINEMENT OF A TRADITIONAL BUILDING IN HEBRON, PALESTINE

Abstract

The old city of Hebron suffers from population migration for several reasons. The most influential reason is the occupation rules against Palestinian people who are living there. Where these rules push them for the displacement, in order to take over their homes. Hebron municipality tried to encourage people to stay there by decreasing the taxes and providing them by nearly free electricity and water services. While physically, the historical buildings need to be renovated environmentally to fit the people’s needs, taking daylight, ventilation and thermal performance and other factors into consideration. Accordingly, this research aims to study the possibility of enhancing daylight inside buildings there, as the daylight is an important environmental factor for living inside homes. A historical building was randomly selected as a case study to be surveyed, analyzed, and simulated considering the natural lighting passage inside it, to know to what extent the daylight level can be improved. On-site measurements and a simulation software (Dialux evo 9.1) were used to test different passive strategies of daylight refinement. The results confirm the high performance of lighting pipe over a skylight if it is used in the case study. Using such passive strategy was effective as a solution to improve the indoor environment of the traditional building, which can be adopted as a common strategy in other historical buildings of Palestine.