Climate and Energy Lab in Architecture (CeLA)

Background

The Climate and Energy Laboratory (CeLA) in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning is involved in the environmentally conscious design of buildings, urban spaces, and new materials. It also serves as a national consultation center on these subjects to government offices, public and private bodies, and practitioners.

The impact of the work done by CeLA in relation to building and urban planning in Israel is extremely valuable, and the Technion has already acquired both a national reputation and international renown as a leader in this field. Many papers, describing the work done at the laboratory, were presented at National and International Conferences and Professional Journals.

CeLA combines research, teaching, and consultancy. The research lab is actively involved in setting the principles for the environmentally conscious design of buildings, urban spaces, and application of new materials and technologies. It also serves as a national consultation center on these subjects to government offices, public and private bodies, as well as architects. Expertise fields include climatic design and evaluation of intelligent facades, building upgrades for energy and comfort improvement, performance-based architectural design, daylight, thermal and visual comfort, development of strategies and devices for active and passive energy saving in buildings, solar rights and evaluation of wind flow around buildings, determination of principles for sustainable urban planning in different climates, zero and positive energy design, and implementation of strategies for sustainable bioclimatic architecture.

Research on these subjects is carried out primarily through computer simulation using state-of-the-art software, as well as by creating custom tools. CeLA has developed many unique Computer Aided Design tools for the advanced research conducted in the Laboratory.

Beyond and besides the research performed in this Laboratory, CeLA is a reference point also for teaching purposes, especially for undergraduate students in some of their compulsory courses and design studio as well.

Research focus

Among CeLA’s research topics we can include:

• Zero Energy Buildings and Communities
• Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM)
• Thermal Comfort in Buildings and Open Spaces
• Energy Performance and Optimization of Buildings
• Intelligent Buildings
• Retrofit of Buildings
• Performance in Buildings
• Daylight in Architecture
• Indoor Environmental Quality