Preliminary Thesis Statement

Green architecture has increasingly gained momentum over the last decade. Many sustainable strategies have emerged to improve living condition and to reduce energy emission. Unfortunately, these strategies are only widely utilized in European and western cultures. In poor and undeveloped countries this idea is unheard of. Developments in these countries are mostly unsustainable with not context connectivity. How could we create a sustainable building system that is intuitive enough to be replicated in a local context of a small-undeveloped country?

This thesis is an attempt to widespread the concept of sustainable architecture in countries in which this concept is rarely used.   The idea is to explore the use of local resources to create a prototype for green architecture in a hot humid climate and what impact could this has on the traditional way of construction on that specific site.

The project will be sited in San Pedro Sula, a small city in Honduras.  San Pedro Sula is a tropical vibrant city with a large housing density.  Middle class housing however, have been built with out any regulation to control the environmental characteristics of that zone. Houses are built one right next to the other leaving not room for natural ventilation and dayligting. How is this city no taking advantage of its natural resource? How can we create habitat spaces that utilize sustainable strategies but that also embrace local resources?  How different could this building look compare to San Pedro Sula’s traditional building form? What impact could it have on the society and the way they live? All of these concerns will be explore further in this theses.