Evaluation of environmental comfort conditions in public schools: case study in Arapiraca-AL
environmental comfort; public schools; perception of users
Educational buildings must be capable to offer safe, accessible and creative places to the users, especially comfortable spaces. Students spend great part of their days in this environment, in many cases having full time classes which, per se, takes to mental fatigue throughout the day. Thereby, verify features related to the promotion of well-being within the classrooms is crucial to the adequacy of the learning-teaching's relations. Facing this conjecture, this research aimed to explore the main environmental variables and the main physical components in three public schools located at the municipality of Arapiraca/AL/Brazil. The collected data happened in two different periods, one related to the summertime and the other to the winter, and in order to obtain broader and representative results a range of methods of Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) were applied as: data of thermal, acoustic and lighting comfort, questionnaire with the users, walkthrough and the matrix of discoveries and recommendations. Having in mind that these educational buildings were built in the 60’s, with similar features of construction, the research aims to establish correlations within the results, where is observed that: schools with no bioclimatc strategies have a higher thermal discomfort, whilst the acoustical and lighting evaluations present different values from the required norms in the three schools. About the users’ subjective evaluation is verified the correlation between the collected environmental data and the questionnaires only over the thermal and acoustic relations, while the lighting aspect is positively assessed by the users. About the functional safety, is observed problems related to the lacks of resources and negligence, with potentially dangerous places to the students. Finally, the walkthrough observations, arranged in the matrix of discoveries, were analyzed with the objective of proposing solutions to be adopted by the schools, so that the studies parameters could be adjusted to the normalized values and, thus, guarantee the necessary comfort for their students users.