Investigation of energy consumption of traditional houses in approach to sustainable architecture (Case Study: Ardebil, Sanandaj, Hamedan and Tabriz cities of Iran)

The rapid growth of the urbanization process followed by the increase in the population of cities has had various consequences and causes many challenges in energy consumption. Residential construction like houses play a significant role in resource and energy matter. he native architecture of different regions of Iran talks about the recognition of the environmental characteristics, especially the climate of the diverse regions is related to the sustainability subjects. The methodology of research is descriptive-analytical, which has a development purpose. By examining the existing experiences, it extracts physical components that influence the climatic performance of traditional houses in cold climates. In the next step, using the obtained indicators, the study and classification of traditional houses in four cities of the cold climate of northwest Iran will be done based on the available sources and information. In the next step, examples of traditional houses from several cold climate cities will be analyzed by Energy plus and Openstudio software up to the survey data. and results show the main issue in cold climates is to provide thermal comfort in the indoor space in winter, and for this purpose, traditional houses try to use sunlight, avoid adverse wind flow in winter, and reduce heat exchange through the external walls of the building. According to the physical system of traditional cold climate buildings, the use of passive solar methods, especially the thermal mass and the thickness of the walls, is of considerable importance in the design of these buildings.