Wind Micro-Climate Conformation in Hot Dry Cities: Riyadh
[Thesis]
Alhawsah, Saeed Idris A.
Mimica, Vedran
Illinois Institute of Technology
2019
64 p.
M.S.
Illinois Institute of Technology
2019
Recently, the transformation in urban development in Saudi Arabia has caused abrupt and sporadic change to its desert climate. Careful environmental consideration of vernacular architecture practices is lost by the vast modernization. The significant changes of modernization contain desertification, sand rapping due to massive urban construction, and urban heat islands, all that has created a severe issue with sandstorms. Saudi's modernization changed sandstorms phenomena from its seasonal occasions to a frequent rapid increase as a result of the urban inability to maintain its naturally mild and soothing condition. All the global incidents from the natural refugees in Gobi Desert, China, to the 1930s U.S. dustbowl are evident to the urban environmental disturbance. This research is an environmental investigation to reduce the sandstorm effects in Saudi Arabia through designing multiple territorial landscape interventions to filter out the sandstorms and trap its sediments to avoid reoccurring sandstorms.