3 Here comes the Sun

The most basic purpose of the place that we call home is to provide accommodation that shelters us from the rigours of the natural environment. The natural environment is often inhospitable, or certainly less comfortable than most people prefer: it is frequently too hot, too cold, too wet or too humid. This suggests that there is some kind of ‘comfort zone’ within which people prefer to live: a zone of limited ranges for the various aspects of climate that humans are capable of sensing, such as temperature. The ‘comfort zone’ of a home can be influenced by several basic things, including its overall shape, the materials used in its construction and its orientation. In this section we will concentrate on the last of these, the orientation of the building.