Thermal discomfort is one of the main triggers for occupants’ interactions with components of the built environment such as adjustments of thermostats and/or opening windows and strongly related to the energy use in buildings. Understanding causes for thermal (dis-)comfort is crucial for design and operation of any type of building. The assessment of human thermal perception through rating scales, for example in post-occupancy studies, has been applied for several decades; however, long-existing assumptions related to these rating scales had been questioned by several researchers. The aim of this study was to gain deeper knowledge on contextual influences on the interpretation of thermal perception scales and their verbal anchors by survey participants. A questionnaire was designed and consequently applied in 21 language versions. These surveys were conducted in 57 cities in 30 countries resulting in a dataset containing responses from 8225 participants. The database offers potential for further analysis in the areas of building design and operation, psycho-physical relationships between human perception and the built environment, and linguistic analyses.

Shared office spaces represent a challenge regarding thermal comfort. They have a diversity of occupants and expectations, and they require social interaction, which could imply restriction in adaptive actions, contrary to individual areas that usually allow total control. Hence, this paper aims to identify differences in thermal comfort criteria among individual and shared offices spaces by comparing adaptive opportunities and actions performed as well as thermal perception. Fieldwork was carried out in Chile in 18 office buildings, 9 in Concepcion (36°S), and 9 in Santiago (33°S). Thermal comfort surveys with simultaneous measurements of indoor environmental conditions were performed in each of these buildings during a single day in winter, spring and summer. The findings show variations in the criteria studied, which indicate that thermal requirements differ by spatial layout. Moreover, the results suggest that occupants of shared spaces have a wider comfort range; therefore, some kind of ‘adaptation by coexistence’ might be happening.

Chile is a resilient country which has been struck by a series of natural disasters, affecting heritage areas whose inhabitants live under a great economic and energy vulnerability. Although there are some advances that have been made in the country to recover its heritage, these do not include energy efficiency parameters. In this context, intervention in heritage properties requires a specific, complementary treatment above and beyond what is currently applied. Consequently, this research aims to develop a methodology that balances heritage and energy in energy vulnerability contexts. The proposed methodology analyzes heritage and energy aspects separately through attribute matrices, as well as the building pathologies, to later integrate the results in a final matrix which allows defining an energy-heritage intervention plan. In this way, it includes the systematic identification of elements that require intervention because of pathological issues, as well as the type of intervention that would be acceptable given its heritage significance and whether they mean a possibility to optimize the energy performance. The methodology, for its validation, was applied in a heritage residential building inhabited by low-income occupants. The case study presents physical damages and is located in the city of Lota, an area with an outstanding cultural heritage from the mining era.