Extracting a Sustainable Paradigm from Passive Design Strategies in Iraqi Traditional Architecture for Hot-Arid Climates

Traditional Iraqi passive design strategies are well documented, but the evidence on how they perform when adapted to contemporary buildings is scattered across separate publications and has rarely been compared across building scales. This paper addresses that gap through a qualitative, documentary multiple-case study of three Iraqi projects designed by the same research group: the Al-Jawadi House in Baghdad (Case A), an experimental wind-catcher house on the Karbala–Najaf road (Case B), and the Sunni Endowment Department Headquarters (SEDH) in Baghdad (Case C). The study did not generate new field measurements or simulations. Instead, it extracts, tabulates and compares the design data and performance values already reported in the published and archival sources for each case, and grades each value by its level of evidence. The reported results indicate that the residential model (Case A) was monitored for about twenty years, with indoor temperatures of 24–28 °C and an annual electricity use of about 14,000 kWh for all domestic purposes. The moisturised wind catcher (Case B) lowered the indoor peak to 31.4 °C against an outdoor peak of 43 °C (a difference of about 12 °C) over a 10-day September 2013 monitoring period, with relative humidity of 29–35%. The institutional building (Case C) is documented only at design stage, and no measured performance is reported. The comparison suggests that the effectiveness of courtyards, wind catchers and thermal mass depends on their combined use and on the match between the technical solution and the scale of the project. The paper proposes a design framework of five principles, each with the parameters reported in the cases, the scale at which it was applied and its level of evidence, and it identifies the measurements still needed to verify them.