The Sustainable House: Comparative Analysis of Houses in Al Kut Neighborhoods-Iraq

This paper is based on the conception that sustainable architecture design of a residential house must provide comfort to residents and not limited to energy and materials saving. This conception has been widely discussed in the literature however there is no data available on the sustainability of houses in the city of Kut in Iraq. Therefore, the research aims to investigate the relationship between house properties and occupants' satisfaction achievement under the sustainable buildings criteria. The main assumption of this research is that sustainability criteria and controls for housing unit should achieve the satisfaction of occupants. The most prominent findings of this research were residential houses are not environmentally sustainable as they rely enormously on artificial energy for heating, cooling and illumination. The research concluded that the type of residential buildings in the surveyed area, and that is applicable for most of Kut city, is not sustainable as it consumes an enormous amount of energy for daily activities such as lightning and interior climate control.