A systematic review of indoor thermal environment of the vernacular dwelling climate responsiveness

Vernacular dwelling, based on climate responsive experience, become the focused topic currently. However, an in-depth review of these existing studies is still missing. In this context, this research presents a review of 55 previous studies since 2010, including the quantitative and the qualitative description of the research topics, research methodologies, and corresponding main findings by using the clustering analysis, the statistical analysis and the classification analysis. The results could be grouped into three categories: climate responsiveness of vernacular buildings, adaptive thermal comfort of residents, climate adaptability of both buildings and residents, and the vernacular dwelling climate responsiveness is the mainstream. In addition, approximately 83.64% of the studies used quantitative research methods, which is the field and simulation study, to verify the effectiveness of strategies. And the relationship between strategies and building were not single mapped. In order to explore the connection between these two, a further classification by season, location and elements is conducted. Finally, this research indicates that more rigorous quantitative research and more scenarios, especially future climate adaption, are necessary for future exploration in this field. This research aims to demonstrate a clear and effective overview of this field for further promotion of architecture sustainability. •55 studies identified from 6812 documents on vernacular dwelling climate responsiveness were reviewed since 2010.•The vernacular dwelling climate responsiveness is mainstream and approximately 83.64% studies used quantitative methods.•Indication of future climate change and rigorous multi-disciplinary cooperation methodology is future directions.