An Assessment of Thermal Comfort and Users’ “Perceptions” in Office Buildings - Case of Arid Areas with Hot and Dry Climate -

Comfort is a global concept: heat and cold, light, noise, landscape, water, greenery, prestige.. and other, are as several elements defining different climatic, aesthetic and psychological parameters of comfort. Comfort is also the subjective feeling which does not exist in itself. It is only by discomfort that one can appreciate it. This appreciation is different according to the society and for the same society according to the individuals.Researchers start to defy the theory of universality, and to discuss that the fact of not consider: cultural, social, economic and climatic dimensions in the evaluation of comfort, direct to an exaggeration in the definition of the heating and air-conditioning needs, for the reason of the universal application of the thermal comfort tools of evaluation that a significant thermal discomfort is perceived by the subjects considered [1]. So there is not perfect combination of comfort conditions since those are not relating with the context, this interaction between the feelings and differences in appreciation for an individual to a different, and for a society to another. However, the theoretical definitions of the comfort concept agree all on the importance of thermal comfort. This one constitutes the subject of this study. Indeed, recent work on the concept of adaptive comfort proposes the individual variations of the place and time, conduct by personal strategies, which can be of a physiological, psychological, social, cultural and behavioral nature. In inverse of the physiological answers, which can be measured in an objective way, the determination of the subjective answers depends on the self-evaluation of the person subjected to a given environment. This evaluation is not single but varies with the individuals, and also for the same individual according to various periods [2.3].