A Web Based Assistant for the Design of Climate Responsive Buildings *P. La Roche, **R. Liggett *Instituto de Investigaciones de la Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad del Zulia. Maracaibo, Venezuela. At present a PhD student at the Department of Architecture and Urban Design. University of California Los Angeles **Department of Architecture and Urban Design. University of California Los Angeles. Box 951467. Los Angeles CA 90095-1467 ABSTRACT An Internet based computer program that helps the designer to select climate responsive design guidelines during the initial stages of the architectural design process is proposed. No knowledge of bioclimatic concepts is necessary to use this tool and its ease of use and ability to analyze multiple alternatives in a short time, make it also a useful educational tool. The computer analysis is based on outdoor temperature values and their relationship to the comfort zone. The program analyzes minimum and maximum temperature values for a given site and generates two sets of hourly temperature curves. Using these hourly values it determines and displays graphically, in a color matrix, when each of six general strategies would be useful to control heat flows by conduction, convection or radiation. The temperature zones for these strategies are adapted from Olgyay’s and Givoni’s bioclimatic charts. In this case, however, the strategies to achieve comfort are organized in terms of heat flow actions, which would either increase or decrease the heat flow through the envelope, depending on the relationship between the comfort zone and the outside air temperature. For each of these six cases, a set of architectural guidelines connected by hyperlinks to the main Page is proposed. The program was developed using HTML, JavaScript and Java, and the Internet was selected as the environment for the program, because it is platform independent and available to users all over the world. Keywords: Computer program, climate responsive architecture, internet bioclimatical design tool 1. Introduction Climate responsive design of buildings is important not only because of the comfort and energy saving implications for its users, but also because it helps preserve valuable resources in our planet. This paper presents a Web based Computer program that will aid the designer in the generation of an architectural concept for a building envelope, depending on outside climate conditions. The program is designed to be used as a design tool for the initial phases of the architectural design process, where a quick visualization of results is more important than precision. Computer tools such as this one are important because they help the architect to solve complex problems,