**6. Acknowledgements**

The research, which is presented in this chapter, formed part of a Ph.D. thesis, which was supported by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y.).

The parts of the paper referring to façade materials, as well as Tables 3, 4 and 5 were reprinted from J. Solar Energy, 83, Bougiatioti, F., Evangelinos, E., Poulakos, G. And Zacharopoulos, E., The summer thermal behaviour of ''skin" materials for vertical surfaces in Athens, Greece as a decisive parameter for their selection, 582-598, Copyright (2008), with permission from Elsevier.
