**7. Final considerations**

The challenge of bringing together design considerations about outdoors comfort, good daylight, the need and possibility of natural ventilation and energy efficient buildings' envelop was geared towards quality spaces for the occupants and visitors, rather than focusing only on energy efficiency issues. In this respect, the core objective of the environmental design approach was to create inviting open and semi-open spaces as well as comfortable internal spaces where the occupants are intuitively led to interact with means of controlling their own environmental conditions, ultimately achieving levels of environmental and energy performance beyond what was shown by the analytical predictions.

The potential environmental performance of the buildings that encompass the extension of the Petrobras Research Centre in Rio de Janeiro, which was firstly developed at the design level, has been put to test by its real occupation which took place in June 2010. An Initial and informal feedback has confirmed the satisfaction of the occupants with the environmental quality of both naturally ventilated and air conditioned buildings, translated into internal visual communication and access to daylight, views towards the outside from all working spaces, physiological cooling through natural ventilation and inviting shaded transitional spaces.

Possibly, the positive response of the occupants about their working environments will maximize the use of natural ventilation in the working spaces where environmental quality can induce a better performance than the predicted in the simulations, since a more flexible and adaptable notion of comfort could be put in practice by the occupants as a consequence of the overall quality of the spaces. This could be the case of the office cells in the laboratories, for instance, where the relatively small internal loads, coupled with the internal thermal mass and operable windows facing the gardens could spontaneously lead to the preference for natural ventilation rather than the air conditioning system.

Overall, the environmental quality and performance potential achieved in the design of the extension of the Petrobras Research Centre in Rio de Janeiro define a new reference for future environmentally responsive buildings in Rio de Janeiro, exploring environmental attributes from outside the boundaries (and often limited) of energy performance standards.
