UNIVERSITY OF RWANDA

COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND BUILT ENVIRONMENT

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

ARCH1256 PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT

STUDY TOPIC: ECOLOGY AND ECOSYSTEM

NAMES:

ISHIMWE JEAN CLAUDE 222004620

NIYIGENA PHOCAS 222001630

NIYOMUGABO RUTH ANGE 222019437

MUDATSIKIRA FABRICE 222002441

DATE: 27TH DECEMBER 2022

 PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT AND ECOSYSTEM IN KIBAGABAGA

INRODUCTION

Physical environment refers to all things that surround people and different conditions that affect
peoples lives and healthy. Ecosystem refers to the geograghical area where animals, plants and other
organisms, land scape and weather work together to form life. In physical environment we have lakes,
rivers, swamps, trees and others. This physical environment plays a big role in peoples lives because its
where people live, get food,air they breath and do their everyday activities like agriculture activities,
carpentry and other activities. Its also where they put different public places like churches, stadiums,
museums, markets, schools, hospitals and many more. People do these things with multiple purposes
like earning a living, enjoyment, earning skills among others. These actions of people on physical
environment have both negative and positive effects. As architects there are elements in physical
environment we deal with in development of different projects. Such elements are topography and
landscape, sunlight quality, winds quality, stone and soil quality among others. In this report we are
going to have an over view of how architects deals with elements of physical environment and the
effect on people. We are going also to study and analyse the site we visited in kibagabaga during our
study and we sea how people relate with there physical environment.

STUDY

TOPOGRAPHY AND SLOPES

Topography refers to the slope and level of the land. Topography and slopes are formed either due to
the shifting of glaciers or weathering erosion transportation and deposition of materials. When the land
is slopy it affects the design of the project where you find that some parts of the project don’t receive
sunlight in a good way. So this affects the design of a given project. But when the site if flat it doesn’t
affect the layout of the building. So there are projects that are suitable in slopy areas and others suitable
in flat areas. Architects before they design their projects one of the physical environment element they
consider is the topography and the slope of a given site. (parmar, 2022)

ORIENTATION OF BUILDING

Orientation of buildings simply means what compass direction the building faces. The orrientation of the
building plays a big role in determining the thermal conditions inside the building and ofcourse the
confortability and visual confort in the house. For visual confort orientation, buildings should be
oriented east-west rather than north-south. The long facades of when they face north-south dirrection,
the rising and seting sun does not hit you in the face hence the visual is clear inside th house. For
thermal confort inside the building, different facades of the building receive different amount of heat
from the sun. also here the good orientation is to orient the long faces of the building in east-west in
order to reduce the amount of heat inside the house. (foundation, 2022)

SUNLIGHT QUALITY