India has a rich tradition of passive architectural design practice. There has been, however, little effort to study these design strategies to evaluate their effectiveness. This study analyses the climate responsiveness and thermal performance of domes and vaults in brick masonry.

The study compares the performance of hemispherical domes and segmental vaults in a residence-office building for indoor conditions measured on hourly basis for one year. The study gives the necessary quantifiable performance of domes and vaults constructed using low-cost, local materials as an effective energy efficient design strategy that may be easily adopted as a practice.