| Summary: | Over the past few years, the energy efficiency of the existing school buildings in Saudi Arabia has gained more and more attention. Most of the existing school buildings in Saudi Arabia are similar in the architectural design. However, the aim of the present paper is to show that; an appropriate design of school building should be adopted according to the microclimate conditions of the city location. That can be reflected on improving the energy saving techniques in such school buildings and achieving the required indoor thermal comfort. Two different locations are considered as places of the current applied research; namely Mecca and Abha cities, where extreme changes in microclimate conditions can be found. A school building model issued from the Ministry of Education-Saudi Arabia is used as a case study. Three different class rooms in the school building are chosen to apply the different architectural design adopted. The obtained results showed that in hot regions (such as Mecca city) a need for natural ventilation technique in order to obtain the thermal comfort conditions. However, in moderate climate regions (such as Abha city), the application of the cross natural ventilation technique is necessary to obtain the thermal comfort conditions which lead to an efficient energy saving procedure. Keywords: Architectural design, Microclimate conditions, School build, Thermal comfort, Saudi Arabia
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