The energy required to create a comfortable living environment in high-density cities in hot and humid climates usually demands a substantial electricity usage with an associated environmental burden. This paper describes an integrated passive design approach to reduce the cooling requirement for high-rise apartments through an improved building envelope design. The results show that a saving of 31.4% in annual required cooling energy and 36.8% in the peak cooling load for the BASECASE apartment can be achieved with this approach. However, all the passive strategies have marginal effect on latent cooling load, often less than 1%. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.