It is well known that the passive strategies applying in traditional buildings respond satisfactory to climatic requirements and succeed to provide maximum indoor comfort with minimum energy consumption. From this point of view, it is interesting to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of the vernacular strategies to improve the environmental performance of the building''s envelope under desert climate conditions. The research tries to address this issue and was undertaken in southern Algeria where a very hot and arid climate prevails. The effect of some selected passive cooling strategies on enhancing the building''s envelope climate performance was examined. These strategies are inspired from the local vernacular architecture, and they are expected to provide satisfactory indoor thermal comfort for users and to reduce the energy cooling demand from residential buildings. Applying field and computational investigations, two existing residential buildings were tested: a typical residential unit and a contemporary vernacular (neo-vernacular) building. In the latter, climate responsive strategies inspired from vernacular architecture were applied. A comparison based on site measurements was carried out on the two selected buildings which differ from their envelope design properties and components.