The Impact Of Design Elements On Building's Physical And Energy Performance: A Review Of International Literature

The energy crisis attracts the researchers and architects in the passive designing for energy conservation.Towards a better passive designing,researchers started to analyze the impact of design elements on building's physical and energy performance.Researchers have paid much attention on residential buildings but not enough on public buildings because of its complication of forms and space.So the author put most attention on public buildings in this thesis.The papers and books in this field have been published since 1960 s,and certain researchers categorized them limitedly.Obviously the systematic understanding in the previous research would have significance to the followers in various subjects,including the selection of research field,the chosen of methodology and the using for reference.To understand this field more integrallty and systematically,a more comprehensive review is to be done.So this thesis prepares the methodology,result and research key points,in the manner of studying the papers in the last decade,and analyzes the context and trends of this field and the limitations at present.The research shows the globally trends from the traditional single element to the actual well-applied multiple elements;meanwhile the object of research has developed from the early single objective progressively to the contradictory multi-objectives.A more intergrated way of thinking and researching is becoming the trend.The research method changes accompanying the research mode:from Victor Olgyay's biological climate chart in the very beginning to the experiments based on scale-models,and then from computer simulations to computer simulations with optimization algorithm.Nowadays,two limitations exist in the research of this field: the one is that the researchers focus on office and campus buildings,other type of buildings attract little attention,the other is that the elements studied are only about simple and formal space.These limitations reveal that there is this gap between the academic research and contemporary buildings practice.Taking advantage of the integrated thinking mode and research method would be a possible solution to break down the barriers.