Assessing the Influence of Architectural Parameters on the Environmental and Daylight Performance of a Mid-Rise Office Building

Details

Supervisors

Stephan, André ; Slavkovic, Katarina

Faculty

Faculté d'architecture, d'ingénierie architecturale, d'urbanisme

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil architecte, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Buildings are major drivers of environmental damage, including climate change and resource depletion. Yet, they provide essential functions to human society, including shelter, thermal comfort and others. To date, most existing research has typically focused on trying to optimise one of the many services that buildings provide, or to improve their environmental performance while omitting the additional comfort they provide, or their geometrical features. This master thesis addresses this gap in existing research on the environmental performance of buildings by considering the often neglected factors of daylight performance and geometric parameters. The study focuses on evaluating the effect of various parameters on the thermal energy demand, embodied environmental flows, and spatial daylight autonomy (SDA) of a parametrically modelled mid-rise office building floor. Buildings are modelled as sets of rectangular sections in plan views (referred to as ‘wings’) with different functions, e.g. offices and circulation. Findings highlight the significant influence of the window-to-wall ratio (WWR) and building shape parameters, particularly the number and width of the wings of building, on all the studied metrics. Specifically, the WWR seems to primarily affect the SDA and to a lesser extent the thermal energy demand. Additionally, the width of the wings appears to significantly influence embodied environmental flows and the SDA, leading to a trade-off between these two metrics. Finally, the self shadowing effect induced by the shape of the building affects the thermal and lighting performance, but further research is needed to explore this aspect in more detail. The developed research methodology proves to be effective in easily assessing the relationships between geometric parameters and energy and lighting performance, but still offers room for improvement. This study calls for future research to delve deeper into the influence of geometric parameters on buildings, expanding the knowledge in this field.