Building Performance

What is building performance - just energy efficiency, low greenhouse gas emissions? Something to do with BREEAM, LEED or WELL certification? A productive building that maximizes return for the investor? The term building performance is used frequently by many, yet few people can provide a good definition of the concept. This website is dedicated to the discussion of this subject, and hopes to contribute to a generally accepted theory of building performance and its analysis.

Particular interest are:

the definition of the concept of building performance
approaches for the quantification of building performance, whether that is through monitoring and measurement, computer simulation, expert judgment or stakeholder evaluation
study of the contribution that building performance analysis may make to better design, construction and operation of buildings
the interaction between the field of building performance analysis and adjacent disciplines.

Books and chapters

BPA book

Seminal work on building performance analysis. 600 pages, mainly for PhD-students and scholars.

BPB book

Introduction to building performance for undergraduate students and professionals. Compact at 80 pages.

Energy Modelling

Chapter with Fried Augenbroe in wider work on sustainable buildings. 14 pages

PhD thesis

Thesis that focusses on the role of building simulation in design of energy efficient buildings. 238 pages

Quantification

Building performance analysis implies an effort to quantify building performance - in other words, to put numbers on 'how well' a building does what we want it to do. There are four main approaches to do this: physical measurement/monitoring, computer simulation, expert judgment and stakeholder evaluation.

Unfortunately our toolset is not complete; there are performance aspects where some of the approaches simply are not yet available. In other domains, the outcomes may vary across the quantification methods, leading to the notion of 'building performance gaps'. A good solid understanding of what building performance is, and how to quantify it, is essential for all involved with building performance.