Impacts of architectural beauty to building energy performance

Consideration of architectural beauty in the built environment is growing as the broader concept of sustainable design replaces the more narrowly defined concepts of high performance or green building. This work is a part of Beauty in Building (BiB) research conducted by a team of architects and engineers working to understand links between architectural beauty and building performance. This work presents the exploration findings on what impact architectural beauty may have on building energy performance. A sample of 35 case studies contrasting high performing buildings with architecturally beautiful and high performing buildings was evaluated using the developed BiB matrix. Features that distinguished the best performing buildings from the rest of the sample population were identified based on the results of the case study evaluation. Building energy models representing these building features were then developed for quantitative evaluation of energy performance through energy simulation. Relative importance to beauty and energy performance of each of the features was determined and presented as weighting factors. The results illustrate those features that exhibited density, a combination of multiple systems, in the designs offered better performance relative to both beauty and energy.