Building morphology, transparence, and energy performance

Certain energy-related building standards make use of simple numeric indicators to describe a building's geometric compactness. Typically, such indicators make use of the relation between the volume of a built form and its surface area. The indicators are then used along with information on the thermal transmittance of the building enclosure elements to evaluate the degree to which a building design meets the relevant thermal insulation criteria. Using extensive parametric thermal simulations, this paper examines the reliability of such simple compactness indicators for energy-related evaluative assessments given that buildings with the same compactness attribute could differ in enclosure transparence, orientation, and morphology.