Form-Finding of Energy and Fabrication Aware Building Skins Analysis of The Impact of Solar Radiation on the Buildings’ Energy Performance.

Abstract

With the fast-growing global warming crisis affecting our planet, contemporary architecture is shifting towards building systems that are contributing to the overall energy reduction and consumption in buildings. The present research focuses on enhancing the buildings’ overall energy performance through the form-finding of fabrication and structure-aware building skins. It aims to investigate the effect of optimal façade geometries on improving the building’s energy performance, thereby reducing the solar heat gain and enhancing the occupants’ comfort in buildings. Using performance-oriented façade geometries can highly contribute to the overall performance and energy consumption of buildings, considering its ability to control the amount of solar radiation entering the building. A passive solar design approach is adapted to generate the façade geometries and analyze its impact on the different facades of the building. Three approaches of design generation and performance analysis are investigated in the research, a self-shading approach, a fabrication-aware approach using ruled surfaces, and a structure-aware approach using a Dynamic Relaxation algorithm for form-finding, all of which use a mesh-based computational framework as an initial input. An existing building located in a hot-humid region, specifically in the region of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia was examined in terms of the assessment criteria and climatic data considering its program being a genetic office building.