High Performance Buildings: Measures, Complexity, and Current Trends

Most people are intimately involved with the built environment, while unfamiliar with detailed aspects of its design and operation. Buildings are everywhere and are designed and equipped using an agglomeration of many different design elements or puzzle pieces. With the recent trends towards a more energy efficient world, there has been an attempt to make buildings more efficient by using highly efficient pieces of the design puzzle. Not always does the integration of these subsystems result in an efficient building as a whole. The goal of this chapter is to highlight some of these boundaries and current engineering trends to surpass these obstacles. The discussion will be focused on large commercial buildings in the United States, while similar concerns are prevalent in other building types and in other global locations. We start by highlighting different ways that performance is measured and review the different design elements and equipment choices that are available to construct a building. The large number of interacting components creates complexity and a challenge to obtain a high performance structure. Specifically, technology barriers to realizing high performance buildings through this integration process lie in the ability to create useful models, data analysis tools, and effective control strategies. The chapter concludes with some current applied research in building systems that address the complexities in building systems and methods being developed to overcome the barriers that lie in the way.