Climate change awareness and growing urban density drive worldwide demand for higher-performing buildings, prompting designers to pay greater attention to building efficiency.
Determining the effects of a design change on a building’s overall performance and analyzing how it can be affected by other buildings, is beneficial in the urban building modeling domain. This study intends to address a gap in the literature by establishing a way to measure a building’s energy performance that considers the morphology of its surrounding network of buildings.
In this research, a single building is introduced as a case study among 3 different urban density contexts. Each scenario’s effect on the target building’s energy consumption is estimated and compared with the stand-alone condition. Moreover, several urban morphology indicators are measured for each scenario. The impact of each alternative on building performance was assessed by calculating monthly total energy consumption. The results
show that shading due to the nearby buildings plays an essential role in energy demand throughout the year. Increasing the height of the surrounding buildings in winter increases the heating consumption by up to 11%, and a reduction in cooling by up to 37% is seen during summertime.
Therefore, building energy behavior analysis in urban planning can be the theoretical foundation for logical architecture design and energy consumption reduction when efficient cities are constructed. Moreover, the influence of other urban environmental factors, such
as meteorological loads, Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects, or urban morphology, could be investigated for future studies.