Building Performance Analysis

8Design and Construction for Performance

The preceding chapters have dealt with the foundations and assessment of building performance, exploring how this performance is related to user needs, discussing what approaches are available to quantify performance and exploring working with building performance. However, to make a difference in actual practice and for real buildings, this theory about building performance then needs to be implemented. Two broad areas are crucial to ensure that thinking about building performance actually has impact: building design and construction, and building operation and management. Design and construction is the subject of this chapter.

Design is a key activity in bringing systems into being, by an activity that decides on the look and functioning of something, especially by making a detailed drawing of it. Design is a key part of both architecture and engineering. In his seminal Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon (1996: 111) states that ‘Everyone designs who devices courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state’. Construction is the process of actually making the building, according to the plans that result from the design process. Both design and construction are extensive ...