Building Performance Analysis

11Emergent Theory of Building Performance Analysis

The first 10 chapters of this book have introduced the concept of building performance and then explored different dimensions: the context in which building performance is placed, the demand side that defines what performance is desired and how this demand can be captured, the inner workings of the concept of building performance itself and how performance is expressed, the criteria that can be used to assess performance, the wide range of performance quantification tools, the application of building performance analysis in the full complexity of the context, the application of the concept of building performance in design and operations, and finally the aspirational category of high performance buildings. Given the large number of partial contributions made by other researchers, these 10 chapters are predominantly descriptive in nature, giving a wide overview of the state‐of‐the‐art on building performance analysis and how the different efforts fit together.

This chapter builds on these previous chapters and distils an emergent theory of building performance analysis. The adjective ‘emergent’ has been added deliberately: while it is possible to draw conclusions from the previous work, and to make recommendations, a proven theory requires further testing and discussion within the field.

The emergent theory is presented as follows: this chapter present series of facts and observations on building performance analysis, with comments ...