Building envelope design with the objective to ensure thermal, visual and acoustic comfort conditions

To ensure conditions of thermal, visual and acoustic comfort in rooms with a minimum of energy consumption is of great importance for the health of the user and the energy conservation. One of the most important functions of the building envelope is, therefore, to control physical environmental factors such as heat, light and sound in order to realise defined comfort conditions for the user with a minimum of energy consumption. The objective of the present work was to develop an approach, which would allow the construction of a building envelope with optimal performance with respect to thermal, visual and acoustic comfort conditions thereby taking properties of the building envelope such as function, position, dimensions and orientation into account. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.