Sustainable energy entrepreneurship through architectural design: a key point controlled method

The biggest opportunity to influence the relationship between energy goals and architectural design is during the early planning phases of a building project. It is commonly known that unilateral elaborate design decisions can have substantial negative influence on the economic and the environmental performance of a building. Great opportunities are seen in the early design phase, where only general conditions and basic constraints are predetermined by the client and the participating planners. Building requirements contain numerous explicit and implicit requests, which can in a next step be defined as verifiable design checkpoints. These Key Points will allow designers to easily structure the design process in individual evaluable parts and will thus help them to concentrate on high-level strategic decision making tasks. Against this background, the central question that motivates this paper is: how can we aggregate building requirements to be able to formalize the data as basis for the definition of Key Points? To answer this question, a closer look at building requirements of different participating planners and their individual decision making is taken. The Key Point driven design process is expected to lead to greater efficiency in the planning procedure to final design results of higher quality. At the same time, it will provide an opportunity of weighing up many more alternatives than currently possible.