A Parametric Study on the Community Form and Its Influences on Energy Consumption of Office Buildings in Shanghai

Abstract

This paper aims to study the impact of community form on building energy consumption of commercial district. Building typology and FAR (floor area ratio) are two important morphology factors in district energy efficiency design. To explore how they influence building energy consumption, two major questions are concerning: (1) how a given FAR generates alternative building typologies that have different effects on energy consumption? (2) how increasing FAR affects building energy consumption generally? In this paper, a group of representative hypothetical models are built based on the form of actual office buildings in Shanghai. The energy consumption of three building typologies (the pavilion, the slab and the courtyard) are examined using DesignBuilder and EnergyPlus. The results suggest that, with the same building density, office building energy consumptions have a positive relationship with FAR, and different building typologies can lead to variations in energy consumption as well as energy-FAR relationship.