Early-Stage Design Optimization of Primary School Building’s Geometry with Reference to Energy Performance

Since the early stages of design have the most important impact on building performance and general decisions regarding the geometry of the building are made at this stage, this article deals with energy optimization in the initial stages of design. This research aims to provide a method to help architects find the proper geometry of the building to reduce energy consumption in the initial design steps. In this article, a parametric generative model, which was created in the Grasshopper plugin environment in Rhino, is used. Here, the determining variables of the building geometry include the orientation, WWR, and the shape composition of the building form, then the Honeybee plugin is used to calculate the Energy Use Intensity (EUI) and find the optimal geometry. In general, in this research, the optimal form of the building mainly has a rectangular or square plan, and the forms with a large contact surface with the surrounding environment have been recognized as inappropriate, in addition to that, the optimal orientation is variable based on two other parameters and is mostly 0 or 15. The WWR for the top models was mostly 20 and in sometimes 30. Generally, in this research, the lowest EUI of 93.18 kWh/m2 and the highest EUI of 125.93 kWh/m2 were reported, which indicates a difference of about 32% in the amount of energy consumption of different geometries for an educational building in this context. The results show that architects can use the method adopted in this article as an effective method to reduce building energy consumption in the early stages of design.