A Performance-Based Methodology for Retrofitting Buildings Guided by Visual Comfort

Extensive glazing is a common feature of modern buildings, intended to maximize daylight and strengthen visual connections with the outdoors. While this strategy can enhance energy performance, its effectiveness strongly depends on climate, orientation, and seasonal variations, and it often introduces challenges related to visual comfort, particularly glare. This paper proposes a refurbishment methodology that systematically integrates the view out, often neglected in current practice, into the decision-making framework, focusing on its relationship with daylight. The methodology follows a stepwise process encompassing the identification of discomfort conditions, evaluation of intervention feasibility, and design of targeted refurbishment strategies. Its main innovation lies in integrating and verifying a balance between view quality and daylight within a unified analytical framework. Validation through a university building in València confirmed that optimizing these parameters represents a significant design challenge, as enhancing one may compromise the other. The analysis also revealed limitations of current standards, such as EN 17037, whose static approach fails to capture the dynamic interactions among daylight, shading operation, and user perception. Furthermore, the proposed methodology introduces a scalable level of analytical granularity, enabling the assessment depth to be adapted to economic resources and time constraints, thereby supporting informed and sustainable decisions in building refurbishment.