Navigating Sprawl-Induced Lifestyle Shifts: The Impact of Architectural Standards on Energy Consumption in High-Rise Residential Building Typologies in Erbil, Iraq

Urban sprawl across the Middle East has restructured residential living patterns, accelerating the transition from traditional courtyard dwellings to high-rise apartment typologies and exposing systemic gaps between architectural design standards and as-built practice. This study, framed explicitly as a Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE), investigates the relationship between three micro-level architectural standards — building orientation, thermal insulation quality, and window-to-wall ratio (WWR) efficiency — and the macro-level energy consequences of sprawl-induced lifestyle change in post-2010 high-rise residential buildings in Erbil, Iraq. The research foregrounds human-building interaction and the perceived performance of architectural standards over physical building-physics measurement, and adopts a cross-sectional quantitative design using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 4. Technical envelope constructs are operationalised via occupant-observable symptoms — perceived drafts, solar glare, HVAC dependency — that act as latent-variable proxies for architectural adherence. The conceptual model specifies four exogenous architectural constructs, one moderating sprawl-lifestyle construct, and two endogenous outcomes (Perceived Thermal Comfort and Perceived Energy Performance) tested through six directional hypotheses. The findings indicate that sprawl-induced lifestyle change is the strongest predictor of perceived energy performance, that envelope compliance and thermal insulation quality most strongly shape perceived thermal comfort, and that perceived thermal comfort mediates the influence of envelope parameters on energy performance, while building orientation shows only a weak effect and the moderating role of lifestyle change is limited. The model explains approximately 60% of the variance in perceived energy performance and 52% in perceived thermal comfort. The study delivers a first-of-its-kind POE-grounded PLS-SEM model for Iraq's residential stock and evidence-based recommendations for architects, engineers, and policymakers.