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1. Introduction
Building shape is a key consideration in sustainable building design due to its significant impact on building performance. Over the years, architects have designed different shapes of building for aesthetical and functional purposes. The “water cube” at the Olympic Park in Beijing, China, the Biodome in Montreal, Canada, the Glass Pyramid in Paris and the Tietgen Dormitory at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark are some of the good examples (Plate 1). While different shapes of the building can bring aesthetic effect and visual realization of architecture, it is also necessary to consider building shape from the technical and economic perspectives such as environmental quality, energy consumption (EN), greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well as cost in the design process. Since there are numerous factors needed to be considered for building shape design, it is a great challenge for building designers to decide the optimal design solutions.
Previous studies on building shape design were conducted from different perspectives, which provided valuable information on understanding the effect of building shape on different building performance indicators. Building shape was found to affect building function. For example, Jedrzejuk and Marks (2002) performed optimization on the shape, function and heat source utilization. Zhang et al. (2016) applied the multiobjective genetic algorithm to optimize the shape of free-form buildings according to solar radiation gain and space efficiency. They found that compared with cube-shaped building, the solar radiation for free-form building increases by 30–53% and space efficiency reduces by less than 5%.
The impact of building shape on energy demand is another area of focus in the building shape research (Aksoy and Inalli, 2006; Granadeiro et al., 2013; Caruso et al., 2015; Fallahtafti and Mahdavinejad 2015; Zhang et al., 2016; Premrov et al., 2018). Aksoy and Inalli (2006) theoretically studied the effect of building shape and some other design parameters on heating demand. They found that in Elazig (38.4ºN), Turkey, square shape buildings have more advantages with optimal building orientation angles of 0º and 80º with building length to building depth ratios of 2/1 and ½, respectively. Fallahtafti and Mahdavinejad (2015) studied the effect of building shape, relative compactness and window-to-wall ratio (WWR) on optimized building orientation that led to significant energy savings.
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