Optimizing Urban Texture and Building Typology for the Goal of Achieving Near-Zero Mid-Rise Residential Building

Abstract

Turkey is experiencing a massive urban renewal process to increase earthquake resistance of building mass. As a participant of Paris Agreement, Turkey also uses this process as a tool to improve energy saving performance of building mass with mandatory insulation requirements. Envelope retrofits achieves energy savings; however, this massive urban renewal process offers a greater potential since it allows a chance to optimize urban scale variables such as urban texture and building type, as well. This paper focuses on investigating the influence of building typology and urban texture on building energy performance. For this purpose, four different texture and six different building type alternatives are defined in Istanbul. Energy performance simulation analysis of 24 total alternatives are done with Existing envelope, TS-825 envelope, and proposed Near-Zero envelopes. Results of 72 simulations show that both building type and urban texture have important influence on building energy consumption and production performances for three envelope alternatives. Selection of optimized building type and urban texture alternatives with N-zero envelope maximizes building energy performance and achieve near-zero building requirements. Another important result of the study was urban scale decisions reduces energy consumption very significantly even before applying building design strategies. This is a very important input for decision-makers because energy performance of a regular building can be improved with retrofits in any time during lifetime. However, these retrofits may not be enough to achieve full potential (net-zero in future time) of the building when urban texture and building type is not optimized accurately.