Climate-active building enclosures: an integrative literature review

Abstract

The building energy demand and anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have risen since the preindustrial period, reaching the highest levels. Brazil is the eighth largest consumer of primary energy globally, with buildings accounting for 51.2% of the total electric energy consumption. In this sense, the building enclosure has substantial potential and the lowest cost for reducing energy expenditure. The dynamicity of environmental factors allows for many design approaches, and since the user comfort analysis evolved, time-varying building skin configurations emerged. When coupled with computational design, the building's skins no longer must compromise to one stationary condition that is never optimal to any particular condition. These climate-active envelopes need a seemingly conveyed characterization or a straightforward design process as a relatively new technique. We aimed to differentiate climate-active building typologies and gather the latest compositions and performance assessment metrics, rendering an integrative literature review, state-of-the-art, and bibliometric analysis. As the main results, we assembled tabular data on 100 research pieces considering various study methodologies, climate-active typologies, movement categories, actuation styles, simulation engines, and performance criteria, demonstrating that most studies evaluated facade typologies, concerned temperate climates and adopted simple, binary movement characterizations. Furthermore, the design process for active building enclosures needs to be clearer and well-structured, and the available computational tools still need improvement.