Investigating reducing building energy use at urban scale in Taipei

Sustainable development related design and research has shown a focus shift from new building projects to existing ones; from the building scale to the regional and the urban scale; from construct and assessing the energy performance of buildings to participating at an earlier design stage. Taipei has been selected as the subject of this research due to its extremely high urbanization and huge pressure from the existing built environment. In order to achieve the national goal for reducing CO2 emissions, appropriate localized guidelines for buildings are urgently needed. Therefore, this research aims to understand, analyze and predict the energy performance of the architectures in Taipei, and offers a series of design strategies to help reduce the energy demand at building and urban scales. This will be achieved through the application of modelling, integrating SketchUp (@Last Software 2000), HTB2 v2.10 (WSA 2008; Alexander 2008), and Virvil Plugins (WSA 2012; Jones et al. 2011). The whole research process is a two-phase study. The first phase is to create models at different scales based on observation of the practical building environment, analysis of architecture related data and practical situations in ... (continues)