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BPS tasks within the design and operation process

Pre-Design

As the name suggests, this phase includes all considerations before the design is started. The aim is to collect all ideas for a feasible design. This includes clarifying needs, objectives and framework conditions, defining solution strategies, procedures and organization, as well as initial cost estimates. At the end, there is the option of launching an architectural competition.

In the case of a renovation project, this phase is of course quite different, because the existing building already provides a very concrete basis for the project. A renovation project therefore does not begin with this phase, but with the operating phase of the existing building. After that – from the design phase onwards – new construction and renovation projects basically follow the same pattern.

Of course, it can be a challenge to simulate the energy performance of buildings for which there is no design yet. Nevertheless, certain boundary conditions can be deduced from the conditions of an undeveloped property. These include not only the climate at this location and the main usage of the building, but also its main orientation, shading neighbouring buildings, and its target volumes or floor areas to be inferred from the construction laws and financial possibilities.

These assumptions enable initial simulations to be made, which, when used early enough, help to ensure that targets for the building energy performance are not too high or too low. With automatically generated simple preliminary designs, in which typical values are used for unknown boundary conditions, sensitivities can be analyzed, e.g. for building standards, window sizes, building spacing, choice of building materials or the use of renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics, biomass or ambient heat. Optimizations allow the BPS specialist to set high but realistic targets at this early stage.

In the case of an architectural or any other competition, simulations can be particularly useful because they allow an objective comparison of all the preliminary projects submitted in terms of energy performance. Without such comparative simulations, each competition team will carry out its own evaluation in such a way that its design is in the best possible position. Unfortunately, simulations are still far too often used solely to make a ready design look good instead of serving as an optimization tool for the design. In pre-design in particular, it is therefore important that simulations are not (only) carried out by the designer themselves, but are also conceptualized by a specialist with coordinating tasks. This is an important prerequisite that everyone with a BPS background should fight for in every single project.

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