High-Rise Buildings in Europe from Energy Performance Perspective

The United States is well known for the birthplace of high-rise buildings in the world since the nineteenth century. The trend continued across all continents and in 1940 Europe developed its first tall building of over 100 meters in Genoa, Italy. Building codes, technological development, energy crisis have all influenced the built environment in different ways; a very visible sign of such impacts can be seen in high-rise buildings not only on their architectural style but also on their energy performance.

Different studies worldwide investigate the energy performance of modern high-rise buildings; however, evolution of such buildings is rarely considered. To close a gap, this study aims to make a closer look of how technological developments and energy crisis affected high-rise buildings in Europe with a focus on their energy performance.

Study is organized as follows. Section 1 presents general evolution of high-rise buildings in Europe and includes analysis of the findings on their energy performance from other studies. In Section 2 changes of high-rise buildings’ performance are categorized into three distinct periods of from birth to when curtain walls become widely popular across Europe and from curtain wall system popularity to the world’s energy crisis and from the energy crisis to the development of building standards. In Section 3 simplified (steady-state) heat loss comparison is performed. Discussion on findings and comparisons among different generations of buildings with a focus on energy performance is provided in Section 4. Section 5 concludes the study and provides insights for future research.