امیرحسین ذکری

Novel viewpoints see the façade as a multi-functional component that should simultaneously meet functional and aesthetic requirements. These requirements need to be evaluated using a state-of-the-art approach. Although façade performance assessments are seen in the literature, studies that investigate the aesthetics and performance of façades rarely can be found together. Reviewing the approaches, methodologies, and criteria utilized to assess façades can draw a vision of the background for those who intend to develop a method for façade evaluation based on a novel perspective. This study aims to investigate recent research to discover approaches to façades. An exploratory case study methodology was applied to implement this aim, while the data collection method was library-based. Content analysis was employed via logical reasoning to determine the approaches, methods, and criteria of façade evaluations. Also, open and axial coding was used to organize the criteria extracted. The found approaches were "sustainability," "buildability," "life cycle assessment," "competing objectives," "performance," and "general," while the most frequent ones were "performance" and "sustainability" after "general." Previous façade-focused research methodologies were concentrated on five methodologies: multicriteria decision-making (MCDM), simulation, optimization, library-based, and hybrid. The most popular method was MCDM. Extraction of criteria demonstrated that "Costs," "Thermal performance," “Environmental impacts,” and “Durability” are respectively the trend ones with the highest frequency of presentation. To conclude, the façade as a multi-functional element needs to be assessed with state-of-the-art methods that consider all the required functions of a façade, including aesthetics. In contrast, Conventional methods cannot provide such a service.

Various researches have introduced methods to use daylight in office buildings in the Middle Eas t zone, but none of them have ever considered the use of plant leaf arrangement, called phyllotaxis, as a comprehensive solution for harves ting daylight. The idea of the Phyllotaxis Tower has been raised for several years but the main ques tion of this research is whether using the phyllotaxis model is capable of exploiting daylight in high-rise buildings or not. So, in response to this ques tion, the main aim of the research was set to evaluate daylight efficiency in high-rise office buildings by presenting an exemplary and phyllotaxis-inspired design. The research method is encompassed several s teps including, s tudying the literature on the subject firs tly, then modeling a prototype building based on the Biomimicry Problem-Based approach, and eventually computer simulation to evaluate the performance of the proposed building. The results show that office units can get daylight illuminance of 500 lux at 50% of operating time per year in addition to proper performance on four single days of different seasons of the year. Furthermore, the sample building obtained label B of energy consumption from S tandard No. 14254 presented by the Ins titute of S tandards and Indus trial Research of Iran, which has been compared with the energy label of 45 office buildings in the same location and same climate conditions, based on the figures are defined on the aforementioned s tandard and has the bes t performance among them.