Energy performance feedback is an essential tool in addressing the current climate crisis. However, this is not simply another theoretical text about energy performance in buildings. This book is for anyone who wants to better understand how energy is used in buildings, and how to drive down operational energy use – whether you’re an architect, student, client, building services engineer, contractor, building operator or other stakeholder. Focusing on evidence from feedback on buildings in use, it explains what it takes to get them to perform as expected, as well as the reasons why they often fail.

Energy, People, Buildings draws extensively on the findings of studies, UK government-funded building performance evaluations and on original research into seven case studies from across the UK and abroad that have achieved exemplary energy use through building performance feedback.

Providing a clear roadmap to understanding aspects that impact building users’ comfort and satisfaction, it also outlines the factors behind energy use and how to track it across the life of a project to ensure that your building performs as intended.

Case studies include: the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool; Rocky Mountain Institute Innovation Center, Colorado; and Carrowbreck Meadow, Norwich.

Featured architects: AHMM, AHR, Architype, Hamson Barron Smith, Haworth Tompkins, Henning Larsen Architects and ZGF Architects.

Judit Kimpian is an architect and environmental policy expert based in London. After 20 years in practice, she currently teaches low-energy architecture and planning at UCL and chairs the Architects Council of Europe’s Sustainable Architecture Group, focusing on embedding feedback in design and construction to deliver a net zero built environment

Sofie Pelsmakers is an environmental architect, educator, and researcher in sustainable housing design and architecture at Tampere University, Finland. She is author of the Environmental Design Pocketbook (RIBA, 2015), and guest-edited Everything Needs to Change – Architecture and the Climate Emergency (Design studio, RIBA, 2021).

Hattie Hartman is sustainability editor at the Architects’ Journal, London. She participates widely in industry juries, chairs events and lectures on mainstreaming green design. She is the author of London 2012 Sustainable Design (Wiley, 2012).