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S. El-Bellahy:
"An empirical study of effort and effectiveness in computational building design support";
Supervisor, Reviewer: A. Mahdavi; Inst. f. Architekturwissenschaften/ Abteilung Bauphysik und Bauökologie, 2005; oral examination: 2005-01-14.

The aim of this work is to study the relative importance of the ecological loading due to recourses extraction and the building construction on the one hand, the energy use during operation phase of the building, on the other hand. The research will establish an integrated computational environment for the concurrent assessment of energy use and environmental impact of building.
Evaluation of the building lifetime environmental burdens during building design stages, using a more comprehensive systematic and scientific methodology is a complex and difficult issue requires detailed tools, detailed environmental database, and clear guidelines and codes to support the design decision making. This thesis presents an analysis of the required effort, and effectiveness to apply the building assessment methods and tools during the early building design stages in terms of an empirical study to analyze and evaluate the environmental performance of a primary school building designs (six alternatives) in upper Austria region, using a wide range of the building environmental indicators, and a more systematic and comprehensive procedure. The results of this thesis denote that methods and tools of the environmental building performance assessment provide partial views of the building design environmental performance and have a very specific technical scope, there remains a significant degree of choice on the side of the designer to interpret the results and select the best solutions for the architectural problems during design stages to achieve high quality building design with out inconsistency with other building performance criteria, i.e. it is difficult to obtain high quality building design, if it is only considered one or more of the performance criteria and omitted the other performance criteria.