Residential Energy Retrofits: Balancing Daylight Performance and Outdoor view

Research has clearly shown that retrofitting existing buildings with energy-efficient measures, such as high-performance glazing, shading devices, and thermal insulation coatings can significantly reduce the environmental burden of the building sector. However, these mitigation strategies can also impact the quantity and quality of daylight received by the indoor environment, as well as the outdoor view, aspects that markedly affect luminous well-being and, for office buildings, productivity. The study quantifies the impact of most of these changes on daylighting performance and outdoor view by comparing the results against climate-based metrics and specific sky conditions. Additionally, from the perspective of user-centered design, it introduces a metric for outdoor view assessment and proposes an alternative approach to calculate minimum view potential (MVP*) which also examinates the influence that the indoor users’ disposition may have on access to outdoor views. By constructing a context-based residential building archetype and analyzing the effects of different insulation thicknesses and glazing replacement strategies, the study aims to identify optimal design solutions that balance thermal performance with visual comfort. Results suggest that the different retrofit strategies yield different impacts, more on the average daylight factor (39 ÷ 52%) and outdoor-view (10 ÷ 27%), rather than on the climate-based daylight metrics as Daylight Autonomy (DA) and Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDI).